FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, JOIN OLLI!
By Thom Clement, Executive Director
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED SOME EVIDENCE of our efforts to recruit new members for OLLI at Mason this month. In case you have missed something, I thought I would provide you with some details. Since May, the following efforts have come to fruition:

• New full-color OLLI brochures – "Great minds never stop learning"
• New OLLI business cards, with the benefits of OLLI printed on the back
• Articles in all of the Connection newspapers – "Osher Lifelong Learning: The New Retirement"
• Announcements of registration in the Connection and Fairfax Times newspapers
• A quarter-page ad in the September Beacon newspaper for people ages 50+
• Additional promotional copies of a redesigned Fall 2008 catalog with full-color cover
• Direct mailing to 3,500 local Mason alumni, ages 60+, of an OLLI post card – "It’s Your Retirement; Use it Wisely"
• Open Houses at all three OLLI locations: Sep 9 for Tallwood/Fairfax, Sep 10 for Loudoun, and Sep 11 for Reston

     Thank you to all OLLI members who have made these efforts come to pass. We’re looking forward to meeting lots of new people for the Fall 2008 term!  

THE FALL FOR THE BOOK FESTIVAL WILL BE STARTING SOON!

By Paulette Lichtman-Panzer, OLLI member, Fall for the Book Board member
MARK YOUR CALENDARS for the six-day Fall for the Book Festival running from Sep 21–26. What could be more enjoyable than seeing many of your favorite authors up close and personal and having an opportunity to ask them questions? The festival celebrates literature, learning, all types of books (both fiction and nonfiction), poetry, and plays.
     A very short list of the prime-time authors includes novelists Chinua Achebe, Sue Miller, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham. You can meet former Virginia Governor Linwood Holton, who wrote his memoir, Opportunity Time. For poetry lovers, there are a host of events throughout the program's six days. To see the complete list of daytime and evening events just visit the Festival's Web site. And the best part – all events are free.
     This year, two events will be held at OLLI--

• At the Loudoun campus on Tue, Sep 23, at 1:30 novelist and legal scholar Garrett Epps will discuss his best seller, The Shad Treatment.
• At Tallwood on Wed, Sep 24, at 2:00 you can hear George Norfleet who wrote A Pilot’s Journey: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman, Curtis Christopher Robinson.

     OLLI has arranged for buses to get you to several of the on-campus events (with return transportation) so you don’t have to worry about parking. Here is the bus schedule--

• Tue, Sep 23, Lincoln Historians Morning Session (including Daniel Mark Epstein), 10:00-12:30: bus from Tallwood at 9:15
  
• Tue, Sep 23, Lincoln Historians Afternoon Session (including Michael Beschloss), 1:30-5:00: bus from Tallwood at 12:45
• Fri, Sep 26, Harvey Frommer, sports historian and journalist, 2:00: bus from Tallwood at 1:15

     If you have any questions, you can contact me via email or telephone.  REGISTRATION AND COURSE CONFLICTS

By Bob Lawshe, Philosophy/Ethics/Religion Resource Group Co-Chair
and Kathryn Russell, Program Committee Chair
ANOTHER OLLI REGISTRATION HAS NOW COME AND GONE, and we have made our class selections. If you’re like us, you probably had to make some hard decisions, especially if, again like us, you wanted to take two courses that met at the same time like Kathryn’s Taming of the Shrew and Catherine Weir’s "Perceiving Art," being offered this fall term. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of these foregone classes could be offered again? That almost never seems to happen. Well we’re trying to do something about that. We need your help in identifying classes you would like to see offered again. We understand that not all classes can be offered again, but it’s worth trying to see if we can get some of them repeated.
     So we would like you to let us know of any courses you would have liked to take but for one reason or another were unable to do so, e.g., conflicts with other courses you were taking or teaching, wrong day of the week, not enough time to get from Lake Anne to Tallwood between classes, your cat was ill, etc. You get the idea.
     There is no need to restrict yourself to just this past registration. You can look over prior catalogs to refresh your memory by clicking here – OLLI's Document Storage – and scrolling down to OLLI Catalogs. That’s how I found Brenda Cheadle’s "Mental Calisthenics: Metaphorical Thinking", an excellent course last offered in the spring of 2006. You can contact us by email.
     We’ll let you and the resource group chairs know the results after you tell us what you’d like to see offered again. Thanks!
EXHIBIT IN SOCIAL ROOM ANNEX