Small World, Small World

I recently finished last week's New Yorker magazine. As most New Yorker readers will attest, one is often finishing one edition even as the next is stuffed into the mailbox out front each week.

I was interested to read the magazine's profile of ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin, who as had a part of some of the election '04 kerfuffle. Halperin is publisher of The Note, ABC's influential on-line political tip-sheet.

More importantly (to me), he is also the brother of David Halperin, who was lead singer of the 1970's rock group The Ramblin' Beach Guys (RBG's) and is no mean commentator himself. I had the pleasure of playing guitar with the RBG's during the band's heyday, when we were highly influential among a small cadre of our classmates at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda Maryland.

It got me thinking ("where are we now?") and googling...

David, as linked above, is involved with the Center for American Progress. He was also a part of the Dean campaign and worked for a time at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

Our drummer was John Heilprin. I've been thinking about John lately; partly because of the confusion between Halperin and Heilprin that we always dealt with and partly because, as I spoke with a colleague recently about helping kids choose colleges, I reminisced about John and my week-long college-visit road trip through New England our senior year of high school. John's a reporter now. The most recent work I've found suggests he's working for the Associated Press.

Danny Miller played lead guitar. I think Danny became a film editor. I haven't been able to track him as well as I'd like.

John Krivit played bass, then switched to singing and playing a little guitar. I knew that John had owned a recording studio in Massachusetts for a while. My latest search finds him on the faculty of The New England Institute of Art. Or maybe on the faculty of Bay State College. Maybe both?

Our bassist was Steve Stavros. Of Steve, I have found nothing so far. There was also Gene Mage (I think that was the name) who played occasional saxaphone. A quick Google turned up this guy. He feels like the Gene I remember; he was a go-getter. But that was a long time ago and Gene was only partly a part of the band.

So that's what I've found out, so far. Now, if any of these fellows use Google Alerts to capture mentions of their names (and the Google spiders crawl through this blog) , maybe I'll hear something and will update this memory.