NOTE: This post was originally published at princetonalumniweekly.blogspot.com/
Mat action


Princeton wrestler Jesse Palermo ’07, left, grapples with Harvard's J.P. O’Connor during their 149-pound bout Feb. 2 in Dillon Gym. Harvard beat the Tigers, 36-7, in the Ivy League opener for both teams.

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski


Women’s basketball, men’s and women’s squash face key weekend


On Feb. 3, women’s basketball star Meagan Cowher ’08 scored her 1,000th career point in the Tigers’ 69-51 win over Brown (video available at goprincetontigers.com). Cowher has averaged a league-best 27.2 points per game in Princeton’s five Ivy contests, and the Tigers are 4-1, tied for first place, as they leave for what historically has been the league’s toughest pair of road games. Princeton plays at 4-1 Harvard Feb. 9 and at 3-2 Dartmouth Feb. 10. Last season, the Tigers swept their road games against Harvard and Dartmouth for the first time in 24 tries.

Men’s and women’s squash also face Harvard and Dartmouth this weekend, hosting the Big Green first (Feb. 10, men at noon, women at 2 p.m.) and the Crimson the following day (Feb. 11, men at noon, women at 2 p.m.) in the final matches of the Ivy season. Both Princeton teams are undefeated, but both Harvard squads are unbeaten as well, so Sunday’s results likely will determine this year’s Ivy titles. After the Princeton matches, the Crimson complete their Ivy slate against Yale Feb. 14.

Markowitz ’74 pens second murder mystery

In A Minor Case of Murder: A Cassie O’Malley Mystery (Five Star), Jeff Markowitz ’74 adds a new adventure to the career of rag sheet journalist and amateur sleuth Cassie O’Malley. When Andy MacTavish brings minor league baseball to White Sands Beach, near the New Jersey Pine Barrens, not everyone welcomes the club. Birders are upset that the ballpark will upset nesting areas. So after a woman dies at the ballpark during the final game of the season, MacTavish asks O’Malley for help in solving the murder. A Minor Case of Murder was nominated for a Readers’ Choice Award in the Best Traditional Mystery/Amateur Sleuth category at Love is Murder, a mystery writers conference held in Chicago in January. For information about other books by alumni and faculty, visit New Books at PAW online.
Alumni headline theater projects

Dana Wieluns ’91 is performing in Kabara Sol, a production of Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, through Feb. 11. Wieluns performs the roles of a male drug lord, a voluptuous torch singer, and a mysterious disabled girl without a past. Wieluns wrote in an e-mail, “Set in the seedy underworld of a fantastical oriental port in the ’30s, Kabara Sol explores the theme of identity through the hallucinatory weaving of three lives: those of an opium kingpin, a drug-addled chanteuse, and the deformed amnesiac with powerful attachments to both. … Kabara Sol is a spellbinding fable of murder and redemption.” For information and tickets go to www.fordamphitheatre.org . Wieluns is a founding member of the Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble.

The latest musical by Prospect Theater Company, Tock Tick, opened Feb. 5 and runs through March 4, at the West End Theatre in New York City. Recommended for ages 10 and up, Tock Tick is about a 12-year-old girl, Chelsea Tickerman, whose mother has cancer. “As the clock in the front hall steadily marks each passing moment,” a release about the production said, “Chelsea can see the dragon of her mother’s death, hovering. In a bold move, she embarks on a fantastical quest to slay this dragon and save her mother.” Prospect was founded by five Princeton alumni, including Cara Reichel ’96 and her now-husband Peter Mills ’95. For more information go to www.ProspectTheater.org.
Posted by Brett Tomlinson, with reporting by Katherine Federici Greenwood.