Luminaries of ’59 Celebrate Their Graduation Anew
The Golden Anniversary class gathering at Commencement is always special. Having left Brooklyn College as young men and women eager to begin building their lives, they return fifty years later with many achievements under their belt and lend a spark of color and fervor to the Commencement Exercises of a new generation.
The Class of 1959, which celebrated with the 2009 graduates on May 28, was particularly luminous. Among their members are the renowned attorney Alan Dershowitz, agent-to-the-stars Don Buchwald, and national health care advocate Harriet Brathwaite. Lending his award-winning filmmaking talents to the day was Robert Sarnoff. Sarnoff skirted around the campus, while capturing the ceremony and his former classmates as material for his documentary-in-progress, The ROMEOWS, which stands for "Retired Older Men Eating Out Wednesdays."
As Sarnoff explains, "The ROMEOWS centers on a group of men vociferously engaged in the big, murky questions of American life. Their generational take viewed through the prism of America as a democratic ideal for seven decades connects with No Country for Old Men and Gran Torino, while repelling notions of Grumpy Old Men."
The film is due to be completed this fall.
