CORK, Ireland—What you can learn about an American woman, even a Chestertown woman, from the vantage of a foreign city, is quite surprising.
Elisabeth Anselmi Reiss, soon to be the “First Lady” of Washington College, could play a big role both on campus and in Chestertown. That is clear, even here across the wide Atlantic, judging from what the worldwide web shows about her time at the College of William and Mary.
She’s an activist. And she acts.
She met her husband, WC’s president-to-be, Mitchell Reiss, on this side of the pond, back when he was a student at Oxford University and she was performing in a theater in London’s West End.
After he became a professor and administrator at William & Mary, she continued her career, but in community theater. Colonial Williamsburg’s Official Website lists her as having performed at the Kimball Theatre, in Williamsburg, Va.
She also has starred in a one-woman show, Jolly Hockey Sticks, at the Lyceum Theatre in Old Town Alexandria.
That play, according to Afternoon Tea, a program of Maryland Public Television, featured funny monologues and shifting characters, in which Reiss played a teacher trying to cope with too many overactive children, to a Cockney Girl discussing her loser boyfriend, to an awkward woman trying to cope with a 30th reunion.
The Williamsburg-Yorktown Daily reports that she volunteered with the Rita Welsh Adult Literacy Program at W&M. In her efforts to gain awareness for breast cancer research, Mrs. Reiss may have broken a Guinness World Record for . . . stringing beads.
According to an article in the W-Y Daily, it took her months to do it, but eventually she strung 40,000 pink beads onto pink nylon wool. The beads represent the 40,000 American women and men who died of breast cancer last year. She stretched the completed length of beaded rope out – to 1,046 feet.
The article, “Beading for Some World Record Attention,” said Mrs. Reiss has been “involved in various efforts, including an annual bunko tournament, to raise money for Susan G. Komen For the Cure and local nonprofit, Beyond Boobs.”
Mrs. Reiss said she hopes to keep working with the Komen Foundation and Victoria’s Secret to produce “halter-style beaded bra” and raise funds for breast cancer research in the process. The W-Y Daily reports that one of her goals is to have the pink bead become a symbol of breast cancer awareness for younger generations.
It quotes her as saying, “Girls of your generation associate the ribbon with their mothers and grandmothers…I’d love to see Victoria’s Secret come out with a bra with a bead and a ribbon in the middle.”
{Amber Lester of the Williamsburg-Yorktown Daily (wydaily.com) contributed to reporting.}
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