Compiled by LAURA WITSENHAUSEN Associate Editor When they met in 1982 one dreamed of wearing an astronaut’s suit, the other longed to own a cash register. They were kindergartners then at Carlthorp School in Santa Monica. In grammar school there, Palisadian friends PAMELA NEUFELD and DARYLL KIDD achieved at least one shared ambition: marching in red, white and blue leotards and performing a ribbon-twirling routine with their Carlthorp Brownie Troop in the Pacific Palisades Fourth of July parade in 1985. Winning the First Place trophy that afternoon was frosting on the cake. The girls took different paths after sixth grade. Pamela attended Harvard-Westlake School, where she became a reporter and editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Chronicle. Daryll went to St. Matthew’s School in the Palisades and Marymount High School, where she was active in student government and graduated as president of her class in 1995. In 1999, both earned a B.A. degree, Neufeld in Rhode Island at Brown University with a double major in comparative literature and history, and Kidd at UC Berkeley, majoring in political science. For the next two years, more miles separated them as Neufeld worked on a Fulbright Scholarship in Damascus, Syria, translating Arabic poetry into English. Kidd served as Community Affairs Manager in the office of former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan. In 2001, 11 years after parting as sixth graders, the Palisadians became classmates once more at UC Berkeley in the Boalt Hall School of Law. The old friends graduated together for a second time last May. In the fall of 2004 their paths diverge again, though both have settled in Southern California’Neufeld will be a staff attorney for Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County, and Kidd will be an associate with the law firm of Bingham McCutchen in Los Angeles. o o o Members of Boy Scout Troop 400, under the direction of Palisadian WILFORD EITEMAN-PANG, an Eagle Scout candidate, created a garden box at the Palisades Jewish Early Childhood Center in Temescal Gateway Park. The 6 ft. x 5 ft. garden box is made of wood with a plexiglass cover that the preschool children can lift in order to tend to the herbs and plants which will be planted inside. The Palisades Jewish Early Childhood Center, which opened in September 2000, encourages children to learn by ‘hands on’ garden nurturing. Scoutmaster Ken Wheeland supervised the project, which took over eight hours to complete. ‘The Scouts attitude, application and love for the Boy Scouts of America make any parent proud,’ said PJECC director Barbara Leibovic.

For architects Rick Poulos and Tammy McKerrow, home and work life are woven together in more ways than one. The couple has been collaborating at the tightly-knit Jerde Partnership architectural firm for over a decade now, applying the vision of Jon Jerde to projects abroad, within the United States, and right here in the Palisades, where they’ve lived for 10 years. ‘We’re constantly evaluating how a place performs or where to live based on the work we do,’ says Poulos, a Los Angeles native who earned his bachelor of architecture degree from USC in 1975. Professionally licensed in 25 states, Poulos joined Jerde in 1992, and now serves as executive vice president. McKerrow, who joined Jerde in 1986 as a junior designer, says the Palisades is the perfect community for them because ‘there are different enclaves with unique characteristics but it’s all one place, with one of the biggest boulevards [in L.A.] running through it.’ Poulos and McKerrow purchased their home in the El Medio area in 1993. In choosing a place to live, they evaluated various areas in Los Angeles based on the Jerde philosophy. ‘The work of Jerde is community-oriented,’ explains McKerrow, the firm’s only female vice president and senior project designer. ‘It’s about creating experiential places where people would enjoy spending time.’ Originally from Ohio, McKerrow earned her bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1985 and worked at Skidmore, Owings, Merrill in San Francisco prior to joining Jerde. McKerrow and Poulos met in 1981, when she was interning at Los Angeles-based Gin Wong Associates, where Poulos was designing corporate headquarters and commercial high-rise complexes. ‘There’s been a constant braiding of our relationship through our profession,’ says Poulos, who suggested that McKerrow interview at Jerde and move to Los Angeles. Influenced by ‘spacial inspiration’ more than an individual architect, McKerrow was drawn to Jerde’s philosophy about public, urban spaces as well as his ‘co-creative,’ or creative and collaborative design approach. ‘Jon brings together the creative group,’ says Poulos, who works closely with the firm founder, pursuing business and design opportunities. ‘It’s quite a family here at Jerde, with all the idiosyncrasies. You have to buy into the philosophy to be here.’ Jon Jerde founded the Jerde Partnership in 1977 based on his vision of creating unique places ‘where interesting things happen and people gather to experience a sense of community.’ The firm first introduced the revolutionary idea of ‘placemaking’ when it revitalized an abandoned six-block site in downtown San Diego, now known as Horton Plaza. This project redefined urban retail projects and the traditional notion of ‘shopping center’ by proving that it could draw people for more than just shopping. Horton Plaza attracted 25 million visitors its first year, revitalizing downtown San Diego. Often criticized for designing ‘commercial’ places, Jerde prides itself in creating ‘great places that have lasting social and economic value”from retail and entertainment to rejuvenating cities. By merging public life, shops, parks, restaurants, entertainment, housing and nature into one place, Jerde-designed projects emphasize the beauty of ‘organized chaos,’ especially in cities like Los Angeles. From the firm’s one design office on the Venice boardwalk have emerged the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Bellagio resort and Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas, Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles, Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, Canal City Hakata in Japan, Beursplein in Rotterdam and The Gateway in Salt Lake City. ‘People are starving for these public, urban spaces,’ says McKerrow, who has designed many urban revitalization projects, including the recently opened West Hollywood Gateway at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea Avenue on the eastern edge of West Hollywood. ‘The idea [for West Hollywood Gateway] was to give public space back to the people and to create something modest and city-like.’ Designed as a new community center, the project includes courtyards, wide, pedestrian-oriented sidewalks and landscaping, as well as an urban solution for tenants Target and Best Buy. Vividly colored building materials, awnings and tent canopies help give an urban composition and pedestrian scale to the large retailers’ boxy structures. A larger project that Poulos and McKerrow worked on together was Universal CityWalk, designed in the early 1990s as a 1,500-ft.-long promenade containing shops, restaurants, night clubs, bars, theaters, offices and classrooms, to link Universal Studios Hollywood’s existing attractions. The award-winning project’s eclectic and layered architecture reflects small-scale, anonymous Los Angeles buildings, or ‘a little L.A. street,’ according to McKerrow. The Jerde team used terrazzo (mosaic flooring or paving) and natural light for the open-air city, whose building roofs are angled to create a dome shape. However, rather than establish strict design criteria for CityWalk’s tenants, Jerde encouraged open and original storefront design, signage and lighting. ‘Our projects take on their own life with the user,’ says Poulos, who worked on the business side of the CityWalk project. Internationally, Poulos and McKerrow worked together on a master plan for Punta Cancun in Mexico, and presented it to the Mexican government three years ago. The plan, which included cleaning the lagoon, creating a pedestrian boardwalk in place of a busy, car traffic street, and ‘giving it some character,’ was adopted and the city is currently being developed. ‘A local [Mexican] architect would never have had the audacity to suggest they change their whole road system,’ says Poulos, whose ‘built-in understanding of the [architecture] industry’ comes from the childhood years he spent on construction sites with his father, who was a contractor. Mexico was also familiar to them since they had worked there in the early 1990s to create a master plan for the proposed Santa Fe Town Center on the western edge of Mexico City, which was never developed due to the devaluing of the peso in 1994. The plan involved turning a rock quarry into ‘a unique, handcrafted town,’ according to Poulos and McKerrow, who worked on the project with Jon Jerde and sculptor Robert Graham, among others. ‘Jerde people often feel the history of a place and will of the people [in that place],’ says Poulos, who is currently working with McKerrow on a plan for Warsaw’s city center. ‘When I went there, I could feel that unusual things had happened there,’ he says. McKerrow adds that, for all of their projects, it’s important ‘we’re doing something the people are going to like, what they would want.’ She studied comparative cultures at the American Institute of Foreign Study in 1981 and advanced art at the Pratt Institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1988. Domestically, Poulos and McKerrow have dozens of ideas about what works and doesn’t work in Los Angeles. According to Poulos, the Downtown area ‘was much better at the [previous] turn of the century than at this last one,’ though he thinks that if Grand Avenue is redeveloped right, ‘it has opportunity.’ The problem they both see is that the high-rises going up there in the effort to create a more residential downtown are not the future. ‘Middle to lower scale is what works in L.A.,’ says McKerrow, who sites Santa Monica as a good example of a residential and commercial downtown. ‘A more European-style city should be the focus.’ Perhaps some of their biggest ideas could help create a better Palisades, where they previously worked on designs for the outdoor yard and playground at Palisades Presbyterian Nursery School. Poulos serves on the board of the Palisades Pony Baseball Association and coaches son Anthony’s baseball team. Anthony, 8, attends Marquez Elementary, and Nicholas, 11, will be entering sixth grade at Paul Revere. McKerrow says that their ideas for the community revolve around preserving open space and blending landscape and architecture, making the Palisades ‘Southern California’s version of Carmel.’ Fortunately, ‘each neighborhood has a natural, unique environment, so we should just strengthen landscape identity and weave it into the village and neighborhoods.’ The problem areas they see in the Palisades include slide areas along PCH, which could be made safer and more natural-looking, and the dangerous and crowded bike path. One of their ideas for improvement involves raising the area of land at the northeast corner of PCH and Temescal and making it a recreational park with a view, just below the Bluffs area.

Jessica Renee Schraub and Maxwell David Norman were married on August 8 by Rabbi Noam Marans in Jersey City. The bride, daughter of Marion and Gerald Schraub of Glen Rock, New Jersey, recently completed the master’s of public policy program at the School of Public Policy and Social Research at UCLA. She received her B. A. from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in psychology. The bridegroom, son of Susan Greenberg Norman and Dr. Michael Norman of Pacific Palisades, is a third-year law student at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the Moot Court Honors Board. Currently, he is a summer associate at the Beverly Hills law firm of Ervin, Cohen and Jessup. He graduated from Harvard-Westlake, where he was prefect of the graduating class. He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in history. The couple met in their freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. Living in the same dorm and sharing classes, they found that their paths often crossed, but that was the extent of their interaction. In their sophomore year, they again shared a common dorm address but this time a rooftop lounge was part of the package. Though the lounge was a quiet study location, Max managed to elicit Jessica’s e-mail address after starting up a hushed conversation over some chewy candies from the downstairs commissary. Jessica had previously enjoyed seeing Max perform on stage with the Mask and Wig (the nation’s oldest all-male musical comedy troupe at Penn), but she was more impressed when she met him in person and not dressed as a woman.

Heather (Gibson) Fiene and Shane Lerner became husband and wife on April 17 at the Bel-Air Bay Club. Though a little breezy, their outdoor wedding overlooking the ocean with their own personal vows was a perfect way to say ‘I do.’ The couple have known each other for years, as they both attended Paul Revere and Palisades High School. ”The bride received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Loyola Marymount University and the bridegroom earned a degree in economics at UCLA. It was during college that their friendship blossomed into romance. ”Heather’s parents, Scott and Suzy Gibson and Gregg Fiene, couldn’t be happier about the union. Shane’s parents, Richard Lerner, Sharon Lerner and Michael Barry, also shared in the joyous occasion. ”The couple honeymooned on Paradise Island in the Bahamas and are currently residing in Brentwood.

By KAREN WILSON Palisadian-Post Intern Emeritus She was facing her first press line and she’d made a faux pas: forgetting to remove the backstage pass from around her neck. But instead of acting embarrassed, Marie Digby tossed the pass off to the side and continued smiling for the cameras. ‘I’m such a dork!’ she proclaimed, and something rare happened’a group of journalists bonded with the girl on the other side of the rail. Meet Digby, a 21-year-old Marymount graduate who last week debuted at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom as the winner of Pantene’s Pro-Voice Contest, which sends one lucky winner (out of 1,200 applicants) to the aptly named Pro-Voice Concert. There, before a crowd of 2,000 New Yorkers and this reporter, Digby shared the stage with bestselling recording artists Ashanti, Fefe Dobson, Paulina Rubio and Skye Sweetnam. The annual event was founded as a way to get women’s voices heard, and this year’s unlikely feminist came in the lithe form of a softspoken tennis player-cum-musician from Mandeville Canyon. A piano player since age 4, as well as a former competitive tennis player, Digby grew up in Pacific Palisades and attended Village School. She began writing songs as a teenager, at a time when she felt lonely, left out and as if she didn’t fit in. ‘I turned to music as a way to express the things I was going through,’ Marie said. By the time she left home for UC Berkeley in 2001, Digby could play piano and guitar, and had stockpiled an arsenal of songs. Socially active and happy with college life, Digby was taking some time off to pursue her music career when she was contacted by a friend in Tennessee, who had seen an ad for Pantene Pro-Voice on television and wanted his pal to enter. ‘I totally didn’t take it seriously,’ Digby recalls. ‘I sent my application in on the day before the deadline.’ ”The shampoo company asked competitors to include music and lyrics for one of their self-penned tunes; Marie selected ‘Miss Invisible’, which described her experiences eating under the bleachers during junior high school lunch to hide from her teenage tormentors. One week later, a Pantene rep phoned and informed Digby that she was one of three girls selected as the Pro-Voice finalists. ‘I almost fell out of bed,’ she said. The ensuing weeks were a whirlwind, as the girls filmed individual music video-style television commercials asking viewers to make one of them the lucky winner. The contest’s grand prize included two tickets to MTV’s Video Music Awards, $5,000 cash, and a chance to perform in the Pro-Voice concert in New York City. Marie’s spot, which aired constantly on MTV and featured the aspiring songwriter playing the piano and singing the ballad, ‘Miss Invisible,’ sparked 30,000 music lovers to go online and vote for her, handing her the Pantene crown. And that’s how, on August 5, Digby found herself somewhere in the bowels of the Hammerstein Ballroom in midtown Manhattan, posing for the cameras on a dingy, ‘this is Hollywood?’ red carpet. Sheepishly, the green Digby told photographers she didn’t know what ‘look straight out’ meant (stare right in front of you, smiling wide) and confessed to this reporter that she was ‘so, so nervous,’ more so about facing the press than she was about her five-song set, which would come later in the evening. She may have thought herself awkward, but Marie’s media outing earned her nothing but praise from the men and women behind the lenses. ‘She’s well-poised, and she’s beautiful. She’s gonna go a long way,’ Retina photographer Carmen Valdes said, as Digby skipped off for a quick break. Later, Digby re-hit the press line, more relaxed this time, thanks to new company. The platinum artists sharing the bill with her that night-Ashanti, Fefe Dobson, Paulina Rubio (accompanied by her beloved dog) and Skye Sweetnam-all descended on the red carpet to preen and give interviews. And they couldn’t have been more fond of the newcomer in their midst. ‘She plays the piano, which is very, very awesome,’ Dobson said. ‘And she’s obviously really passionate to be able to enter a contest, and have that will, so I can’t wait to see [her perform]. She got here. This is a big step and not many people can do that, and I think that it’s an awesome, awesome start.’ ”Also stopping by to sing Marie’s praises was Ashanti, one of the biggest R&B stars in America today. ‘I think it’s a great thing that she’s original,’ she said. ‘That’s very important [in terms of] breaking a new artist into the industry.’ When asked what she thought of Digby’s music and its message of ‘rise above those who get you down,’ Ashanti added that she thought ‘it’s such a positive thing, and it’s important, because you have to have it inside you to be in this industry.’ And did the diva think Marie has it? ‘Yeah,’ she said, winking. Before her set, Digby camped out in the wings with Dobson, who gave the contest winner a pep talk. ‘She told me to get out there and have fun,’ Marie said. ‘I was really nervous, just trying to breathe. But the minute I stepped on stage, the fright was just gone.’ Encouraging shouts from the audience of ‘Okay, Miss Invisible!’ and ‘You go, girl!’ also helped guide Digby as she played and sang her way though five original, deeply personal songs. ”Afterwards, she was rushed backstage to tape an interview with MTV anchor LaLa, as part of a Pro-Voice segment set to air this Sunday at noon on the cable channel. She was then approached by a group of autograph hunters. ‘I think I had more fun signing than they did getting my signature,’ Digby said later. Back in the dressing room, she received congratulations from friends and her parents (Matthew, an attorney and Emiko, a homemaker) and teenage sisters Naomi and Erina, who all took their newly minted singing star out to a nearby diner for some celebratory sweets. ‘It was just an amazing evening,’ Digby said. ”Now back home, she’s pursuing music full-time, both in the recording studio (working with a well-known producer as part of her Pantene prize package) and traveling with a mall tour for up-and-coming musicians, sponsored by YM magazine. ‘My number one goal,’ she says, ‘is to make an album that’s truly a piece of art.’ (Karen Wilson, a PaliHi graduate, began writing for the Palisadian-Post as a seventh grader at Paul Revere. She is spending her summer in New York City as an intern at Entertainment Weekly magazine. She will be a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara this fall.)