There are no happy stories in this place, at least not for me.

    Sure, there are weddings. Weddings are happy. Brides are pretty, grooms dashing. I don’t cover weddings. Weddings don’t make the front page and they don’t sell newspapers, unless they’re marrying two super-size flavors of the month, or unless it involves local royalty.

    Me, I get the aftermath, the wives beaten, orders of protection violated. Wife stabs husband in self defense? That will sell newspapers.

    Many of the criminal defendants and victims I write about from the East Hampton Town Justice Court are black or brown, Latino or Hispanic. Most of the people arresting, prosecuting, defending, and judging them are white. Maybe that means something, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. I’m just a reporter.

    There are two judges in this town. They alternate week to week, Lisa Rana and Catherine Cahill. One is a Republican; one is a Democrat. That stuff shouldn’tmean anything in a small town, but it always does, except in here, on Thursdays, when the calendar reads criminal.

    Cahill has a wry sense of humor. After presiding over five arraignments resulting from a Montauk brawl, she looked at the court officer and said, “Any more?”

    Rana is sterner, but both can be nurturing, when called for.

    You can see it in both women when a young repeat defendant comes before them.

    Cahill recently arraigned a 17-year-old charged with trespassing.

    “My mother’s in prison, and my father’s deported,” he told her.

    She spoke with him at length, exploring his home life.

    “You have very little ties to this community. You have no one willing to stand up for you. You don’t even know the name of your boss,” she said.

    She released him without bail, warning him to be back in court that Thursday.

    He was.

    Rana recently had a kid who had plea-bargained out of an aggravated D.W.I. He would however, have to wear a collar, which detects even minute levels of alcohol consumption. One drink and he’d be back in jail.

    She spent five minutes talking to him, trying to reach him, warning him about the temptations he was about to face as he returned to his world.

    “Your friends will tell you it’s okay. It’s all right. One drink’s not going to hurt.” She paused. “They’re not the ones going back to jail. If you violate this, you’ll be back in jail quicker than a New York minute.”

    He seemed to get it, but who knows?

    Both women have watched troubled kids grow into troubled men and women. The same faces keep going through the criminal justice revolving door — petty, minor stuff, until one day they graduate, they commit a crime serious enough that they’re transported to county jail and indicted by the D.A.

    No more trips to town court. Now, it’s the big time, county criminal court.

    We’ve already had a couple of graduates this year.

    Of course, before any of that happens, there has to be an arrest.

    A reporter’s relationship with the cops can be tricky. My job is to ask questions. Detective Lt. Chris Anderson, East Hampton Town Police’s liaison to the press, has a different job — he has to catch suspects. That conflict leads to some clipped, cryptic conversations.

    “So, Lieutenant, do you think he acted alone?”

    “The investigation is ongoing.”

    My translation: Maybe yes, maybe no. You figure it out.

    Which is what I try to do, in my own way.

    My competition is tough, Virginia Garrison of The Press and Taylor Vescey of Patch. Sometimes I beat them to a story, sometimes they beat me.

    They’re both pros, and they both know people, and the people they know, know people, and that leads to leads.

    I don’t know anybody, so all I can do is knock on doors and ask questions, and hope to get lucky.

    “O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees.” Shakespeare. Not much has changed.

    I’ve met very few lawyers over the years who didn’t think that they were smarter than I. Some of them are. Many of them aren’t.

    Lawyers and reporters are after two different things. Lawyers want facts. A good lawyer can walk in with a valise filled with facts, lay them out on the table, and convince you that up is down and day is night.

    A reporter wants the truth. If you can get to the core truth in a story, the facts, the pieces of the puzzle, will fall into place.

    I recently was in court, waiting for an arraignment. Seated next to me was a New York attorney, Michael Paul. He was in court that morning defending a client accused of a theft.

    I was speculating about the seeming rise in crime.

    “Desperation,” he said. “People are desperate.”

    When you’re desperate, you do dumb things. Bad for a small town, but good if you’re a criminal defense lawyer, or a reporter on the beat.

    T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star who covers police and courts as well as East Hampton Town planning and zoning matters.

   Havens Beach in Sag Harbor was closed by order of the Suffolk County Health Department yesterday and the day before that after heavy rains raised the possibility of bacterial contamination. But you wouldn’t have known this had you stopped by for a swim.

    Once word comes from the county that the beach is to be closed — as happens from time to time — the village has the lifeguard hang up a generic “no swimming” sign, and they leave it at that.

    The general source of the problem is known: an 880-foot-long ditch that wends its way up toward Hempstead Street and its road drainage. But just where the bacteria associated with human waste come from is far from obvious. The ditch eventually crosses the beach, presenting an inviting rill to children who like to splash in its water.

    When I was still the father of just one child, in ignorance, my wife and I allowed our 2-year-old daughter to plop down and play in the ditch. In fact, I only learned of the risk when a man who lives near Havens Beach happened to notice what we were doing and walked over to clue us in.

    Since then I have watched with growing frustration as plans to do something about it — or at least issue honest and explicit warnings — fail to be made by successive crops of local officials.

    For more than a decade now, successive Sag Harbor Village Boards and East Hampton Town officials have fumbled several variations of a remediation project. A few years ago, fences were extended along the ditch, and signs put up noting possible bacterial danger. These are routinely ignored. So far, that’s about it.

    Two years of study by engineers hired by the Village of Sag Harbor have produced a plan to install a system that will capture contaminants before they can cross the bathing beach and reach Northwest Harbor. The project will include the installation of sponges laced with an antimicrobial compound that should kill most of the pathogens.

    I hope the project goes forward, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

   While everyone in America is celebrating the Fourth of July on Wednesday, I will take a moment to celebrate my dog, Brodie, an incredible golden doodle who looks like a platinum blond, purebred golden retriever. Sounds silly, I know, but read on nonetheless and you too might celebrate him. He is my hero.

    I promised in my Christmas column that I would never again write about my very painful knee problem. But it’s not fixed, so I’m breaking my promise. Yep, that’s me, Janis the promise-breaker. And besides, everyone I know in Montauk is probably wondering why the hell is she walking so funny with that grimace on her face?

    I’m one of those people who write what they know. And I know my knee is screwed! I believe I damaged it on all those long walks I used to take daily in Montauk, through the woods, to the cliffs at Camp Hero, and to the Montauk Lighthouse, which is exactly one mile from my home. But I’ll tell you: It hurts like hell, folks, and even after two knee surgeries and visits to countless doctors I still walk with a gait. It’s noticeable, not just by pedestrians, but by Brodie, who has helped me in many ways that all the doctors I’ve seen have not. He helps me walk.

    The first time it happened I didn’t really know what he was doing, nuzzling my butt and leaning on me as I walked down the hallway of my house. I thought he was just horny. But then I realized, oh my God, he’s trying to help me! (And I’m welling up with tears here at the memory.)

    Usually a big, fluffy goofball, always laughing and smiling at us, Brodie saw from his dog bed that I was having trouble, clutching the wall as I walked, and he jumped up to support me. He leans very gently on my left side and I hold on to him while he walks me step by step down the hallway with a very serious look on his beautiful face. I note his beauty because everyone who meets him thinks he’s a she. He’s a pretty boy. I wonder how he even knew that it was my left leg that’s been giving me so much trouble. He has shown a side of him that I didn’t even know he had.

    I always wanted a golden retriever, as I’ve heard that they are amazing dogs. But I resisted because of their shedding problem and an allergic child. When I was offered this adorable little golden doodle puppy, I was told they don’t shed. Wrong! He sheds so badly I could make a blanket out of his fur. That is, if I were handy, and I’m not, or if I were inclined to sleep under a dog blanket, which I’m not, because though he’s my hero he still smells like a dog.

    At the end of my hallway is the bathroom to the right and bedroom to the left. Wherever I’m heading he guides me there and then waits either outside the bathroom door or in the hallway outside the bedroom to take me back to the main part of the house. The first time my husband saw him do it he couldn’t believe it. He now calls him my therapy dog.

    And so I think Brodie deserves an award for heroism. I imagine the pretty boy walking to the stage, guiding me, head held high and proud, to accept his award, but that’s only in my fantasy.

    In reality Brodie wouldn’t make it to the stage for an award. He’d be greeting and jumping on everyone along the way. He’s a jumper and that’s one thing we haven’t been able to contain. He can’t help it. This dog is so full of love it oozes out of him and he treats everyone from complete strangers to the gas station attendant as his long-lost best friend. If he sees a human far off, he’ll stand on his hind legs and prance toward him like a gazelle to show the love. But dogs were meant to be a man or a woman’s best friend, so we have to allow him that.

    And while you’re watching fireworks and raising a glass, please make a toast to dogs everywhere. They are amazing creatures, even if they sometimes don’t look it.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   When one of my tennis partners the other morning asked what I did, I told him I wrote sports for The Star, and had worked at the paper for such a long time, going on 45 years now, that I was probably fit to be embalmed.

    “But first,” I said, “I’m to be enshrined!”

    I have thought seriously lately of changing the greeting on my voice message machine from “I’m either at a game, going to a game, or coming from a game” to “I’m either being enshrined, going to be enshrined, or coming back from having been enshrined,” but Mary and my eldest daughter, Emily, have turned thumbs down on that.

    “I couldn’t believe that no one could think of anything but nice things to say about you,” Emily said, after she’d read the piece Cailin Riley wrote about my East Hampton High School Hall of Fame induction in The East Hampton Press which I’d sent her.

    “Well, you have to suspend your disbelief at times like this,” I said. “I may cheat at backgammon, making me a candidate for the Hall of Shame, but you have to admit I do write well. One has to take the chaff with the wheat — assuming there is any wheat! As to the piece, I’ve always depended on the kindness of sportswriters.”

    “I like what you said about being in ‘the joy department,’ ” Emily said. “I am too. It’s a joy to teach first graders. They’re little experts when they come to you. Each one’s alit passionately on subjects in preschool that they love — trains, dinosaurs, bugs, whatever. I was reading them “Charlotte’s Web” the other day and was saying that Charlotte had gone off to lay her eggs when one of the kids began sobbing. We all looked at him, and then he said, “When spiders lay their eggs, that means they’re going to die.”    

    “A future entomologist,” I said.

    Teaching first graders and then having the summer off puts Emily in the joy-squared department, I guess, while plain old joy will have to suffice for me.

    Getting back to Cailin’s article, Claude Beudert said he had hoped she’d put in the nice thing he’d said about Mary, who, he assured Cailin, had quickened my pulse and got me breathing again. (These weren’t his words — I’ve been writing lately about Jean Carlos Barrientos’s brave save of a drowning man in the ocean off Napeague, but it’s dawned on me that these medical terms describe well what Mary did . . . cardioimaginative resuscitation.)

    I would have continued on living, yes, and working ably, and being cordial, but I would not have experienced the joy that I have in these past 27 years were it not for Mary. It’s because of her that I can say blithely that I’m in the joy department, and can promise solemnly never no more to cheat at backgammon.

   Nights for parents of young and getting-to-be-not-so-young children can be complicated, and by the standards of those without progeny at home, the things we celebrate must seem a little weird. Take, for example, the case of one editorial staff member here who was positively giddy on Tuesday morning because both her toddlers slept all the way through to 6:30 a.m.

    Such are the small victories of parenthood. In my case, I was pleased one night this week that the sequence of prebed tears, various and sundry risings, and some raccoons scuffling outside ended just before 2 a.m., and I was able to get back to sleep by reading half an article in The New Yorker about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Dawn came soon enough, with the songs of birds awaking me.

    School-day mornings are hectic more often than not, with hunts for missing sneakers, complaints about what is for breakfast, and then a sprint out to the end of the driveway to meet the bus.

    On Tuesday morning, however, I had to drive two of our three kids to school in Bridgehampton, and anxiety about what I anticipated would be slow-moving traffic had me more on edge than usual. At Wainscott, I bailed off Montauk Highway and went by way of Sagaponack, looping up to Narrow Lane and slipping into Bridgehampton. It is doubtful that I saved any time by this roundabout route, but at least we were moving and the views were grand.

    With Evvy, our second grader, off to her classroom, I took Ellis to a play yard to ride the trikes before his prenursery session began. There, I struck up a conversation with a woman who, it turned out, had just made the drive from Montauk, staying on the highway the whole way. We had arrived more or less on time with our  charges and were pleased with the accomplishment, as minor as it may seem to those who do not know.

   Like most of us, I get a lot of spam — from politicians I do approve of, from organizations I don’t approve of, and from merchandisers of everything from country-style window treatments to sketchy-sounding laser-hair treatments. They really were annoying this week, however, when I got back from three days out of town.

    I had taken off thinking it would be nice to have a holiday from the computer. Unlike lots of others, I’ve been satisfied to have a cellphone that does nothing more than make and receive calls. No apps, no e-mails, no thank you. When I got back, though, my Microsoft Mail was full of unwanted missives too numerous to count.

    For months, I’d wondered why the “junk” function on my Mac wasn’t performing its alleged task, that is, putting mail directly into the junk folder when the sources I repeatedly clicked on as spam appeared. With little confidence in being able to adjust the junk “preferences,” and without consulting a guru, I had soldiered on. Until this week, there weren’t that many irritating e-mails each day. Now, however, the time had come to do something about it.

    So began what were hours of opening unwanted e-mails and searching for the tiny word at the bottom saying “unsubscribe.” Even the word “unsubscribe” itself is annoying. How can you unsubscribe to something you never subscribed to? In the once-upon-a-time days of telemarketing, all you had to do to get rid of a solicitation was to say, “No, thank you,” if you were polite, or hang up the phone without saying anything if you were rude. And telemarketers rarely left messages when you were out of town.

    We all know that telemarketing has been all but replaced by e-marketing. I am sure you can get an undergraduate degree these days in the various iterations of the art. But in my attempts to seek solutions to my spam problem I made the mistake of Googlng the word “e-marketing,” and came up with information that I fear one would need a doctorate to understand. Perhaps I am only proving how low down on the Bell curve I am when I admit what I gleaned from the following bit of information: “Facebook [yes, I understand] today started rolling out the new Open Graph [huh?] apps [maybe yes, maybe no] for its Timeline [what?] profile.”

    It is said that you don’t need to know how an engine works in order to drive a car. And you don’t need to understand mathematical theory to add and subtract. But any analogy with the use of a computer fails. I will never understand how a computer works — programming, codes, algorithms, nanotechnology — but I wish someone would at least explain to me how to turn on the ignition and apply the brakes.

   The other day Apple iTunes, after years of meekly opening when clicked upon, inexplicably balked, demanding that I put in my password and username before it would let me give it 99 cents to hear Petula Clark singing “Downtown.”

    Aaargh. Am I the only fool alive who can hardly ever come up with the right combination of those two maddening computer evils?

    Like most people who spend hours e-mailing, online shopping, Facebooking, word-game playing, and other time-wasting, I have too many online accounts. I use the same two passwords for most of them (more on that in a moment), but the usernames are mostly different. Which one went with which of the passwords to get me to 1964 swinging England?

    Apple gave me just three chances to sign on, and I struck out. It then consigned me to a special hell for people it thinks are identity thieves, where you must first click on the day and year you were born and then, if you get that right, answer a bunch of “security” questions. (“Who was your best childhood friend?” “What was your first job?”) I never even got that far, because a red exclamation point popped up telling me I wasn’t born when I thought I was.

    Tried again, wrong again. Not wanting to spend half an hour on hold to argue with a stranger about my birthday, I gave them my e-mail address instead and they sent a link that would let me choose a new password.

    Now I would no longer have one of the good old passwords that I know by heart. Instead I was directed to create a typographical Frankenstein with “minimum eight characters, must include at least one number and one capital letter, cannot have three of the same letters in a row, no asterisks or other marks like %#&~#, nothing you’ve used in the last 12 months.” Congratulations to me, I’ve created an alphanumeric monster that will be impossible to recall 30 seconds from now.

    Yes, I do know why they ask us to contrive these convoluted strings of symbols. It’s so hackers will give up after a while and try an easier mark. I know — but I don’t bother, and I’ll bet you don’t either, unless maybe you’re over 55. Older people, Cambridge University scientists recently discovered, pick passwords that are at least twice as secure as those chosen by under-25s.

    But like me, most people want something they can remember easily — their first name, or their dog’s, or 123456 — not something they have to look up every time. The most popular password in the world, and this has held true year after year and in every language since passwords were invented,  is — ta-da! — “password.” When I first read that someplace I thought to myself that I should change the password on my cellphone account, which is “wireless,” but I never did.

    Even systems administrators who are supposed to keep the rest of us safe from the bad guys mess up sometimes. Like millions of others, I had to get a new credit card two years ago because someone, probably a Russian teenager, stole T.J. Maxx’s passwords and broke into its database.

    The other rule about passwords is to have different ones for different Web sites, because if you use “qwerty” (another hot one) for Optimum and eBay and Yahoo and YouTube, you’re probably using it for online banking too, and if you’re attacked by a password-sniffing worm, there goes the 401K.

    Nobody observes this rule much either. But it’s the usernames that really throw you. When I first ventured onto the Web I used my first name spelled backward; then I started adding whatever year it was (“eneri96”), then I’d pick usernames I thought related to the site (“shinesforall” for The New York Times, “buyer” for eBay, only hundreds of others thought of that one first and I wound up with something like “buyer557,” since changed.) 

    The dilemma will not go away. But who can remember all these words, much less which two must walk down the aisle together? Offices are full of despairing computer jockeys who’ve jotted their passwords down on sticky notes and stuck them on their monitors.

    I’ve begun keeping a printed list, four pages long now, hidden in a desk drawer where only a thief would think to look. The people at GeekHampton in Sag Harbor say it should be “encrypted.” Oh Lord.

    Irene Silverman is an editor at The Star.

   When Whole Foods and the Red Horse Market both opened in time for Memorial Day, my theory that East Hampton has one too many of everything seemed borne out. I harrumphed when I noticed that Whole Foods, clearly not a farm stand, is calling itself one (I suppose because it does not intend to carry as many groceries as it does elsewhere). Still, I was impressed when word went out of a well-targeted marketing come-on: orchids for sale for $10 apiece.

    I wasn’t really surprised that the Italian-specialty outpost of Citarella, which was in the Red Horse space for a few years, didn’t last, but its demise may have been simply a case of bad timing: Had Joe Guerrera waited until this year to launch it as an addition to the Main Street Citarella branch, it might have made it. The demographic gurus for Whole Foods and the Red Horse are calculating that the economic tide may have turned. We certainly all hope they are right.

    Judging by the crowds over Memorial Day weekend, there might be more people here “in season” than ever. Casting your eyes around the gourmet-foods shops, you’d never know there are families in town having trouble affording groceries. The latest summer crowds are those who, recession or not, have money to burn. (Or could it be we are witnessing a local bubble of a different kind — a merchandizing rather than a housing bubble?)

    When the first Citarella opened on the South Fork, I avoided it and made it a rule never to buy fish there. Call it chauvinism: I just didn’t like the store’s expansive counters of  apparently every fish that could possibly be transported here. East End waters — and fishermen and shops — provide an extraordinary variety already. What we can find at the small seafood shops here is, I think, incomparable; shouldn’t what is really local be enough? But even after the Water Mill Citarella closed, the one in Bridgehampton opened, and the two emporiums of anything-you-can-get-in-the-city seem to be thriving, regardless of my gimlet-eyed objections.

    It’s a wonderful thing that true farm stands and farmers markets have proliferated recently, too. (To the point that my husband has now taken to comparison-shopping, checking the prices of different homemade jams and jellies at stands around town.)

    We are so lucky that a fair number of agricultural fields — some of which were preserved because the towns and the county purchased development rights — have survived, and not sprouted McMansions.

    Now it is strawberry season. But apparently the popularity of supermarket strawberries, in combination with property values, has convinced some East End growers to give up. At Vickie’s Veggies in Amagansett this week, Elaine Jones was surprised to hear that strawberries were still being grown and sold in Wainscott. She gets hers, as do others, from the North Fork. The strawberry fields in East Hampton and Amagansett, Ms. Jones said, have disappeared.

    Perhaps farmers are instead planting corn, with which supermarket corn truly cannot compare. Or can it? This winter, someone brought home a neatly plastic-wrapped pack of four ears from lord knows where, their husks stripped away to show that the kernels were uniformly perfect. (Genetically engineered?) To my dismay — yes, dismay — they didn’t taste half bad.

    I spent a lot of childhood summers where the evening drill was to go out and pick the corn immediately before putting it in the pot. Those are wonderful memories.

    The population of the East End of Long Island was once dominated by farmers and fishermen. Many of us, people and organizations, with government help in some years, have done what we could to promote the preservation of the land and the waters. We know that the inshore fishery is dying. Could it also be that our taste buds are quietly reminding us that the traditional way of life is history?   

   Monday night was the occasion of the annual East Hampton Star All-Star Awards in which we give recognition — and an dinner out with family or friends — to local high school juniors whose academic and extracurricular performance has been noted by their respective schools’ administrators. This year, as I drove to the dinner at East Hampton Point restaurant, I was thinking about what the world that these young men and women were inheriting would be like.

    As I do before such events in the privacy of my pickup truck, I talk out loud to myself, working out what I might say. But most of the time when the microphone goes on my better ideas go right out of my head, and I find myself wishing I had made crib notes. This time, however, one idea stuck: that these students, most of whom will be college-bound by this time next year and entering professional adulthood in five years, will be facing a time of unprecedented challenge.

    This, I told them, might sound scary, but in my view it was something to be envied. Out of great obstacles come great solutions, I said, thinking of climate change, global population growth, and economic inequality. If there was one generation I truly envied, I told them, it was theirs.

    The way the All-Star Awards night works is that a representative or two of each school’s administration or faculty gets up while dinner is being served to say a few words about their nominees. The range of accomplishment and background we learned about was, as it usually is, remarkable.

    Sometimes the selections surprise us. I was moved when Jack Pryor, the principal of the Bridgehampton School, spoke of two students, Vanessa Cruz and Made Aditya Nugraha,  who came to the district — and the United States — knowing little English and, through hard and unrelenting work, did well in their course work and won the admiration of their peers and faculty. Vanessa is from Mexico and Made from Bali.

    When her turn came, Maria Mondini, an assistant principal at East Hampton High School, said that when she spoke about her students’ sky-high grades, volunteering, and sports accomplishments, she couldn’t help wonder where she had been in high school. This is a sentiment I share each year at the awards. “This is,” I told the group in all modesty, “a club of which I would not have been a member.”

   What is going on when 314 lookalike members of a gigantic crowd, and 235 of their spouses or partners, gather under a huge tent and do things like wave big white handkerchiefs around while singing? It’s an Ivy League reunion, of course — at a men’s college.

    I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I accompanied my husband to the 50th reunion of his class at Yale. The class of ’62 was among several having reunions during a three-day weekend earlier this month, and Yale certainly knows how to stage them. But I kept asking myself who these men were and why Yale means so much to them.

    Chris had accompanied me to a reunion at Douglass College 16 years ago, but I could hardly say it was a similar event. I had been lured to attend by being asked to be on a panel about working women. There is really only one friend from my days at Douglass whom I have kept up with, and those I would have hoped to reconnect with didn’t show up. The big moment came when I reminded Reiko Fukiyama that she used to try to play my position as well as hers in field hockey, a sport I never got a handle on but was obligated to take part in for some reason having to do with Douglass’s being a state school. Chris and 313 others had more meaningful bonds.

    That’s what was so astonishing. In the first place, a fairly large portion of the class returned for this 50th reunion. In the second, any doubt that these men — all around 70 years old — were cut from the same oxford broadcloth was graphically dispelled when they all (well, 99 percent of them) appeared in tan pants and blue blazers. My guess was that, although they had to differ politically and economically, they were more alike culturally than I could have imagined.

    Fifty years ago, Yale was a school for white men. Of the 1,000 or so who matriculated in the class of ’62 about 850 are still alive), only two were black. Asians were nowhere to be seen. Students got a traditional liberal arts education; hardly anyone majored in the sciences, and many, perhaps most, went on to graduate school. Some retained allegiances to the underground societies they had belonged to as undergraduates, and lawyers and doctors and academics were well represented. A not-so-small cadre had remained Chris’s friends all these years.

    Never mind that the weekend offered dozens of lectures and panels, as well as opportunities to tour Yale’s museums and early-20th-century Gothic buildings (which I think are hideous). For me, the weekend’s best part was making the acquaintance of a number of accomplished and down-to-earth class of ’62 spouses, and by the illusion that everyone who went to Yale in my husband’s day sings.

I joined a group who rehearsed and sang at a memorial service. My husband was among a big batch of former glee club members who entertained at dinner one night. The class of ’62’s Whiffenpoofs were part of another evening’s entertainment, highlighted by his classmates David Finkle and Bill Weeden, who became a legitimate cabaret act after college. And then there was the singing of “Bright College Years,” which I gather is Yale’s traditional alma mater, with the waving of those white handkerchiefs at the last words, “Where’er upon life’s sea we sail: For God, for Country, and for Yale!”