It was a match made in, well, the pages of Stanford. When children's video producer Libby Pratt, '81 ("Child's Play," September/October 1998), saw chemistry professor-cum-playwright Carl Djerassi at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last October, she recognized him from photos accompanying a magazine profile ("What's Next?" November/December 1998) and introduced herself. Turns out the two have other connections as well—they live next door to one another. "We were neighbors in San Francisco, and we were neighbors in Stanford magazine," Djerassi laughs.
And now they are collaborators on a video version of Djerassi's first play, Immaculate Misconception, which was released in July. The drama, whose protagonist injects her own egg with sperm under a microscope, is Pratt's first venture aimed at adults. She also plans, though, to market it to high schools. "It's a great film if you want to talk about sex with your kids," she says. "It's not sexy or prurient. A 9-year-old said the whole play made science look fun."
Both Djerassi's and Pratt's second careers are thriving. Immaculate Misconception played in four cities last year and aired on BBC radio. Djerassi is working on his third play, NO. Pratt quit work as an options trader last summer to work full time at her fledgling company, Globalstage Productions. Maybe their paths will collide again—even without our help.
He's Counting on You
"There's never been anything like this," Kenneth Prewitt told Stanford last summer. The U.S. Census Bureau director was describing how government head counters would reach out to the public as never before ("Census and Sensibilities," September/October). Prewitt, PhD '63, wasn't kidding. The bureau hired 460,000 census takers, ran an ad campaign in 20 languages, enlisted the help of Sesame Street's Count of Counts and unleashed the Census Road Tour to talk up the tally at powwows, potlucks, the Grammy Awards and the Final Four.
Prewitt's mission: to count as many people as possible and reverse a two-decade slide in census return rates, especially among undercounted minorities. (The return rate fell from 83 percent in 1970 to 65 percent in 1990.) On May 31, he claimed victory: 66 percent of census forms had been returned and 92 percent of housing units canvassed. But Prewitt, who calls the decennial count "a national civic celebration," isn't resting. "We must redouble our efforts to reach the remaining 8 percent," he says.
