I received an A.B. from Barnard in 1971 and a J.D. from UCLA in 1986.
I married Tom Nelson in 1972 and divorced in 1979. No kids. Kept the name.
I married Jim Ruxin in 1988. We live in Los Angeles. We have 3 children: Julia, 25, and twins David, 22 and Liz, 22. As of the date of our reunion, Liz will have graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans (on May 20th) with a degree in Communications with a minor in Psychology and David will have graduated from the University of Virginia In Charlottesville (on May 21st) with a degree in Leadership and Public Policy. We are somehow managing to attend both graduations. Julia has been working in NYC for a start up tech company called Unified and as of the date of our reunion she will have transferred to their Los Angeles office. As of the date of our reunion the likelihood is that we will have gone from empty nest back to full house. (-:
After graduating from Barnard in ’71 I worked in motion picture production (which had/has a very high glass ceiling) until enrolling in law school at UCLA in 1983 and ever since graduating and passing the California Bar in 1986 I have been working as an entertainment lawyer primarily with clients in the film, television, book and theatre worlds. For the last 5 years I have been a partner at the NY-based entertainment boutique firm Cowan DeBaets Abrahams & Sheppard. I opened their LA office in 2011 and am based in Beverly Hills. Some projects I have been involved with recently are “The Hunger Games” trilogy, last year’s “Amanda Knox” documentary, the NY off-Broadway show “Not That Jewish” and the upcoming films “Marshall” and “So B. It.”
I am on the boards of 3 not for profit arts organizations in LA – 1. for the women-run dance company Body Traffic (which recently performed in NYC at the Joyce), 2. for Dance Camera West, which promotes dance on film and has its annual festival coming up in LA at the end of April, and 3. for Jewish Women’s Theatre, which I have chaired for the last 6-7 years. . I am also currently doing some consulting with the Sundance Institute. I get a great deal of satisfaction from working with all these organizations and am very proud of what they do.
Remarkably (or maybe obviously) among my closest friends and colleagues in LA are classmates Doris Abrahams and Maia Danziger. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Doris, Bill Clarkson, Maia and her soon to be husband Michael Pressman are all very dear to me and Jim, and we love having them in our lives.
We also remain in close touch with classmate and lifelong friend Ruth Katz, with whom I traveled quite literally from preschool through college. Ruth’s husband Neil Chan and daughter Marina have become close friends as well. And through Judy Gruber I became reconnected with classmate Myrna (Margulies) Breitbart, her husband Billy and their children, whose friendship we have enjoyed over the years.
A number of other Hunterites are meaningfully in my life on a regular basis, from the classes of ’69 and ’70, Judy Bass, Anne Morea and Faith Wender (all also entertainment lawyers) and Nancy Trichter, who has become a close friend and client. With me every day is Judy Gruber, whose son David’s wedding I attended last spring. I remain close with Judy’s husband Joe Houska and Joe’s wife Chris, as well as David (who is a lawyer in San Francisco), his wife Katie, and Judy’s younger son Aaron (who lives and works in Chicago and I’m hoping to see him when I’m there in a few weeks-maybe I’ll have some photos and news from Aaron when we are at reunion). Joe recently retired from his position as policy advisor at Kaiser Permanente, where Chris still works. I had the privilege of being with Joe, Judy’s dad Irving (who has since passed away), and the boys, with Judy when she died. I treasure the memory of our friendship every day. It is particularly difficult to navigate through the quagmire of current events without Judy’s brilliant insights and wicked humor. What I’m left with is, well, the mucky mire. I really, really, really miss her.
I confess that last summer and fall I was giddy with anticipation, thinking about our reunion, the remarkable path we have been traveling since 1967, missing those we have lost but looking at all we would have to celebrate. That is, until November 8th, when, for me, the whole house of cards collapsed. As I sat at the curb on the sidewalk in front of our house, unable to get myself into the car to go to our neighbor’s house for an election returns-watching party, all too certain of the unthinkable outcome, I wept, not just for my children whose adult lives were about to be launched in a world so much less hopeful than it might have been, but also for the knowledge that my anticipation about the reunion had just been smashed to smithereens and that the awesome ride of 50 years had in significant part been an illusion. I am anxious and sleepless these days, sad and disappointed (and not just because I’m right now at my desk at home looking at my passport photo from 10 years ago and the one I took last week---yikes, 67 looks a lot different from 57…….))-:.
I am looking forward to parsing this out with those of us gathering for the reunion, and hoping we will find we can be of some comfort to one another as we face a very bizarre-looking future.
Update:
Shortly after the last reunion, I left my law practice at CDAS and joined the Sundance Institute as its General Counsel. In August of 2020, during quarantine, I retired.
In order to ensure that I really was retired and was meant to slow down, the stars aligned to cause me to suffer 2 strokes during the autumn of 2020. My left side was paralyzed. I thereupon joined the ranks of determined stroke survivors, with rehab as my full time job. I do PT, OT and speech. For a while it was on a daily basis. I am still a fall risk, and need someone with me when I am walking (I walk with a cane), but manage to get around.
I found that aging, particularly aging as a stroke survivor, compelled me to examine issues of identity and other existential matters, in a very profound way.
Of course, that discovery led me to a compulsion to write about my experiences and, not having written anything except legal documents in a very long time, I called my good friend, Hunter classmate and writing guru Maia Danziger,a for advice, and she generously suggested I study with her. That has been a fantastic experience, and I am having a blast writing when I’m not watching baseball or the Food Network on TV. I just found out yesterday that a piece I wrote, entitled “Cleaning,” is being included in a production being done by The Braid, a theatre company in Santa Monica, and will be performed in mid June. So I am about to debut as a theatre writer! (If you want to see it, it will be live on Zoom, go to www.the-braid.org/uncovered for more info)
I am married, going on 34 years, to Jim Ruxin, who is also retired but teaching film editing part time at USC School of Film. Daughter Julia is at Google, daughter Elizabeth is at Saatchi & Saatchi ad agency, and son David is doing impact investing at the San Francisco wealth management firm of Montcalm TCR. All are in LA, working remotely, pitching in with mamacare, and with caring for Bella, our 17 year old Yorkie who is blind, deaf, incontinent and adorable. She has her own Instagram page, the Spoiled Life of Bella, for which Lizzy takes lots of photographs.
I am waiting out my retirement at home in LA, still cautious in this time of Covid.
Hunter means friends to me, old, current, and the dear ones who have passed. I had a visit earlier this week from Joe Houska, Judy Gruber’s husband, who was visiting LA. Joe and Judy’s son, David, and his wife Katie, have a little boy, Gideon, now around 1! He, taking after his grandma, is, of course, brilliant and beautiful.
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