Mary Ellen Ross, Joanne Grossi, Cheryl Palmer Normile, and Susan Barrera Fay—a Fordham photographer brought them together on graduation day as representatives of their “pioneer class” of 210 graduates, the “first girls to invade the male environs of Rose Hill en masse,” as a University press release put it at the time.

They weren’t the first women to attend Fordham. Women had been earning Fordham degrees in law, education, social service, and other fields for nearly five decades. But they helped initiate a tremendous cultural shift at the University, one that culminated a decade later, when TMC graduated its last class and Fordham College at Rose Hill began accepting women. They challenged themselves and everyone around them—including skeptical faculty and students at the all-male Fordham College—to see beyond boundaries of expectations for women.

Their undergraduate days were also indelibly marked by social unrest—the civil rights and burgeoning women’s liberation movements, political assassinations, race riots, and anti-war protests that shocked and roiled the country.

“It really is hard to have perspective in the moment,” Normile said of being in the first class of TMC amid the “tumult” of the times. “But I think as women, we did have a sense that we were breaking some ground.”

Grossi expressed a similar sentiment. “When we got there,” she said, “we knew it was a big deal.”

‘She’s Done Well, She Deserves to Go’

Fay first visited Rose Hill for a debate workshop as a high school sophomore. “I thought it was a beautiful campus,” she said. So when she learned that Fordham was opening a college for women, she leapt at the opportunity. Admission was highly selective. In a letter welcoming the first incoming class to the University, Vincent T. O’Keefe, S.J., president of Fordham from 1963 to 1965, admitted, “[W]e don’t even know whether to call you freshmen or freshwomen.” But he praised their academic records: “Your College Board scores are collectively above average.”

Academic requirements were no problem for Fay, but finances were another issue. As the oldest of five children (the youngest was born while she was at Fordham), she wasn’t sure she would go to college at all. “My father said, ‘Maybe you should go to secretarial school, so when you get married and have children, you’ll have something to fall back on if you need it,’” Fay recalled. Not that he was unsupportive, she said, just worried about providing for the rest of the family. “And it was my mother, who had not gone to college, who put her foot down and said, ‘She’s done well, she deserves to go,’” Fay said.

Like Fay, Ross was already familiar with Fordham. She grew up on Perry Avenue in the Bronx, a 15-minute walk from campus, where her brother, Donald, was a senior and the student government president. “We were very different,” he said of his sister. “I was a glad-hander, and she was not, but she was very well organized.” Grossi remembers Ross as warm and well liked, and thinks her proximity to power, as it were, might also explain why she was elected TMC student government president. “There was a lot of, ‘Can you ask Don about it?’ or ‘Who do we see?’” Grossi recalled with a laugh. But the women were often on their own, and Ross felt the challenge of being first. “There was nobody to look up to,” she told the Fordham press office in her senior year. “We had to solve our own problems.”

‘They Were Not Ready for Us’

Most of the women were commuter students, as there were no campus residences for women until fall 1967. Grossi traveled from Jersey City, New Jersey; Normile from Mount Vernon, New York; and Fay from Queens. Ross walked to campus. Grossi’s and Normile’s parents eventually let them live in nearby apartments, both for the experience and, in Grossi’s case, because her science labs were early in the morning.

Some students lived in the Susan Devlin Residence, a Bronx boarding house for working women that was run by Catholic nuns and was so crowded, Grossi said, that some residents had to climb over other beds to get to their own.

“They got us admitted and got us seats in classrooms, but they were not ready for us,” she said, recalling a dearth of ladies’ rooms and places for the women to gather on campus. Funny and outgoing, she succeeded Ross as TMC student government president. She said the administration tried to keep women in separate classes at first, but “in a year or two, we took classes with the men. And I think most of the guys changed their minds and got used to us.”

In a history class her first year, Fay was the only woman among about 50 students, she said. She found the last seat, in the back, where she hoped to go unnoticed. No such luck. Her future husband, John Fay, FCRH ’68, came in late and stood behind her, stealing glances at her name on her notebook. “The attempt to keep classes separate broke down quickly,” said Fay, whose facility with Spanish—her father was from Ecuador—landed her in advanced Spanish literature instead of an intro, girls-only section. “I hadn’t had boys in class since the third grade, so it was a bit of an adjustment.” She added with a laugh, “As soon as we got to higher-level classes, they weren’t going to have [separate sections of]Chaucer for boys and for girls.”

Normile attended an all-girls Catholic high school and never doubted that she would go to college. She remembers her guilt at skipping class with a friend one day to visit the New York Botanical Garden. “I did it, but it just bothered me,” Normile said of their little adventure, “because I knew the tuition was a lot for my parents.”

‘Beyond Your Own Little World’

The first class of TMC was graduating just as protests against the Vietnam War were dividing campuses, including Fordham’s, where military recruitment became an increasingly contentious issue. “People didn’t want recruiters on campus,” Grossi recalled. “It was a difficult time.” Fay’s boyfriend (later husband) joined the ROTC because he figured it was better to go into the Army as an officer than to be drafted. “It was a looming reality,” Fay said of the war. Her husband was not deployed to Vietnam, but many Fordham alumni were: 23 of them were killed, including four members of the Class of ’68, one of whom, Staff Sgt. Robert Murray, FCRH ’68, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Normile recalled it as “a tense time, a disturbing time. But I think that kind of disturbance makes you think beyond your own little world,” she said, adding that a Jesuit education helped provide “a bigger balance” because it “encourages questioning, thinking, and exploring, and students were doing that on a much bigger level.”

Fay had an experience that took her out of her familiar world when she joined two mission trips to a sugar mill town in Mexico during the summers after her sophomore and junior years. She taught English classes there and lived in the parish rectory.

“It was an eye-opening experience for many of us, these privileged American kids going down to this little community where children had bloated stomachs and were walking around barefoot,” she said of the trips, which grew into the University’s Global Outreach program. “I think my attitude toward political and economic issues was shaped in part by seeing how people struggled to survive in Mexico,” she said, adding, “I also discovered I knew how to teach.”

Life After Thomas More

Fay and her husband were married in the University Church the year after graduation, and following moves to Hawaii, Chicago, North Carolina, and Texas, they eventually settled in Reston, Virginia, where they raised two children. She earned a doctorate in English from George Washington University and taught at Marymount University for 31 years before retiring in 2011.

Grossi majored in biology but also had a knack for computer programming. She worked in data processing at Con Edison and then at Chase Manhattan Bank, but both jobs proved unfulfilling, and the constant stress led to gastrointestinal troubles. The only thing that helped was visiting a chiropractor. “Even though people thought they were quacks, it worked for me,” said Grossi, who was so impressed she started chiropractic school herself in 1973 and became a practitioner.  She retired on full disability in 1992 after being diagnosed with Lyme disease and lupus. “It’s very difficult, when you’re still in your early 40s, not to have a profession anymore,” Grossi said. “What do you do?” Volunteer work with the local YWCA is one thing that has kept her engaged.

Ross earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Syracuse University and was a professor of psychology and women’s studies for 30 years at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where she found her niche.

Donald Ross remembers when he learned just how much of a difference his sister had made in the lives of her students. He was in Anchorage, Alaska, working on a juvenile justice project, and the administrator of a prison facility there had a St. Olaf mug on her desk. He asked her about it. She was an alumna, and she had known his sister. The woman began to cry when he told her that Mary Ellen had died, from Alzheimer’s, at age 66. “She said, ‘Your sister was so inspirational to all of the young women there, and treated us so well,’” he recalled.

Normile pursued a journalism career, which led to her becoming, she believes, the first female speechwriter on the staff of the secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Being a groundbreaking woman in the federal government in the 1970s meant facing sexist attitudes, despite holding a master’s degree from American University, Normile said. She left the USDA in 1981, got married, and later spent two years working on the Democratic Study Group of the U.S. House of Representatives before taking time off to raise two daughters and care for her parents. She returned to the USDA as a speechwriter in 1992, retiring in 2015. Her husband, Michael, died that same year.

Looking back, she attributes her decision to become a writer in part to William Grimaldi, S.J., a Fordham classics professor who encouraged her to go to grad school.  “It was because of him that I came to D.C.,” she said.

Fay was also friends with Father Grimaldi—he presided at her wedding and baptized her children. Years later, when he was visiting the Fays at their home, they fell into conversation about the impact of women at Fordham. They reminisced about those days when everyone was navigating unfamiliar waters, students and Jesuits alike.

“He had thought it was not a very good idea” at the time, Fay said, “but over the years, he realized it was the best thing that happened to Fordham.”

—Julie Bourbon is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C.

“It was terrifying,” Seidell says. “Not because of anything Lorne did, but just because he’s Lorne Michaels.”

That summer, Seidell had been going to a lot of Mets games, and though he says Michaels asked a couple of comedy questions, they also talked a lot about baseball.

“He talked about how the Mets weren’t great, because there was no expectation of excellence on the Mets, whereas on the Yankees there is,” Seidell says. “I think he was probably using this to talk about SNL, because I remember him saying, ‘If you’re not excellent on the Yankees, then you’re not a Yankee for very long.’”

Looking back, Seidell realizes that meeting with Michaels is the last step of a thorough hiring process—a step that exists so Michaels can be sure “that you can conduct yourself around people with some level of chill.” But at the time, he says, “I left there being like, ‘I don’t know. We just talked about baseball. I think I blew it.’”

It turns out he didn’t blow it. He got the job, and like a ballplayer who’s proven his worth, he’s stuck around: In May, he finished his fourth season as a writer for the show.

‘The Last Place on TV You Can Bomb’

Seidell began performing stand-up in Manhattan during his sophomore year at Fordham. He started writing for the website College Humor in 2004, and eventually worked his way up to become the site’s editor in chief. That job became a springboard to other opportunities, including working on shows for MTV and writing on a sitcom in Los Angeles.

But his dream job was always to write for SNL. He grew up watching the likes of Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Cheri Oteri on the show—part of a childhood comedy diet that also included Adam Sandler records and John Candy movies. Some of the first laughs he got as a kid were the result of simply repeating lines from his favorite SNL sketches. (“I live in a VAN, down by the RIVER.”) And so after Sarah Schneider, a friend from College Humor, was hired to write at SNL in 2011, Seidell began applying as well, sending in packets of sample sketches whenever the show put out a call for submissions. He applied four times before finally getting the job.

And though Schneider had given Seidell a heads-up about what he was in for once his first season began, he says nothing can truly prepare you for it. “It’s like someone telling you what skydiving is like,” he says.

Indeed, he quickly learned how grueling the schedule would be: pitches on Monday, a marathon writing session on Tuesday into Wednesday, a table read of potential sketches later that day, rewrites on Thursday, and rehearsals on Friday. All of that builds to a long day on Saturday—an occasion Seidell marks each week by forgoing his usual casual wear in favor of a suit and tie.

Seidell is the first to admit that writing a great sketch that kills on air is hard. Some sketches he works on in a given week won’t even make it to dress rehearsal, and sometimes a sketch just doesn’t work even if it does make it to the live broadcast. But that’s part of the job’s appeal. “This is the last place on TV you can bomb, which adds to the pressure, which I find motivating,” Seidell says from the office he shares with writing partner Mikey Day on the 17th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, nine floors above the fabled studio 8H. Tacked to a bulletin board above his desk are cue cards from sketches Seidell co-wrote that most definitely did not bomb, including “FBI Simulator,” which features Larry David as a lifelike weirdo target-practice dummy in an FBI training exercise.

Satire vs. Silliness for Silliness’ Sake

The entire office is decorated with props and mementos from memorable sketches Seidell co-wrote. A cue card from “Close Encounter,” in which Kate McKinnon explains that she was not “dealing with the top brass” during her abduction by aliens, hangs in a frame in the office’s corner. There’s a pizza-guitar prop from a sketch featuring Aziz Ansari in a Chuck E. Cheese’s-like restaurant, an illustration of Chance the Rapper from a sketch in which he plays an out-of-his-element hockey announcer, and, near the door, a fan-made poster depicting perhaps Seidell’s most famous sketch: “Haunted Elevator,” written with Day and Bobby Moynihan and starring Tom Hanks as David S. Pumpkins, a confusing character who repeatedly appears in a Tower of Terror-type ride wearing a jack-o’-lantern-print suit. The 2016 sketch blew up after the show aired. Not only did it lead to some media appearances by Seidell, it served as the inspiration for a kids’ Halloween special that aired last fall.

Seidell suggests the timing of the episode helped it go viral. “My personal theory is that it was right before the election, and the rhetoric was really harsh on both sides. I think it was the last safe thing to talk about with your friends and family who disagree with you politically.” (It also didn’t hurt that Hanks, in Seidell’s words, “just went for it,” fully committing to the goofy character.)

It’s fitting that “Haunted Elevator” became Seidell’s most buzzed-about sketch, as it’s representative of the type of sketch he most prefers to write. It’s impossible for an SNL writer in 2018 to ignore politics, as the current administration has provided fodder for many sketches over the past two years. Seidell, for instance, pitches in by co-writing appearances by cast members portraying President Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric. But he is most interested in writing sketches that aren’t tied to the news cycle at all, particularly when they’re a little on the weirder side.

“There are a lot of [comedy shows] that just sort of say something everyone agrees with, and they’re aiming for applause and not laughs,” Seidell says. “But as a writer, I just find that boring. This show’s always been a balance of political stuff versus just baldly funny stuff. I’ve just always favored silliness. I’ve always just gone for a laugh over some stinging political critique.”

That’s not to say that topical sketches can’t be silly—or that they can’t appeal across the political spectrum. With Day, for instance, he co-wrote a commercial parody for “Levi’s Wokes,” comically ugly, ill-fitting jeans described as “size-less, style-neutral, gender nonconforming denim for a generation that defies labels.”

“I feel like I found a creative soulmate in Streeter, so I’m very lucky that he got put in my office that first season,” says Day, who joined the show a year before Seidell. “We share an odd sense of humor, and there’s few people there who are as crazy as I am to start writing something new at like 4 or 5 a.m. out of nowhere.”

A Seat at the SNL Kids’ Table

SNL‘s schedule of intense show weeks combined with downtime in the summer has allowed Seidell to work on other projects, including the David S. Pumpkins special last year. And he says he’d be interested in working on a bigger project like a film at some point, in addition to continuing with some stand-up dates, though his time away from the show also lets him spend more time with his wife and 2-year-old son.

In the meantime, he’s laser-focused on SNL. Since being hired, he’s added the title of writing supervisor, which means he not only writes sketches but also helps decide which ones make the show. “You have a seat, maybe not at the big-boy table, but at the kids’ table,” he jokes. It also means more opportunities to learn from Lorne Michaels. “It’s like if you were a baseball player and you get to talk with Babe Ruth,” Seidell says. “He’s maybe the most important person in American comedy, maybe ever.” Seidell pauses, then laughs. “And he wasn’t even born in America.”

Michaels, after all, has been producing groundbreaking sketch comedy for generations. “My parents told me growing up, ‘This is the funniest show,’” says Seidell, who made it his professional goal to be a writer there, preferring it over other beloved programs like The Late Show. “If you want to write comedy, this is the place to be.”

—Joe DeLessio, FCLC ’06, a social media editor at New York magazine, is a frequent contributor to this magazine.

Related Story: Streeter Seidell’s Top 5 SNL Sketches

1. Close Encounter (2015)

“This one was the first one where it really just destroyed in the room. I feel like Lorne [Michaels] started to know my name after that one. It truly changed my trajectory here. It was the first one I had that really just crushed. And Kate [McKinnon] was so funny. Everything about that one just worked.”

2. Haunted Elevator (2016)

“This did great in the studio, but it didn’t start out that way. It didn’t really work until the final one on air. So it was just getting better each time [during the week], but going into the show, we were like, ‘I don’t know if people are going to like it.’ And then to have it hit as hard as it did was rewarding. Tom Hanks is just a hero of mine and Mikey’s, and just having him go all in on such a stupid thing, just trusting these two idiots—and Bobby [Moynihan], excuse me, these three idiots, to bring him through that thing … It’s just nice knowing Tom Hanks is as friendly and cool as you want him to be.”

3. Civil War Soldiers (2017)

“I did this one with Jimmy Fallon when he hosted where they’re singing this old Civil War song, and he keeps jumping in with what he calls his ‘fat catchy hook’ that just sounds like a modern song called ‘Party at My Parents’ House.’ I just loved it. It did pretty well on the show. Jimmy was so funny, and just got the concept right away. I love history stuff. Whenever I can get a history thing on, I get excited about it.”

4. New Mercedes (2016)

“We did this commercial with Julia Louis Dreyfus for a Mercedes car that ran on like 5,000 AA batteries. I love the joke, and the way it was shot was just gorgeous. But I think I love it more for the fact that they really bought like 20,000 AA batteries, and there was a guy on set whose job was just shoveling batteries. He had, like, a snow shovel. It would be, ‘Action,’ then 10,000 batteries fall out of a hole in this car. Then ‘OK, cut,’ and this dude had to come in and shovel batteries all day. It was just making me laugh.”

5. Rap Song (2017)

“Season 42 was just such a momentous season for the show, and this was from the last episode. I got to do a thing with the full cast, and I knew that Bobby [Moynihan] was leaving, and Vanessa [Bayer] was leaving, and Bobby in particular was one of my buddies, and so it was cool to just have everybody there. It was really fun on a personal level of like, ‘Oh wow, we got to do this really big, deeply stupid song thing at the end of the season.’”

—Joe DeLessio, FCLC ’06, a social media editor at New York magazine, is a frequent contributor to this magazine.

Related Story: The Comedic Stylings of Saturday Night Live‘s Streeter Seidell

In his latest book, Make Today Matter (Loyola Press, 2018), best-selling author Chris Lowney, FCRH ’81, GSAS ’81, identifies 10 habits to help readers cultivate greater self-awareness, stick to their ideals, and learn to recognize the “inner demons” that threaten to derail them from a happier, more effective life. He reminds readers that, although life is filled with uncertainty, we ultimately control “what matters most: how [we] behave, react to life’s vicissitudes, and treat others along the way.”

In short chapters with titles like “Change Your Little Part of the World” and “Be More Grateful,” he shares stories of teachers, nurses, executives, and others who model these habits. With self-deprecating wit, he also shares stories from his own experiences.

For the past five years, Lowney has served as chair of the board of Catholic Health Initiatives, one of the largest healthcare systems in the United States. But he has had a multifaceted career, one that has included several major transitions he did not foresee.

“As an eighteen-year-old,” he writes, “I imagined that my high-beam headlights were illuminating a straight path through life and all the way to my deathbed: I entered a novitiate that year, fully expecting to end my days as a Jesuit priest. Then life happened. I discerned that my calling in the world lay outside the Jesuits.” He left the order in the 1980s, after earning degrees in medieval history and philosophy at Fordham, and went on to become a managing director at J.P. Morgan & Co., leading groups in New York, Tokyo, Singapore, and London.

In 2003, not long after leaving J.P. Morgan, he published his first book: Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World. In it, he drew on his rich knowledge of Jesuit history and teachings, as well as nearly two decades of experience in international banking, to present St. Ignatius’ compañía, the Society of Jesus, as a model of business leadership for the 21st century.

For Lowney, the Jesuits have been successful for centuries partly because they offer a way of thinking about leadership that is fundamentally different than most popular models. Instead of taking a top-down approach, focusing solely on the insights of people in charge, Jesuit training is based on the premise that each person can tap into their leadership potential by continually cultivating greater self-awareness. Heroic Leadership became a bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.

Since then, Lowney has published five other books, including Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads (Loyola Press, 2013), and lectured in more than two-dozen countries on business ethics, decision-making, and other topics. In 2006, he established a nonprofit, Pilgrimage for Our Children’s Future, to support various education and healthcare initiatives throughout the world.

He has also been an adjunct professor at Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, where for the past two years he co-taught a course on leadership for MBA and Executive MBA students, guiding them—literally—in the footsteps of St. Ignatius. Students in the course travel to Spain in early October and trek some of the same route walked by Ignatius 500 years ago. In the process, Lowney told Fordham News in 2016, he and the students learn “about perseverance, planning, coaching, empathy, setting goals that will carry us forward, and, above all, about being self-aware people with a deep sense of purpose.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
I’m passionate about the idea of becoming a great person who uses my gifts well, and for purposes greater than self (a “man for others” to put it in Jesuit speak). But note that I say I’m passionate about the idea of being such a person. As for putting it into action, I’m still rather self-absorbed, easily derailed, and not-quite-courageous.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
“The most successful people I know are good at Plan B,” said James Yorke, one of the mathematician-pioneers of chaos theory. I’ve found it a very liberating idea (though I admittedly spin it beyond his initial concept). Whether it’s writing books or creating strategic plans for entrepreneurial ventures I’ve been involved with, it won’t come out perfectly the first time. So what? Let’s try our best, learn from failures, course correct, make plan B better, and have some fun along the way. That way of thinking leapfrogs the analysis-paralyzed fear of failure that so often stalls individuals and organizations. The literary-minded might prefer Samuel Beckett’s rendering of the same idea: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

What’s your favorite place in New York City?
Hmm. How about 93rd Street and 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. That’s where I grew up. My apartment building, church, school, and playground all on one block; passels of kids, always up for stickball, skully, cannon sticks, manhunt, etc. Granted, that block would look pretty nondescript to a visitor. But I guess that’s part of the point? Ultimately, it’s the people that turn places into favorites, no? But if you want a spot with more pizzazz, how about Wave Hill in my adopted borough, the Bronx. Go there for Sunset Wednesdays in the summer! You’ll love it.

What book has had a lasting influence on you?
The Acts of the Apostles. The Catholic Church is suffering a profound crisis. Consider, for example, our inability to engage young people as one serious challenge among many: When are we going to confront our challenges frankly and tackle them with creativity and urgency? We 21st-century Catholics have to drink whatever Kool-Aid those first-century Christians were drinking in the Acts of the Apostles. (It was, of course, the Holy Spirit that they imbibed.) Granted, Acts is not exactly a Tom Clancy-style thriller, but it’s a thriller nonetheless: frontier spirit, internal squabbles, shipwreck, and cameo leadership roles from holy entrepreneurs like Lydia, Priscilla, and Phoebe the Deacon. (Notice anything about those names?)

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
Technology (think app-laden smartphones) is turning life into a “look at me” production. I’m edified and humbled by unsung Fordham alums around my time who do great things daily without broadcasting their derring-do for social media oohs and aahs. I’m thinking of J, a lawyer who helps lead a great social services agency for the impoverished; and of M, who helps deliver healthcare services for prison-involved populations; and of M, M, and plenty more like them: self-sacrificing parents who have set great examples for their kids.

It’s certainly the busiest. Hundreds of thousands of people hustle through Penn Station’s labyrinthine, low-ceilinged corridors every day. Amtrak owns the terminal but shares space and operations with New Jersey Transit, Long Island Rail Road, and the New York City subway. Problems have compounded in a system stretched beyond capacity. Minor delays become major headaches, and overcrowding erodes safety and security. The whole enterprise—and much of the economic vitality of the region—relies on crumbling, outdated infrastructure: narrow platforms, failing ties and switches, and tunnels that may be one major storm surge away from becoming permanently inoperable.

On top of it all, literally on top of it all, sits Madison Square Garden.

It wasn’t always like this.

For Samuel Turvey, FCRH ’79, LAW ’83, the way forward for Penn Station is through its storied past, a time when the station wasn’t a sunless maze but a shining symbol of New York grandeur.

“If we want to keep pace with London, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong, we need to stop using patently dangerous tunnels from 1910 and funneling 650,000 people daily under a basketball arena,” he says. “A train station can and should be located over what presently passes for Penn Station.”

Turvey leads the steering committee for Rebuild Penn Station, a project of the National Civic Art Society conceived by architect and historian Richard W. Cameron. They have been calling for a new and improved version of the original station, as well as a comprehensive transit plan to ease regional congestion.

A Majestic Past

The original station, designed by architect Charles Follen McKim, was a beaux-arts masterpiece inspired in part by Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and the ancient Roman Baths of Caracalla. Opened in 1910, it featured a stately colonnade on Seventh Avenue, with an arching glass ceiling above the train platforms and a massive, sunlit general waiting room where, as historian Jill Jonnes wrote in Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels, the “play of light and shadow in [the] high curved ceilings and pillared walls was evocative and deeply poetic.”

Built by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the station was designed as a public space that would elevate the city’s reputation while honoring the engineering feat that made the station necessary—the construction of subaqueous railway tunnels linking New Jersey to Manhattan and Manhattan to Long Island. McKim said he designed the station as a “monumental gateway … to one of the great Metropolitan cities of the world.”

By the early 1960s, however, the Pennsylvania Railroad had fallen on hard times with the advent of the interstate highway system. “Ultimately, their duty was to shareholders, not to posterity,” Turvey says of the railroad’s decision to skimp on upkeep and sell the air rights to developers who eventually demolished the original building and built the Penn Plaza offices, a theater, and Madison Square Garden atop the station’s platforms and tracks.

In an October 1963 editorial, The New York Times called the demolition a “monumental act of vandalism.” (The public outcry spurred the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which played a key role in saving Grand Central Terminal from destruction.) Years later, architectural historian Vincent Scully lamented what New Yorkers lost at Penn Station: “Once, we entered the city like gods,” he said. “Now we scurry in like rats, which is probably what we deserve.”

Turvey believes New Yorkers deserve better, and so does Gov. Andrew Cuomo, FCRH ’79. Last January, during his State of the State address, he reaffirmed his commitment to fixing the station, and left open the possibility of using eminent domain to do it.

Fixing a Troubled Transit Hub

Some changes are already underway. The James A. Farley Building, the former post office building across Eighth Avenue from Madison Square Garden, is being transformed into a train hall for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad passengers (a project initially led by current MTA President Patrick Foye, FCRH ’78, LAW ’81, who was then working for Governor Eliot Spitzer). Funded by developers, New York, New Jersey, and the federal government, the renovations are scheduled to be done by late 2020.

For Turvey, that’s a good but partial step, one that will alleviate only about 20 percent of the pedestrian traffic at Penn Station and do little to resolve the bigger issues, congestion chief among them.

Rebuild Penn Station has supported a plan by Jim Venturi of ReThinkNYC to make Penn a through station instead of the last stop for New Jersey Transit and Long Island Railroad trains. Trains would no longer be “going back empty,” Turvey says. “Think of the subway: If the subway came down from the Bronx, stopped at 42nd Street, and went back empty, how much waste is that?”

The plan calls for adding or expanding transit hubs in New Jersey, Queens, and the Bronx, while eliminating some platforms in Penn Station and widening others to accommodate more escalators, Turvey says. The plan takes into account the $30 billion Gateway Tunnel Project, which would add a second tunnel under the Hudson.

For Turvey and a growing number of civic groups, however, relocating Madison Square Garden is key to renovating Penn Station. They recommend moving it to the Morgan Post Office and Annex, a five-minute walk west of its current location, by the time the Garden’s lease expires in 2023.

“Madison Square Garden really needs to move if you’re ever to get that location right,” he says. “It’s a historical accident that a basketball arena is on top of a train station. It’s illogical.”

Turvey knows the old Penn Station from books, photos, and Hollywood films. On a recent stroll through the current station, he pointed out some glimpses of its past: a cast-iron partition here, a brass and iron railing there, some glass-block tiles that were designed to allow natural light to reach lower levels but now bear fixtures for fluorescent bulbs. “Dreams die hard for me,” he admits. But he denies that he’s guided solely by nostalgia, and insists that classical tastes and innovation can go together, citing Grand Central Terminal and Washington, D.C.’s Union Station as examples.

“There’s a strain in the architecture community that doesn’t like the idea of rebuilding old buildings,” he says. But he points to recent examples of architectural reconstruction, like Moscow’s 19th-century Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was torn down on Joseph Stalin’s orders in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s. And he argues that Penn Station could be rebuilt on the existing foundations “using modern, more cost-effective construction techniques with appropriate upgrades for expanding train and pedestrian traffic.”

The estimated cost, he says, would be between $3 billion and $3.5 billion.

A “Public-Spirited” Commitment

Turvey grew up on the north shore of Staten Island, where his grandfather worked briefly as a stevedore for the B&O Railroad. He moved to suburban New Jersey with his family when he was 10 and later enrolled at Fordham, where he developed an interest in urban studies as an undergraduate during the 1970s. “It was an interdisciplinary major, and it gave me the opportunity to take courses with some real prominent Jesuits,” he says, including sociologist Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., who later presided at the ceremony when Turvey married his Fordham classmate Patricia Evans, FCRH ’79, and who baptized two of the couple’s three children.

In 1983, Turvey earned a J.D. at Fordham Law School, where he was associate editor of the Fordham Urban Law Journal. And throughout his career in legal and financial services, he has been involved in what he calls “public-spirited” pro bono efforts. In the early 1990s, he established the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, a series of free outdoor concerts in East Village and Harlem parks. He serves on the board of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, and he’s a trustee of the Noble Maritime Collection at Snug Harbor on Staten Island.

“I’ve worked in New York City my whole career,” says Turvey, a managing director at TIAA. “The city has given a lot to me and my family, and I’m interested in seeing it continue its upward trajectory.”

He sees “a transformative resurrection of the original Penn Station” as part of that.

“How we get the federal government and state governments to work together, I’m not entirely sure. I think the corporate community and the cultural and other communities in New York City need to learn about and rally around this plan, akin to how Lee Iacocca spearheaded the Ellis Island restoration,” he says, adding that “public-private partnerships need to be pursued with vigor.”

And he remains inspired by the democratic spirit of the original station.

“It’s very hard to get people to decide that Penn Station should be on the same plane as Central Park, but in a sense, this is a public space, and you need to think about the city’s need for public spaces,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s just the highest dollar and the region misses a once-in-a-century opportunity to get something so right.”

Halsey Street touches on a lot of themes, like mothers and daughters, racial and cultural identity, and gentrification. How did you decide to write this story?
While I was at Fordham, I got a short memoir published in The New York Times. It was called “Remembering When Brooklyn Was Mine,” about a fading Brooklyn and one that was being remade. That made me want to spend more time figuring out what it’s like to feel stuck between two Brooklyns. I invented Penelope [Halsey Street’s protagonist] and knew the story would be about her resistance to her homecoming, and about her finding her place—in her old Brooklyn neighborhood and within herself. Then I started writing her mother’s point of view, and it also became about these two women trying to find their way back to each other.

Did you always see yourself as a writer?
I did, but in college at Yale I was premed. Because I was a smart girl of color, I wanted to be helpful to society, and being a doctor would be something my family understood as having made it. I got into med school, but I deferred. And I deferred again. Then I went to Fordham for my master’s in English. So it’s been nice to have the book come out and reassure my family that I’d be OK, even if there’s still uncertainty. And of course it feels like a huge victory for me too.

What’s been the reaction to Halsey Street?
The reception I’ve experienced overall has been really positive. But I have also been made really aware of how some basic facts of my characters’ lives can be seen as controversial or troubling. Like my use of Spanish when it would be natural for the characters, or to show the trouble with communicating across generations and languages. Or the fact that Penelope is someone who is attentive to color and race. I get frustrated when I read literature and there’s no mention of race or ethnicity until a black character comes out. So for me as a writer, if we live with the powerful fiction of race, I want to be honest about rendering that for various people, not just people of color.

Do you identify with Penelope?
I identify as both black and Latina, like Penelope. And as a scholarship kid since middle school, I also feel like I’m in this bubble, stuck between two worlds. But I don’t always agree with Penelope. The points of view [around gentrification]in the book are deeply flawed. I don’t like the terms gentrifier or gentrified; they’re flattening and not true to nuances. And they don’t acknowledge how gentrification is driven by structural forces and not just individual agency. But when people talk about gentrification, partially what they’re talking about is a sense of erasure, or theft, or appropriation. It’s a complicated position, which is why I wanted to have people on different sides of it and not have the narrative comment directly.

Is that idea of leaving open questions something you teach your students at Wake Forest?
Yes. I think some people teach writing like it’s this mysterious thing, or you’re just kind of born with it or not, which I don’t believe. I teach a first-year writing class and one about American identity, race, and belonging. I think that one really challenges students because it’s one of the first times they’ve been instructed to ask questions about what it means to be American. By the end of the semester, they’ve deepened their thinking and have more questions. I think it’s unsettling for some of them, in a good way.

Do you want to continue teaching?
I definitely want to continue working to cultivate young writers. Teaching is a way for me to remain connected to the value that fiction has for readers, and the value the practice of writing has for writers.

What are you working on right now?
I’ve got two book projects that are cooking right now; they’re both novels. One is a quest story, and the other is about a community in North Carolina, which is inspired by a short story I published about my time in Durham. I think they both build on the work of Halsey Street, but I don’t know which one I’ll finish next.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Alexandra Loizzo-Desai.

“I knew I wanted to be in the city,” says the New Jersey native. “I grew up Baptist, so the whole Jesuit thing was new to me. But I always felt I should be a man ‘for and with others,’” he says, citing one of the central tenets of Jesuit education. “That helped me connect to it and opened my mind. Now I can view issues from a variety of perspectives.”

Glenn, who majored in communications with a concentration in film, is now using that skill in his role as a business development coordinator at a New York City law firm.

As a member of the Young Alumni Committee, he’s also helping people who graduated in the past 10 years stay connected to the University. “I’m passionate about keeping our young alumni base strong so that, when we get to Golden Ram status, we can look back on this journey and see that Fordham has remained in our lives,” he says. In his role on the group’s philanthropy subcommittee, he focuses on encouraging his fellow graduates to help the next generation of Rams by supporting scholarships and financial aid.

“Had it not been for the 9/11 Scholarship, I would not have received a Fordham education,” says Glenn, whose father, Harry, an assistant vice president at Marsh & McLennan, was killed in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. “So I know the importance of scholarship—whatever it looks like, in any shape or form,” he told Fordham News in 2016. “That’s why giving back is such a big thing.”

Glenn also represents his fellow recent grads as the youngest member of the Fordham University Alumni Association Advisory Board, where he volunteers with the lifelong learning task force. “Fordham alumni are always trying to learn and enrich their minds,” Glenn says, “so we want to find better ways to engage them as they do that.”

“I think it’s incumbent upon me to give back in any way I can, whether it be time, resources, or enhancing the Fordham experience in some other way,” he says.

Which is why Glenn also joined Fordham’s new multicultural alumni affinity chapter, MOSAIC. “We want to be a resource for alumni and students in any way we can,” Glenn says of the budding group. “We want to build that community.”

On June 7, Glenn attended the Block Party at Lincoln Center, which this year featured a celebration of the first 50 years of Fordham College at Lincoln Center. Glenn particularly enjoys seeing people across generations and classes at the annual event. “Of course I love my class,” he says, “but it it’s always great seeing people who were seniors when I was a freshman, to catch up with lots of people and hear about what has changed.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
Continuing to learn, helping others learn and enhance themselves, striving for more, and never really settling—it’s that Fordham value of magis.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
That’s a tricky one. But I think it’s what Father McShane said in his speech at our graduation. He broke it down into three parts. Never forget where you came from; love them and thank them for supporting you. Never forget where you went to school; never forget the relationships you developed and all you learned. And matter; be somebody in the world who makes a difference and an impact. I’ve especially taken that last one to heart. I think that’s one of the reasons I stay connected to Fordham, because I want to matter to Fordham. I want to make an impact there and hopefully in the greater global community.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
In the city it has to be the Central Park Reservoir. At the end of every semester at Fordham, I would take a walk to the reservoir and use it as an opportunity to reflect on the semester and all my accomplishments, and also to think about what I could improve on. It’s such an interesting place because of the contrast. It’s so quiet in the middle of Manhattan. I find that fascinating and quite calming also.

In the world, this is a little cheesy, but it would have to be Walt Disney World. My bucket list is to visit every Disney park in the world. Some of my favorite memories with my father were going to Disney World, and the last vacation we had was there. That’s also part of the reason I wanted to come to school in the city. He was from New York and obviously worked here, so that was a deeper connection to him.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
I have two. The first is a nonfiction book called Racecraft, which is by sisters Barbara and Karen Fields. It’s about racism in America, but the way they talk about it is so fascinating, and I had never really thought about it that way. Their main thesis is that most people believe that race comes first and racism follows, but they invert that and say that racism is an action that produces race. It’s a small change but it has tremendous repercussions. I share the book with anybody who will listen to me talk about it.

The second is The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by Father James Martin. The way he takes Jesuit values and puts them in real-life situations … he has the answers. It really is the guide to almost everything. I still use a lot of the methods in the book in my day-to-day life, like decision-making, finding out what you’re passionate about.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I have two again. The first is Professor Jennifer Clark, who was my adviser and teaches film. She taught the theoretical underpinnings of film in a way that was easy to understand, and she’s brilliant.

The second is Professor Tom McCourt, another communications professor. His Popular Music as Communication course opened my mind to looking at music in a scholarly way. I can’t even look at music the same way because of that class. He also advised me on a summer research project I received a grant for which compares gangster films from the 1930s to gangster rap from the 1980s. He always asked me to think a little bit harder and deeper about certain issues. And his closing lectures for his courses are so well done. If I could go to a closing lecture for any of his classes every semester, I would.

Today, Barnett, 81, speaks regularly to children about the importance of education and, in his words, “the limitless dimensions of human possibilities.” He spoke with FORDHAM magazine from Tampa, Florida, where he was in town for a series of speaking engagements.

You’ve spoken before about how injuring your Achilles tendon while with the Knicks was a key moment in your life. You eventually returned to the court, but how did that set in motion what you did when you finished your playing career?
That was a transformative moment in my life and gave me the reality that someday I’d better get prepared for the future which I, as a younger man, wasn’t focused upon. That put me on the path to education and really helped turn my dream into an adventure. I wanted to get my doctorate and go to the highest point that I possibly could. Very few professional athletes have really gone down that road. I thought it would open doors that perhaps were not open before.

I was reading a quote from Chris Mullin, now the St. John’s coach, and he was saying that with those Knicks teams in the late ’60s and early ’70s, their motto was to hit the open man, and it was all about unselfish play. Was there a lesson from that team that stuck with you in your career beyond basketball?
You’ve got to be able to adapt. And then going even further, to be able to not only adapt but to be able to get along with people. You make whatever adjustments that are necessary to function in a multicultural society. All of that is related to what we accomplished playing basketball with the New York Knicks. And one of the very fortunate things is that those kind of relationships that were established on the court have lasted a lifetime.

The Knicks haven’t had much to celebrate over the last 20 years or so. Is it frustrating as somebody who played on the franchise’s championship teams to look at how they’ve struggled to get back to anything like that?
Yeah, it’s kind of frustrating to see that that legacy has not been carried on the way we left it. And unfortunately, they haven’t been able to put the pieces together to reestablish what was left with those championship teams. Obviously they continue to work. I assume they felt very good when they brought Phil Jackson in, who was part of that championship pedigree, and obviously it didn’t work out, but they continue to try to find the formula that was successful when we were there.

There’s a fair number of high-profile NBA players today who speak out on topics of social justice. Are there players you especially respect for that kind of work that they do off the court?
NBA players have probably taken a more interested position in that regard. In previous generations, their jobs were in jeopardy. And now because of social media and generational will, the whole circumstance has changed. They can speak out without their jobs being in jeopardy. LeBron James, [Chris] Paul, even Melo [Carmelo Anthony], and a whole bunch of folks, they are more visible than the players in the NFL and Major League Baseball, and so probably they’re more instrumental in terms of awareness of social justice than other professional sports are.

Once you leave the sports arena, you have to join the population of America, and particularly in certain circumstances you’re just as vulnerable as other parts of the population, without your sheath of protection of being a professional athlete.

I understand that you’re traveling to Cuba this summer for a clinic. How did that come about?
It’s not only a clinic, but it’s a humanitarian effort to talk to young people about some of the same issues that are confronted in America, in terms of their dreams and education and economic circumstances, and trying to provide a better life. It’s something I’m very excited about. Talking about America, Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] said a long time ago that to live one’s dream, you’ve got to reach down into the inner chambers of your own soul individually and find with the ink and pen of self-assertiveness your own man or womanhood, and sign your own Emancipation Proclamation to live your dream. And that has been always a guiding light in my life and the message that I’ve taken forward to talk to young people.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Joe DeLessio, FCLC ’06.

It was the former Vincent Office Building at 302 Broadway, “that narrow, old building with the slow elevators” but “kindly elevator operators,” in the words of Maggie Cumming Casciato, UGE ’68.

It’s now 50 years since she earned her bachelor’s degree with one of the last Fordham classes to be educated at 302 Broadway, which served Fordham students for 25 years amid the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s historic heart.

Situated two blocks from City Hall and a 10-minute walk from where Fordham’s Jesuits first founded a school in Manhattan in the 19th century, 302 Broadway was the last of Fordham’s locations in the lower part of the borough, the final redoubt of what might be called the Jesuit university of Old New York.

“Another New York City Skyscraper”

The Vincent Office Building was constructed for the estate of John Jacob Astor in 1899, designed in a Romanesque revival style. Elevators had only been around for a few decades, and a brochure boasted that the ones in the Vincent would run “day and night”—patrolled by watchmen, no less. Other amenities included “filtered iced water” available on every floor.

The Vincent was an apartment building before Fordham bought it to house its City Hall Division following the expiration of the University’s lease in the nearby Woolworth Building. With the purchase, Fordham “realized one of her fondest hopes,” in part because of the building’s proximity to transit lines, The Ram said in its Sept. 10, 1943, issue.

The building housed the schools of law, business, and education. When she went there to register for classes in the early 1960s, the 14-story building “just seemed like another New York City skyscraper,” said Casciato, a native of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who had become enamored with Manhattan while growing up.

But the building’s location was choice. “The neighborhood was our campus,” she said—there was an Italian place across the street offering a plate of spaghetti for 99 cents, and a nearby pub, Joe Maxwell’s, “where a lot of friendships developed” as students nursed a drink for a while before class. (The drinking age was 18 at the time.) A few blocks away was the Brooklyn Bridge, where she used to go on walks to be alone with her boyfriend.

And next door—until the paper folded in 1950—was the New York Sun building, where John Payne, GABELLI ’51, once got a welcome surprise. After making a sketch of 302 Broadway’s front entrance for the Maroon Quill, the business school’s newspaper, he walked next door to show it to the Sun’s art editor, who gave him a letterpress engraved zinc plate of the drawing the next day, along with several proof prints.

“I still have the plate as a reminder of how nice and accommodating he had been,” Payne said. “302 Broadway was a wonderful location, and it opened some doors for me while I was a student.”

Every student at 302 was a commuter, and some lived at home with their families, Casciato noted—“We didn’t know what we were missing in terms of campus life.” But the urban “campus” held many delights, such as visiting museums for art class, singing with other students for the Christmas tree lighting at City Hall with the mayor, or visiting Chinatown and Little Italy, she said.

“C’mon in the House”

In the building itself, there were hangouts on the 14th floor—where students would play bridge or study—and in a sublevel lounge, she said. There was a first-floor meeting room with a bare-bones stage, “just an elevated platform,” where the Thalians, an acting troupe, would perform, Casciato said. One former member, Gerard McLoughlin, UGE, ’58, GSE ’60, said the Thalians won a one-act festival that pitted them against all Jesuit schools on the East Coast.

And traveling between all the floors was made memorable by the people who ran the elevators, who were “always very friendly and cordial,” Casciato said. “C’mon in the house” was the familiar greeting of one well-known operator, named Hodge, McLoughlin said. Casciato recalled how the operators would stop the elevator a foot below the floor and then crank the car upward by hand, inch by inch.

But the elevators didn’t always make it to every floor, The Ram noted in a Dec. 3, 1968, article about the impending move to the new Lincoln Center campus. The building was increasingly decrepit and crowded. Nonetheless, some students lamented its loss, describing the sense of tight-knit community created when all the students circulated in the same close quarters.

And there was also an urban vibe—endearing to at least one student—created by police cars, fire engines, and noisy demonstrations at City Hall. Atmosphere also came from the sound of the IRT subway “passing on the other side of the thin wall,” the article said.

Whatever the conditions, students were transformed, and moved on to become dedicated professionals in education and other fields.

“Many wonderful professors taught excellent classes to eager students, many of whom were the first in their families to attend college,” Casciato said. “A great number of those students went on to become truly dedicated teachers and school administrators in New York City and elsewhere.”

Fond Memories

Today the building is long gone, replaced by the immense Ted Weiss Federal Building, but it remains the home campus for many alumni, if only in memory.

The Lincoln Center campus is “like a school I’ve never been to,” Casciato said. “And I don’t identify with the Rose Hill campus either, because I was only there a few times,” including for her graduation in June 1968.

Fifty years later, she is looking forward to reconnecting with former classmates at the 302 Broadway reunion being held as part of Fordham’s Jubilee weekend, which takes place from June 1 to 3 on the Rose Hill campus. (The reunion takes place Saturday, June 2, at 2:30 p.m. in Hughes Hall at Rose Hill. Alumni of 302 Broadway are also welcome at the Block Party at Lincoln Center on June 7.) Casciato stays in close touch with several former classmates; in 2015 they all took a cruise together on the Queen Mary to mark the 50th anniversary of when they all met at age 17.

The building at 302 Broadway “holds a lot of wonderful memories for us, four years of growing up, maturing,” said Casciato, a French major who later moved to Connecticut with her husband to start a family and worked as a management accountant.

“I look back on it fondly,” she said. “It was an old ramshackle building, nothing to be proud of, but what we made it inside was very important.”

Study goals. || Photo by MSW student @beccakaitlyn_, via @fordhamgss . #fordham #fordhamlincolncenter #manhattan #springinnyc

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Walkin’ on sunshine. || Photo by @rachzambernardi (@fordhamgsb ’18) . #fordham #fordhamrosehill #fordhamgsb #keating

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Post move-in with some of the best orientation leaders #Fordham #LincolnCenter #fordham4me #wearefordham

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Fall photos: Can’t stop. Won’t stop. Photo by @stephsapienza (GSB ’18) • #Fordham #fordhaminthefall #rosehill #hugheshall

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We made it! Enjoy your spring break, Rams. || Jubilant photo by @shalenaboca (GSAS ‘18) ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ . #fordham

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Happy first day of the semester, Rams! We hope you’ve had a restful break and are ready take on the spring. || Photo by @astrangecharm, FCLC ’18, taken during her first week at Fordham in 2014. . #fordham #fordhamlincolncenter #manhattan #firstday

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@kat_falzon (FCRH ’18) met @louboutinanyc, the famous hugging dog of New York City. (She also wrote an article on Loubie and owner Cesar for @hercampusfordham — check it out!) Photo via @kat_falzon . #fordham #nyc #NewYorkIsMyCampus #louboutinanyc #loubie #thehuggingdog

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Campus in bloom Photo by @allaboutmeehan (FCRH ’18) . #fordham #rosehill #fordhamuniversity

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First snow of the season || Photo by @liyakhali (GSAS ’18) . #fordham #fordhamrosehill #cunniffefountain #firstsnow

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Daydreaming about being back at Fordham in a week

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Saturdays at Fordham are my favorite (feat. Fr. McShane)

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‪Sailing into graduation || #fordham2018 ‬ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ‪Repost @fordhamsailing: Seniors Katherine “KJ” Jones and Emma Archard cap off their spring semester with a sail in their Saturday best. Looking forward to Commencement this weekend followed by the ICSA Nationals.‬

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Happy new year, seniors!! Who else is excited to see what 2018 has in store? : @nicolefrancesca . . . #fordhamrams #fordham2018 #fordhamseniorweek

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It’s something that Betty Gilpin, FCLC ’08, the Fordham Theatre graduate who plays Debbie, might have said herself.

When she was last on the Lincoln Center campus, in April 2016, Gilpin told a group of Fordham Theatre seniors about the struggles of auditioning for acting roles. “Especially as a woman, it’s totally different. You’re going to be told things like, ‘Don’t make that weird face when you cry,’ or, ‘Great, just wear more makeup next time,’” she said. She emphasized how her Fordham training, which created an atmosphere of camaraderie and taught her to focus on her love of the craft, keeps her grounded and motivated.

Now Gilpin stars alongside Alison Brie in the comedy about the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, or GLOW, the short-lived women’s professional wrestling circuit founded in 1986. The New York Times has called the Netflix series, a fictionalized account of 1980s show, “a high-flying leap off the top rope, a summer treat with spandex armor and a pulsating neon heart.”

And Gilpin has been able to share her experiences and advice with a wider audience through magazine interviews, TV appearances, and even an essay in Glamour, where she discusses gaining both confidence and physical strength through her new role.

“GLOW was the first set I’d been on run by women,” Gilpin writes. “It was a magical never-never land run by type-A amazons. I saw power and care together for the first time.”

Season two of GLOW will be released on Netflix on June 29.

In the meantime, watch the trailer to see Gilpin’s character Debbie transform into her wrestling persona—Liberty Belle—about 45 seconds into the GLOW girls’ neon-fueled ’80s dance party.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwVOmTImfLA