Athletes and artists
How some Rutgers people spend their free time
Archived article from Nov 9, 2001
By Douglas Frank
Page 2 of 3
He set a regimen of 10 miles daily, 15 to 20 miles Saturdays and Sundays. "It took a good bit of time. I knew I could run it, but I wanted to do a credible job without endangering my life."
Last year, he felt his running was going well enough to give the Boston Marathon a try, and with some help from medical friends at the Boston Athletic Association and clearance by his cardiologist, he entered the April 15 race.
Kessler ran the course in three hours, 59 minutes and 26 seconds -- not bad for a 53-year-old heart-attack victim.
"I accepted my medal proudly, got changed and came back to the finish line to try to help other runners who were coming in later," he recalls. "I promised everybody that would be the only time I would run. It was pretty tough."
Over the years, Kessler has also served as trainer of the U.S. World Cup soccer teams and the U.S. rowing teams. A physical education major in college and a former Navy hospital corpsman/medic, he has always tried to be a role model in fitness. He still runs 45 minutes a day, bikes and swims.
Kessler doesn't plan to run the marathon again but looks forward to helping at his ninth next year. "Now when I work at the finish line, I'll appreciate much more what the people are going through."
In search of the goddess
By day a secretarial assistant to the graduate nursing program at Rutgers-Camden, Jackie Morfesis assumes different roles when her workday is through, all aimed at pursuing the goddess in religion and myth.
She is a scholar, painter, poet, singer, teacher of fine arts and, more recently, actor, in a quest that took her to Greece in 1999-2000. There, she studied goddess imagery in ancient Greece on a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship.
"I used the disciplines of art, history, literature and religion to try to understand goddess imagery in the ancient world and how we can relate to it in our contemporary consciousness," she observes.
"All of my grandparents are from the island of Ithaca in Greece. I grew up surrounded with a love for the arts, music and mythology," she says. "I went to Greece as a child and then again as a teenager. It was then that the seed was planted in my heart to pursue goddess work."
Mythology, she says, is the inspiration for both her academic and creative work, and she explores the same subject matter in her art and poetry, often getting an idea for a poem and spinning it off to a painting or vice versa. On the canvas and the page, for instance, she will present images of the goddess with hair or heart aflame. A curator of her first solo show said that her paintings present several con-tradictions, being at once direct yet symbolic, spiritual yet human, personal yet universal.
Morfesis is also an adjunct instructor in Camden's department of fine arts, where she teaches drawing, introduction to studio art, two-dimensional design and art, mythology and the creative process. Her academic work focuses on women's studies, and she recently spoke on "Woman as Nude" at the Zimmerli Art Museum. She holds a master's in liberal studies from Rutgers-Camden.
More recently, Morfesis joined a five-women theater ensemble, headed by Greek dramatic actress Lili Bita of Philadelphia, which plans to develop and bring to the stage plays based on goddess mythology.
Over the airwaves
If you want to hear "Music You Can't Hear on the Radio," tune to WPRB, the Princeton University campus radio station, at 103.3 FM, and also on the Internet at www.WPRB.com Sunday nights from 7 to 10 p.m.
You might recognize the voice of John Weingart, associate director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics, who has been emceeing and disk-jockeying the free-form, mainly folk music program for 27 years.
Weingart has been manning the turntable there since he was a graduate student at Princeton, through 23 years as an administrator in environmental protection with state government, through the writing of a book on the storage of radioactive waste (see Rutgers Focus, Oct. 19) and, more recently, as an Eagleton administrator.
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