Cameos

Rebecca Jackson-Picht is a violinist with the SF Opera Orchestra and the SF Ballet Orchestra, and plays in festivals and ensembles around the world. Rebecca trained at The Julliard School and studied privately with David Arben, a Holocaust survivor and former associate concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Rebecca and Abigail’s dad co-founded the chamber music festival and youth outreach program Music in May, which just celebrated its 16th season.

Dianne Jonas grew up in Melbourne, Australia and now resides in the Boston area, where she completed her PhD in linguistics at Harvard. Her research interests are comparative Scandinavian syntax, with a focus on Icelandic and Faroese, and syntactic variation and change. Dianne was at Yale University with Abigail, the two bonding as faculty in a somewhat dysfunctional department, and at a blue-collar bar called the Eel Pot in Branford, CT, where Abigail frequently played Beach Boys songs on the jukebox to indulge her nostalgia for California. Dianne recently retired from a faculty post in the Department of English and American Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. 

Shayna Kessel is a Senior Associate Dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and previously held Associate Dean positions at Brown and USC, where she completed a PhD in English, and where she and Abigail bonded over difficult colleagues and irrational and incoherent university policies. She had hoped to be here with her daughter Ayla, who will turn 4 in August. Ayla loves inventing stories and organizing solo performances for her mom and dad. (She is also into math.)

Michael Marlowe grew up in Santa Cruz, and currently lives in Costa Rica. He is a self-employed IT professional. Mike is a “digital nomad,” a lifestyle that suits him well because he loves the flexibility it provides him and enjoys living in different countries. Mike is passionate about basketball and mountain biking. He likes going to the gym, which works out well because he is definitely a foodie.

Shane Picht grew up on a farm in Plymouth, Iowa (population 382). He is an electric crew foreman for PG&E in San Jose, his crew having been in high demand last winter, when power outages became a way of life for most of us due to relentless heavy storms and atmospheric rivers. Abigail had the honor of attending Shane and Rebecca’s beautiful wedding over Zoom, early in the pandemic.

David Soares has overseen the construction of his and Suz’s gorgeous new home on San Juan Island, off the Washington coast. He is a retired Santa Clara County Deputy DA, where he prosecuted numerous cases, including the case against a San Jose man described as ‘’terrorizing a city’’ during a 13-week crime spree in which he impersonated a police officer. The case resulted in a sentence of five consecutive life terms. He prosecuted a longtime Saratoga dentist who performed numerous unnecessary and invasive dental treatments on his patients, including one who had 18 root canals in a period of five years.

Suz Howells is Director of Community Engagement at the Baskin School of Engineering, where she and Abigail work together closely. Before joining UCSC, Suz was the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Education Foundation and ran her own strategic marketing services firm. She designed her own major in Comparative Agrarian Studies at UCSC, where she worked in the Stevenson College office during the time that Abigail’s dad was Provost of Stevenson. Suz is a founding board member of Food, What?!, a youth empowerment and food justice program.