David was an absolute sweetheart-- immediately warm and welcoming. And so
funny. I feel lucky that I got to know him at the reunions and got to see him
in action. He tickled me.
I love you guysTerry
On Monday, January 26, 2026 at 11:40:46 AM EST, Anne Smith via Winedale-l
<[email protected]> wrote:
As a 90s Winedale alum, I heard many a tale of David, a Plan II genius, which
made him the man, the myth, the legend to us. And then having the good fortune
to get to know him via Reunions, I understood why. And I then could be in awe
of the beautiful human he was. His timing was impeccable. His gift for finding
deep moments of play was a joy to watch. Never a showboat, he stole many a
performance moment, while (usually!!) staying in bounds of the text and the
story. I can still chuckle about all of his “noting” during Much Adonin 2015.
I’m so sad to learn of his passing. We few, we happy few, are quite lucky to
have known him.
Anne
Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 26, 2026, at 10:43 AM, Mary Collins <[email protected]> wrote:
Dearest Jayne,
What an obituary! It captures The mercurial David, and I learned so much
about him while reading it. Thank you for sending it. Like you, I send love to
All,
Mary
Mary [email protected]
On Sun, Jan 25, 2026 at 3:08 PM Jayne Mack Suhler <[email protected]> wrote:
For those of you who knew and loved David,his obituary. This has also been
posted on his Facebook page. Love to all, Jayne
From:"[email protected]"
<[email protected]> on behalf of Michael
Godwin <[email protected]>
Reply-To: "[email protected]"
<[email protected]>
Date: Friday, January 9, 2026 at 1:13 PM
To: Shakespeare Winedale <[email protected]>,
Shakespeare at Winedale 1970-2000 alums <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Welcome to 2026! Plus some content.
P.S. As the prince told Gertrude, "arras me no more questions, and I'll kill
you no more guys."
Love, Mike
On Fri, Jan 9, 2026 at 1:45 PM Michael Godwin <[email protected]> wrote:
A couple of people have noted that our message traffic on the big Winedale
mailing lists has dropped a lot since Thanksgiving. This is understandable, I
think, because 2025 was an eventful, and frequently stressful year, even though
a lot of us managed to get together and commune and share time with one
another, which I very much appreciate.
(This is where Google AI is suggesting to me all sorts of bromides to finish
off this email, which may be a sign of how much progress AI still needs to make
in guessing what I might want to say!)
I do have a couple of things I want to share, though.
(a) HAMNET, which I first heard about as a novel from other alums (I think
maybe Susan Gayle Todd first brought it to my attention), is now a movie, which
I'm dying to see but which isn't yet in anything like wide release. I think
maybe I can arrange to see it this weekend--if I do, I'll report back. (I know
from second-hand reports that there's more of Shakespeare's text in it than
there is in the novel, and my thought is, how can that be anything but good?
Not that this is a criticism of the novel, though.)
(b) I wrote a little essay that seems to be getting some traction among those
who read me regularly, and so I thought I might share it with you too. See
below. Needs a good title.
------------------------
Multiply 260 by 0.667, and you get 173 and change. One year ago, I weighed 260
pounds (about 118 kg). This morning, I weighed very slightly less than 173
pounds. I want to emphasize here that although I’m pleased with this progress,
it would be a mistake to say that I’m “proud” of it—the success in getting back
down into the 170s is attributable to the American Pharma Industry developing
suitable drugs to address (and reverse) problems created by the American Food
Industry. (My ultimate goal, if you must know, is probably somewhere around
160–I’m five-foot-eight, about an inch shorter than I was in college, so not
too terrible a decline in height.)
What I brought to the table (so to speak) was my willingness to find ways to
afford medications that my insurance would not yet cover. It may do so now—will
check at refill time. If you want to know what role my willpower and resolve
played, it’s this: I made the decision to prioritize fixing a persistent health
problem that dates from my early 20s. Although I had been overweight from time
to time before then, true obesity itself didn’t start manifesting for me until
about 1980. For a long time I thought it was something particular to my own
life that had changed. (I had graduated from college, was trying to figure out
next steps in work and education, wasn’t always eating the best food, started
drinking more—alcohol is a great analgesic, and putting on weight quickly tends
to increase one’s daily aches and pains.) Did I exercise? Why, yes, and I also
developed significant muscle mass, which was helpful in moving around a much
larger version of myself. (It should be noted that the rise in gym memberships
in the USA tracks the obesity stats—Americans were investing in working out
more *at the very same time* that obesity was on its abrupt rise.)
But what I was slow to recognize was that the same problems I was having
(fairly rapid increase in weight, increasing experiments with dietary change in
the hopes of reversing the lurch into obesity—experiments that ultimately
weren’t successful and that may even have made things worse) were not specific
to me, but in fact were accelerating through the U.S. population and then
quickly afterwards in most of the developed world. The global stats showed that
this was happening everywhere in reasonably prosperous or quickly developing
countries soon after this obesity acceleration manifested in the USA.
The chief candidate as a source of the problem seemed straightforward, a
quarter of a century after 1980: the industrialized production of food as a
product shaped as much by applied chemistry as by agriculture. One reason
Michael Pollan’s FOOD RULES and other writing on how to eat have continued to
be current for years even as various diet books have fallen by the wayside is
that they shift our attention to, inter alia, buying one’s food around the edge
of the supermarket—that’s where the more natural, and more recently grown,
produce at, e.g., Whole Foods and Safeway, lives.
But while following Pollan’s prescriptions (I’m using the word
metaphorically—he’s a science journalist, not a doctor) might help someone
avoid the sources of the obesity epidemic, it’s less successful in reversing
that epidemic. For someone like me—and here I still hesitate to share that for
a long time weighing in the mid-200s of pounds signified success for me,
because for one mercifully brief period in the late 1990s I crossed the
300-pound line—more proactive interventions, including medical interventions,
seemed necessary. Part of getting my weight to move in the downward direction
was bariatric surgery (in late 2004), which certainly helped keep me alive long
enough to reach the era of Ozempic et al., but which, as is the case with most
weight-loss surgery, was only partially successful in returning to non-obesity
… or achieving it in the first place. (Childhood obesity is a major thing now
in the USA and elsewhere—earlier in my lifetime, it wasn’t.)
So here I am in 2026, weighing at least a few pounds less than I did when
entering college in 1975, trying to make sense of where I am now. The guy I see
in the mirror is visibly older, but in most respects better looking and fitter
than I have been for most of my adult life. But I also have to wonder what my
life might have been like if I had never had this particular health issue …
well, “weighing me down” seems like an appropriate trope.
I hope to make up, in the time I have left, the progress in my professional
work that I might have achieved had I been healthier over most of the last four
or five decades. But I should stress that there have been a few ways in which
my path has been helpful to me professionally and personally. First, I really
have done an immense amount of avocational academic research to get a handle on
the problem—here I credit my undergraduate education at UT Austin for building
in me the habit of reading scientific papers on the regular, rather than mere
journalistic or other popular accounts of what the research may or may not
show. I also acquired a certain amount of persnicketiness when it comes to
experimental models, for which I should credit Plan II philosophy (at UT
Austin) for introducing me to Karl Popper’s work specifically, and the
philosophy of science generally.
My work as a journalist and as a lawyer has also made me more careful about
sourcing what I post or publish, which is all to the good, even when the topic
in question is not food or medicine or even science generally.
But most important, I think, is that my inability to solve my particular
problems through application of willpower/resolve has made me more sympathetic
to other people who can’t just willpower their ways out of their difficulties,
which may be health-related or rooted in something else. I listen better now, I
think. Now if I could just trigger an epidemic of better reading, better
listening, and greater willingness to question one’s own theories at least as
much as one critically examines those of others—that would be something I could
really be proud of.
-----------
That's it! Hope to see you all again soon!
Love,
Mike
--
Be vigitant, I beseech you!
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