Spring Bulletin 2012 - The Park School

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$Kindergarten Summer Math Calendar - The Park School$

it’s a bit of a mystery as to how I ended up effectively bilingual. My folks are from New York, not Paris. We grew up going to Martha’s Vineyard in the summers, not the south of France, and though my mother did read me French children’s books and my best friend’s mum was from Alsace, I didn’t speak any French words until my first class in the sixth grade at Park, where Joelle Cabot painstakingly showed us slides and played us tapes of the now legendary ‘Mr. Thibault’ as he conducted his days in the 13th Arrondissement of Paris. We watched, listened, and repeated. It was strange because I’d never had an experience like that before, even from the first class, of feeling like I was born to do something. (I know that sounds silly—born to speak French — it’s not as if it were a calling or something. If I’d been French it would have been a completely natural. But there was nothing French about me.) It didn’t take long for Madame Cabot, who taught three of my four years of language classes at Park, to real- Lily Davis ’94 ize I had aptitude. She started to push me. But I didn’t want to be the teacher’s pet or draw too much attention to myself. I pretended I didn’t care about French or my teacher. But in private, I studied hard, went to foreign movies, and read long books in tenses I hadn’t learned yet. First trip to France — Grade IX at Park: eye-opening is the best way to describe it. I lived with a family that had no telephone. In 1994. I saw the sights and had some fun but it was in the evenings alone sitting on the windowsill looking over the green hills of the Ilede-France that I felt something happen in me. It sounds corny; teenagers always feel tumult. But all of a sudden I knew there something of me to discover in this place. I kept studying. It was my best subject at Milton besides English. I got to Skidmore and my English and French teachers told me I had real talent, that I should major. So I did. Seemed easy, and pleasurable. I took a threemonth Spanish course and was speaking fluently (though the muscle is slack now from 20 The Park School Bulletin | L A N G U A G E Marketing French wines in Los Angeles Lily Davis spent 11 years at The Park School before attending Milton Academy and Skidmore College, where she double majored in English and French literature. After two years in Paris and Reims (Champagne) she moved to New York and worked in various avenues of the wine business: as a sommelier in Midtown, doing PR at the Loire Valley Wine Bureau, and as a sales rep at a boutique retailer on 13th Street, Union Square Wines. Last year, she moved to Los Angeles to take a job as the staff writer and marketing/communications manager at Woodland Hills Wine Company, a national retailer/e-tailer of fine wines from around the world. Lily is “fluent in French, can scrape by in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and can utter a few German phrases, too.” lack of use). I went to live in Paris for my junior year, drank a lot of six-franc wine in parks, fell in love, got my heart broken, the usual romantic machinations. I was hooked on the place. After college I moved back to Paris and got a job teaching English at a business language school in the 8th Arrondissement. I lived in a cheap, little flat by Canal St. Martin about five years pre-gentrification, with black wall-to-wall carpeting and one window that looked on a grey wall. It wasn’t easy, but I was on my path. At work, I met a boy from the Champagne region and started spending evenings with him and his roommates sampling the different champagnes their fathers made in their spacious flat on the Rue Oberkampf. They were all planning to go into the wine trade, like their fathers and mothers for generations before them. It dawned on me that this business also existed back home. The wine trade. Nobody teaches you about it in school in America. It has to find you. Probably the single most fascinating
aspect of wine is that it’s interdisciplinary: Where else do geology, geography, biology, chemistry, topography and meteorology meet culture, tradition, history, travel, language, and ultimately, the five senses? When the boys asked me to move back to Reims with them, the capital of the Champagne region, for the now legendary 2002 champagne harvest, I jumped. Mostly my role consisted of picking grapes in the chalky-soiled vineyards of the Montagne de Reims. But it was enough. I’d caught the wine bug big time. Back in New York I got certified as a sommelier and worked at a restaurant in midtown for years. It paid the bills. I learned Brazilian Portuguese from a kind-hearted Brazilian bartender’s assistant (or barback in the restaurant business), who took three months one summer to teach me conversational Portuguese. I took a job repping the wines of the Loire Valley, which was fun and empassioned, but still I wanted more. Then I took a job in wine retail. Once I found retail I was never bored. In retail you’re interfacing with wines and people from all over the world on a daily basis. Planning events with distributors, promoting emerging regions, travelling to meet winemakers, developing marketing strategies and writing sales copy to best sell any given product, not to mention eating, drinking, laughing, and hanging out with people from every country. When I had the opportunity to move to Los Angeles to be the staff writer and marketing/communications manager at Woodland Hills, a 13,000 square foot retail space specializing in the wines of Burgundy and Champagne with a huge online presence, I thought… gulped… packed a suitcase and my cat… and got the next plane to L.A. In L.A., my job includes writing all sales copy for our national market, conceiving and drafting all marketing strategy, translating all documentation and reviews from French, acting as a liaison with producers from France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, and Hungary, coordinating and marketing all the in-store events, building in-store content (I buy Central Europe and Greece), assisting with Burgundy allocations, editing content for the marketing blog I instituted, and managing all social media. I took an Italian class at Santa Monica College but dropped out after the first two weeks — the traffic was just too much. But I learned enough to be able to greet to my Italian producers and order pesto and pigato this summer in San Remo. (My German is pathetic, but I can understand if people speak slowly.) Please get in touch if you have any questions about wine or are interested in the wine business. My email is lily@whwc.com. And check us out online www.whwc.com, www.whwcblog.com, woodland hills wine company on Facebook and @WHWC on Twitter. The Park School Bulletin | Spring 2012 21
Page 1 and 2: The Park School Spring Bulletin 201
Page 3 and 4: Dear Friends, In this issue of the
Page 5 and 6: “PARK21”: A STRATEGIC PLAN FOR
Page 7 and 8: 21ST CENTURY LEARNING • Greater f
Page 10 and 11: � Liga Aldins French and Spanish
Page 12 and 13: Mulian Chen Mandarin After earning
Page 14 and 15: Alan Rivera French and Spanish Alan
Page 16 and 17: G R A D E I X : S T U D Y I N G L A
Page 18 and 19: �anguage A L U M N I P R O F I L
Page 20 and 21: Tracy Slater ’82 Freelance writer
Page 24 and 25: After Grades I through III at Park,
Page 26 and 27: Benjamin Stevens ’00 Candidate fo
Page 28 and 29: After ten years at Park (Nursery- G
Page 30 and 31: Bassil Bacare ’11 Spanish student
Page 32 and 33: Hilary Grinker Musser ’79 and her
Page 34 and 35: Diana, Lisa, and Mark have continue
Page 36 and 37: Hilary Sargent ’94 and son, Dash.
Page 38 and 39: S O U T H E N D P A R T Y Kathrene
Page 40 and 41: 1 Clockwise from top: 1. Mabel Gant
Page 42 and 43: R E M E M B E R I N G . . . Sara Na
Page 44: The Park School 171 Goddard Avenue

Spring Bulletin 2012 - The Park School

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