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The fee of $2,500 seemed high for tiny Central Oregon Community College (fulltime enrollment: 950), but it is not often that the town of Bend, Ore., attracts so illustrious a speaker as Ralph Nader. The consumer advocate was duly paid for his appearance last fall, but now C.O.C.C. is crying foul. On the same day Nader also dropped in at a number of other schools in the state, accepting only token payments in some cases, or none at all. Confronted with what his agent had wrought, Nader lamented: "God! I'm being hoisted on my own petard!" The explanation was that the C.O.C.C. audience got a fullblown address while the others heard only the briefest of talks.
Nostalgia about dear old Siwash is all very well, but the basic purpose of alumni magazines is really to help academic fund raisers track down and put the arm on contributors. Editors of the current issue of the University of Chicago alumni publication must have had something else in mind when they noted that mail to Weatherlady Bernardine Dohrn (A.B. '63, I.D. '67) was being returned as undeliverable. Bernardine, now underground, has made the FBI's most-wanted list, the magazine observed proudly. "We're sure," it added, "that her gratitude to any classmate who can furnish her current mailing address would be unbounded." That sort of information might even pry a contribution out of J. Edgar Hoover (George Washington University, '16).
Poor old Humbert Humbert met a host of problems during his pursuit of Lolita, but they were nothing compared with those faced by the optimists intent on adapting Vladimir Nabokov's novel to the musical stage. Dropped as "too ripe" was Annette Ferra, 15 (TIME, March 1). Into the role went Denise Nickerson, 13, who opened as the nifty nymphet in Boston last week. "I can play a sexpot as well as anybody," she told an interviewer, but first-night critics had their reservations. Said one: "She smiles and speaks and sings like a sweet ten-year-old, and so when John Neville [the lead actor] makes love to her, or suggests it, he is made to seem no more than a ghastly child molester." Question: If a 15-year-old is too old, and a 13-year-old too young, will Boston be crowded with 14-year-olds this week?