FAMOUS COUPLES

FAMOUS COUPLES
“Do you think teenage love can last a lifetime? Why or why not?”

share what you have written.
Are there ways in which teenage love is different from adult love?
What do teens have to worry about in love that adults do not have to worry about and vice versa?
How do teens typically respond when parents do not approve of a boyfriend of girlfriend?
Sharon Drager and Wyit Wright”
READ THE ARTICLE and discuss about the following questions:
a. Why might Sharon Drager's mother have feared that a relationship would get in the way of her daughter's career?

b. How might the women's movement of the 1960's have affected the lives and outlook of Sharon Drager and her parents?


c. Do you think that parents today would react in the same way to a situation like the young Sharon Drager's?

d. Do you think that this couple's reunion would have happened if it were not for the Internet? How has the Internet changed people's social networks?


e. Why do you think that 9/11 is mentioned in the article as a factor in the couple's relationship?

f. Why do you think that “their conversation changed” after 9/11?


g. What ethical issues are raised or implied in this article?

h. Before she died, Dr. Drager's mother offered her approval of Wyit Wright. How important is parental approval of romantic relationships?


i. Why doesn't Mr. Wright regret that he and Dr. Drager were apart for so long?


-Anthony and Cleopatra/Abelard and Heloise/-Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal/-Abigail and John Adams-John Lennon and Yoko Ono/-Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King/-Queen Victoria and Prince Albert/-Robert and Elizabeth Browning/-Marie and Pierre Curie/-Annie Oakley and Frank Butler-Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne/-John Alden and Pricilla Mullins-Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre/-King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson/John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy/-Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz-Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy
List of same-sex couples, include the likes of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.
Use the following questions to guide your research:
-Who were each of these people?
What is each one's background and basic life story?
-How, when and where did they meet?
-Were there any obstacles blocking their relationship?
-How long were they together?
-What ended the relationship?
-Did they ever marry? If not, why not?
-Are there any lasting testaments to their love (buildings, writings, etc.)?
-How did these people's roles in life (jobs, status, etc.) affect their relationship and vice versa?
-What does their relationship tell us about their time and place?
-What, if anything, can the story of their love teach us today?


Begin your research using all available resources (Internet, reference works, etc.). Keep a look out for any images or writings that you can include on your poster that will give the viewer a closer look at the relationship, such quotes from love letters, pictures of relevant buildings, poems dedicated to a lover, etc.).

4. HOMEWORK: Interview an adult couple that you know (parents or guardians, grandparents, other family members, family friends, etc.). Use your handout from class as an interview guide. From what you learn in your interview, write an article that tells the story of the couple that you interviewed, modeled on the “Vows” column about Sharon Drager and Wyit Wright.February 12, 2007
Vows: Sharon Drager and Wyit Wright By CAROL POGASH
WHEN 16-year-old Sharon Beth Drager plopped herself down on a bench next to Wyit David Wright, an intense 17-year-old, they began a conversation that with a three-decade interruption would last nearly a lifetime. It was the summer of 1962, and they were attending a National Science Foundation camp for gifted young scientists at Brown University. The exuberant, curly haired girl from the Upper West Side of Manhattan was drawn to Mr. Wright’s sullenness, which she mistook for a James Dean thing. As a New Yorker, she had never met anyone quite so exotic: someone quiet. Nor had Mr. Wright, who lived in Smithfield, R.I., ever met anyone he thought so “incredibly beautiful,” as he recalled. Like himself, “she lived in her mind.” They spent that summer together, and by the end of it had fallen hard in love. They parted with “much wailing and lamentations,” recalled Dr. Drager, 60, a vascular surgeon in San Pablo, Calif. Despite what seemed an unmanageable distance, he accompanied her to her senior prom at Hunter High School in Manhattan, a place where, she said, girls’ “ambitions were encouraged.” By the fall of 1963 she was a student at Pembroke College in Providence and was catching trains to Cambridge, Mass., where Mr. Wright was a freshman at Harvard. There the story might have progressed along a predictable continuum had Dr. Drager’s parents, Marvin and Lenore Drager, not noticed a slight dip in her grades. Her mother was determined that her three daughters would have careers. Dr. Drager, who decided at 7 to become a doctor, said of her parents, “I had a brilliant career ahead of me, and they were deeply invested.”Then came her first Christmas break at Pembroke and an ultimatum from her parents: stop seeing Mr. Wright, or you can’t return to college. The young woman was devastated. Mr. Wright was flabbergasted. He was accustomed to having mothers like him. “I’m a nice guy,” he said. “I know which fork to use.” They did not see each other for three years until Mr. Wright walked into a party in Providence, unaware that she was one of the hostesses. On seeing her, he was hopeful they could resume their relationship. Instead, she informed him she had graduated cum laude from Pembroke in three years and was heading for New York University School of Medicine. “I reacted in a mature way,” said Mr. Wright, 61, the owner of a wooden toy company, Mossy Creek Woodworks, in Wesley, Ark., and of a technology consulting firm, Logical Business Systems, in Fayetteville, Ark. “I got blindingly drunk and had a fling with one of her dear friends.” Over the years they occasionally thought of each other but did nothing. By the 1970s, Mr. Wright was working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge. He married, and he and his wife joined a utopian “back to the land” movement. They settled on a 40-acre farm in the Ozarks and reared a son. Mr. Wright tapped syrup from trees and slaughtered pigs. Dr. Drager meanwhile was in surgical training in New York, repairing stomachs and hernias and beginning what she now calls “a starter marriage.” In 1978, she and her husband moved to California, but by the early ’80s they were divorced. She soon remarried. Her new husband was an emergency room doctor, and they had two children, one of them born on the same day she performed an operation. By 1996 she was divorced again. She was also lonely and began looking online for old friends. She found Mr. Wright’s e-mail address. She remembered being both “apprehensive and excited” when she began typing, “I don’t know if you remember me.” His response came 15 minutes later. By then, he said, his home life was troubled. He was heartened “to hear from someone who you never thought you would hear from again.”They corresponded by e-mail off and on for five years. “Every time his name popped up,” Dr. Drager felt a bolt of excitement. After 9/11, their conversation changed. Mr. Wright, who had always thought he could fix anything, had by then concluded that his family life was irrevocably broken. He suggested to Dr. Drager that they meet in Las Vegas the next year and go on a group river-rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. He told his wife about the trip but not about his companion. When Dr. Drager and Mr. Wright met at the airport in Las Vegas they immediately recognized each other, though her hair was now short, straight and blond, and he had grown a beard. By then both could qualify for membership in A.A.R.P. They started by chatting about getting their luggage. But the conversation Mr. Wright was having with himself was about how much she seemed as she had always seemed. And by the time they reached the car rental desk, Dr. Drager knew, “I could have been happy with this man my whole life.” They told fellow rafters they were old friends. Each night they tugged their sleeping bags farther from the group until Dr. Drager joked they were practically in New Mexico. Afterward, Mr. Wright sent a picture of himself from the trip to Linda Minisce, one of his sisters. Looking at it, she recalled, she saw a twinkle in his eye and thought, “That boy is up to something, and it’s not river rafting.” When the trip ended, they knew they would be together.Mr. Wright and his wife separated in 2003, and they were divorced two years later. (She has since remarried.) Last Thanksgiving, Dr. Drager announced to her assembled family and friends, including her two children, that Mr. Wright had proposed. By the time the pumpkin chiffon pie was sliced, Dr. Drager had settled on a date, setting and invitations. Dr. Drager said she feels like Sleeping Beauty, informed that she would meet her true love at 16, but also that, “You won’t be able to marry him for 44 and a half years.” The wedding took place on Jan. 14 in Dr. Drager’s Berkeley home, which has expansive bay views. On the mantel in the living room, where they were married, sits an old black-and-white picture of two teenagers in love. The bride’s mother died a year ago, but not before having become reacquainted with Mr. Wright, whom she no longer considered an impediment. At the wedding, the bride’s father, 86, a debonair retired public relations man, declared, “It all worked out for the best!” Mr. Wright would agree. “I am the sum of my experiences, and she is, too,” he mused. If they had remained together in their youth, he noted, they might have separated over her determination to attend medical school and his desire to settle in the country. Those experiences, he said, have “given us happiness,” adding, “I can’t regret any of that.” Rabbi Jacqueline Mates-Muchin, who married the couple, spoke to them about love “kept in the recesses of your hearts.” As the ceremony was ending and the procession was leaving the room, the bride turned to her friends and family and gave two thumbs up and silently mouthed the word, “Yes!” Mr. Wright will spend half his time in Arkansas tending to his business and half in Berkeley. Dr. Drager said she wished he were with her all the time, adding, “But you can’t always get what you want.”