Alice Stone Rides Like the Wind

Alumnae from the '80s are coming back, demanding that we pay them lots of attention. They promote their books in lectures at the Institute of Politics and at intimate heart-to-hearts in the Adams House Upper Common Room. Even worse, they suggest that we buy their books, now on window display at Harvard Book Store. Katie Roiphe and Elizabeth Wurtzel have both left their dubious high-heeled footprints around campus this fall, but neither PYT has carried away much of a following with her. (Exception: Some young women feel validated by a Roiphe or a Wurtzel, insisting that these two Harvard grads give voice to their own previously unvoiced opinions and sentiments. Whatever.)

Who can we look to, then, for a more substantial, less annoying vision of our own futures? Where is there a woman (or man) who has left this institution and made an example of her/himself we actually dig? Can we find just one individual who has strayed deliberately from the horde of garbled-Gen X-rhetoric manifesto-creators who scream "I have a New Kind of Feminism" or "I am a New Kind of Prozac User"? Such an individual exists, and she is not self-congratulatory. Her name is Alice Stone.

Unlike Roiphe and Wurtzel, Stone has taken a long, healthy break from Harvard since she graduated from Adams House in 1985. She steered clear of both the sheltered world of academia and of the Manhattan rat-race, sucking up to few trends and pandering to no one. She had no real tunnel vision of her career; she only knew that when she graduated from Harvard she wanted to live in Latin America and/or be involved with filmmaking. Neither of those followed directly from her academic work at Harvard: she concentrated in social studies and wrote her thesis on working women's conceptions of femininity.

After graduation she found herself in Morelos, Mexico, and, as seems to be the pattern in Stone's life after Harvard, she was "in the right place at the right time". She happened upon the opportunity to work on a film set, learned to work their cameras, and used them to create her first film "De Barro" ("Of Clay") about a Mexican campesina potter.

After solidifying film connections in Mexico, she headed to New York to try her luck in the now-ballooning world of filmmaking. She worked a graveyard shift as a legal proof-reader on Wall Street, an occupation apparently popular with the starving artists of Manhattan. During this period that she got lucky when she came across a flyer advertising help wanted for Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia; she took a volunteer position on the editing squad. Demme obviously recognized her talent, because not long after he selected her as assistant editor for "Silence of the Lambs." Her experience impressed enough people at PBS to make her one of the 12 people out of 3,000 to be awarded a substantial grant to fund her first feature-length documentary film. "She Lives To Ride" (see review) opened one week ago at the Coolidge Corner theater. Stone half-seriously calls the PBS grant "one-stop shopping"--it provided her enough money, up-front, to make her first major film.

Stone and her husband Gary Stoloff (he runs a tight burrito business in the Garage) are both enthusiastic about the success of She Lives to Ride. The film has been picked up for national distribution, and Stone already has plans for two more documentaries, whose subjects she is not yet ready to discuss. Stone does not think her past has dictated her future: she says she had a positive experience at Harvard but admits that "I almost lost a job because I had Harvard on my resume." Refreshing simplicity and feminism with a brain: that is what we can expect from Alice Stone in the future.