A Table in Dedham
By Mirror Alumni: Rani Aljondi, Gabby Iarrobino, Sarah Mahoney, and Dan Withrow
December 30, 2020
2010
Left to right: Kristina (St. Cyr) Kimani, Sarah (Mosca) Mahoney, Mr. Nilsen, Gabby Iarrobino, Beth Kempton, Julianne (Warren) Crowley
There is a table in Dedham that plays host to a meeting once a year. Some might call it a booth. It’s even been a bar once. I think it was at a counter top once, too. Anyways, there is table. At this table friends gather to commemorate a glorious time they shared together. A time fraught with laughter and movie quotes, and above all a shared enjoyment of not just the work they did but of each other’s company.
This is the yearly gathering of the Dedham Mirror alumni staff.
At the 50's Diner these one-time school newspaper editors come to pay tribute to the rag that they spent many a late night laboring over, editing an article one minute and confirming the latest school gossip the next. While their journalism days are behind them, the time spent in Mr. Nilsen’s classroom (sometimes we call him Jeff) soldered a bond that remains solid to this day.
Why the 50's Diner? Maybe it’s the feeling that we’re sharing a connection with journalists of yesteryear, surrounded by 1950's memorabilia while we flag down the waitress for some more coffee to be poured into our faded mugs. Maybe it’s the 50's breakfast platter. Whatever the reason, the alumni staff have found solace at that hallowed Dedham eatery. Most years there are a handful of staffers that make the pilgrimage. Sometimes there are a few booths worth. One time there was just one who came to sit down with our fearless leader. As Mr. Nilsen has said, he will keep doing this as long as people continue to show up.
While the group has grown old and has spread out across the country (I’m looking at you, Beth), the topic of conversation hasn’t changed that much. What movies have you seen? or Do you remember when he said that to Juli in class? are annual queries that come up. Inevitably someone suggests that we should write something for the paper again. An insider’s perspective from the outside world so to speak. As the years pile on, our priorities have shifted and sitting down to pen a quick OP-ED always take a backseat.
Then COVID-19 happened.
In as many years as I can remember, this is the first time that the Dedham Mirror alumni staff will not occupy a booth at the 50s Diner in Dedham for the holidays. But does that stop them from commemorating the occasion?
No way.
So while we are doing our best to combat the pandemic, I take comfort in knowing that my fellow staffers are twiddling away at their keyboards, trying to encapsulate what one lunch out of 364 other lunches out of the year could possibly mean to you, our beloved Dedham Mirror readers. All you need to know is this:
I wouldn’t trade that damn lunch for anything in the world.
-Dan Withrow, Class of 2007
Sitting here almost two months before my 30th birthday, my attitude toward high school is: you couldn’t pay me to go back. However, that comes with one caveat. I would go back for a late night layout session for The Mirror.
I think that is the sentiment that has propelled our yearly tradition of reuniting for breakfast. The core Mirror staff from 2006-2009 was a small but mighty group. Most of us were (and still are) self-professed nerds and were not the most popular kids in school. In Nilsen’s classroom the politics of high school were swept away and we were able to be ourselves and express ourselves on the page. (And yes, I am almost thirty and still calling him Mr. Nilsen because calling him Jeff still sounds unnatural. So most of us have settled on Nilsen, a happy medium.)
As I get older I am finally able to realize how valuable the safe space that Nilsen created was. He was always there to lend an ear, Beatles song, or an intuitive piece of advice. Being on the Mirror staff was one of the only places at Dedham High I could openly be myself. When I ran for Vice President my freshman year, in my election speech I made a timely joke about promising to not go quail hunting with anyone, a not so tongue in cheek reference to the Vice President at the time shooting someone while quail hunting. (Remember when we thought that was as bad as it was going to get). The joke was met with silence and later jeers and negative comments from my peers. I distinctly remember someone screaming “QUAIL HUNTING” at me as they drove by me on my walk home. My senior year, I wrote an OP-ED on female politicians’ wardrobes being more judged than their ideas for the Mirror and it ended up winning a student journalism award. My nerdiness and love of politics was celebrated in the Mirror classroom as opposed to being mocked within the rest of the school.
This is just one of many stories I’m sure several of my Mirror alumni peers share that showcase the safety net of The Dedham Mirror and Nilsen’s journalism class. We may have been putting together a newspaper but more importantly, we were also growing up, beginning to find our voices and learning to not be ashamed of who we are.
Every year over Christmas break, we meet at 50’s Diner. The same spot we’d have breakfast before trekking into Boston for our beloved BU field trips. We rarely touch base in between these breakfasts as we are all in our late-20’s to early 30’s with careers and some with spouses and children, but when we all meet up it’s a lot like time has frozen in a bottle. Old quotes and memories come flooding back and suddenly we feel 17 again.
It’s always a treat to not only touch base with each other, but also our mentor Nilsen. He helped shape all of us into the adults that we have become, so it’s always nice to let him know what his hard years of being our teacher, confidante and de facto therapist have led to.
2020 would have been the 13th year of this tradition. COVID-19 has obviously changed a lot of how the world looks so while we’ll be skipping our 50’s platters this year, I look forward to breakfast number 14 in 2021.
Sincerely Yours,
One Member of The Breakfast Club
-Gabriella Iarrobino, Class of 2009
2015
Left to right: Dan Withrow, Julianne Crowley, Mr. Nilsen, Sarah Mahoney
2017
Left to right: Julianne Crowley, Kristina Kimani, Gabby Iarrobino, Mr. Nilsen, Dan Withrow, Rani Aljondi
The first time I sat at the 50s Breakfast club’s table in January 2010, the Great Recession had only just bottomed out. Dedham’s unemployment rate had just started to climb down from close to ten percent.
Legacy Place had just opened in the crater where my favorite movie theater used to be. I had the distinct impression that most of the customers lived out of town. 50s Diner increasingly looked like the border crossing to a vastly older and cozier world.
Too, the preceding year was an important one for me. I had just finished my first semester at Northeastern University. The world became a scarier and seemingly hopeless place, and I came to the conclusion my writing skills were not worth gambling on. With that in mind, I put my plans of building a writing career on what would become a very dusty shelf. I learned to my chagrin that you can share all of the interests in the world with the people in your dorm hall, it does not mean you will necessarily get along with them. It was definitely me and not them.
For breakfast that day, I ordered the 50s Special Platter-scrambled eggs with american cheese on top, eight slices of bacon, homefries, and pancakes with sugar and butter. I traded in-jokes with my fellow Mirror alumni. The fun thing about working with such a team of incredibly creative and funny people is that they will turn anything into a running gag. A plagiarized review of American Gangster, a DIY reenactment of an SNL rap song about Chronicles of Narnia. Every other line in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Every line in A Christmas Story. A former editor who quit the paper in a bitter rage accidentally tripped into immortality when he took a shot at our sitting Editor-in-Chief by calling her “Juli-too-good-for-the-e”. It had been a long year, too interesting by half, and I liked sharing a trashy meal with friends I could still call good, instead of old.
In 2011 I committed completely to a major in software development. 2013 had two landmarks: me having to take a year off for medical leave and terrorists bombing the Boston Marathon. In 2014, I finally sought the mental health care I needed and was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. That fall, I met the love of my life, I had met the love of my life, Erin.
The fourth time I sat with the team was in January 2015. I had just come back from meeting Erin’s parents for the first time. On that day in January 2015, I had the 50s Special Platter again. I remember taking half of it to go. Later in 2015: the best movie critic on our staff and certainly one of the funniest men I ever met would marry his fiancée.
Six months into 2015, Donald Trump would start a presidential campaign a great many experts would call a ‘long shot’. By the end of the year, ISIS had overrun half my parents’ home country of Syria. Much of it was overshadowed by the uncertainty for the lives and safety of most of my extended family.
My tenth meeting with the Breakfast Club was in January 2020. We focused on the things that were indisputably ours: Our jokes, our lives, our loves, gratuitous references to old movies. The critic I alluded to had two children and another editor had since married her husband. By then, I ordered my 50s Special with a new lifehack: blueberries in the pancakes. I spent much of the time excitedly talking about our upcoming wedding and failed to eat most of my food again.
The first American case of COVID-19 occurred on the 19th. By then, ISIS had since been stomped out of Syria, Syria had left the global headlines and Donald Trump was ending his first term in office. The first national lockdown would occur that spring. Erin and I would lose our jobs and wedding to the economic and political chaos that ensued. Exactly a month after when our wedding in Bar Harbor was scheduled, my wife and I eloped in Central Park, New York City on July 13th, one of the most beautiful days of my life. Three days later, twenty four hours after we returned home, my wife’s cat Ritter suffered congestive heart failure. He made it.
Next month would have been my eleventh meeting with the Mirror team, but the pandemic forced us to break the tradition for the first time in literal decades. Eleven months ago, back in January 2020, I remember leaving and thinking that perhaps a year was a long time to wait before seeing these awesome people again, that perhaps I would hit some of them up for movies, drinks, lunch, dinner, or most appropriately, brunch.
-Rani Aljondi, Class of 2009
As a teenager, 50s Diner was always a place of solace for me. It was a place to fill up on breakfast food and milkshakes; to laugh with friends; and a sub-par excuse to show up to school during second period with your entire hockey team and a full stomach. When I found out that Nilsen was starting the tradition of a Mirror Alumni 50’s reunion, I was jealous that I couldn’t attend, still being in high school. As I neared graduation, that jealousy turned to excitement. I was eager to join the alumni crew, I was eager to be one of the big kids, I was eager to grow up.
A little over a year out of high school, everything changed for me. I found out I was having a baby, and that excitement of growing up turned to a fear of being catapulted into adulthood without knowing if I was ready.
Things that used to fill me with elation started to flood me with emotion and doubt. When major changes occur in your life, the people in your life change, too. This was something I didn’t think much about in high school. Many close friends become acquaintances, and relationships that were once so solid, sadly begin to fizzle out.
For awhile, I was scared to socialize with pretty much anybody. I was intimidated by the thought that people could see the cracks in the hard-shelled exterior I worked so hard to build over my years at DHS. I felt that all of my accomplishments would be overshadowed by the choices I made as a young adult.
Over the last several years, it’s taken a lot of work to build back confidence that I lost in navigating the difficult world around me. I can credit myself for that, but, in reality, nothing has contributed more to my growth than the compassion and empathy I’ve received from others. Walking back into 50s for the first time after having my son, my heart was pounding with anxiety of whether or not I’d be accepted as me. I was fixated on everything that would be different. But, when I sat down at that table, all of that fear melted away. I was greeted by the same smiles from my friends; the same old inside jokes; and the same journalism teacher that helped me through a lot of hard times, always had my back, and never stopped believing in me.
Ear infections, wrestling practices, and many other parental activities have probably caused me to miss more annual breakfasts than I’ve attended over the past ten years, but I’m still accepted into this group with open arms every year. I teach math now, but I miss the art of writing SO MUCH. My memories in journalism are some of my most cherished. I am holding out hope that my now second-grader will one day be able to join us at the breakfast table as a proud DHS Mirror Alum.
My message to the DHS students? Cherish your time together and have fun. It will be gone before you know it. My message to the DHS teachers? Thank you. You affect all of us, even ten years later, more than you will ever know.
-Sarah Mahoney, Class of 2010
2019
Left to right: Beth Kempton, Mr. Nilsen, Rani Aljondi, Kristina Kimani, Juilanne Crowley, Gabby Iarrobino, Sarah Mahoney, Jackson Mahoney
2020
Mr. Nilsen
Meet the Writers!
Rani Aljondi, class of 2009, is a Senior Software Developer for Aetna.
Gabby Iarrobino, class of 2009, is a Senior Digital Strategist for BOCA Communications based in San Francisco.
Sarah Mahoney, class of 2010, teaches math at Southeastern Regional Vocational Technical High School in Easton.
Dan Withrow, class of 2007, is a freelance videographer/editor working in the Greater Boston area.