School Story:
[From 50th Reunion Yearbook...]
Darrell Cooper, MH ’57 writes:
Peter and I were thrown together in our senior year. Both of us wanted to live in Hayden, but neither had a roommate. I never really knew Peter until we needed each other.
I am not sure many of you may remember Peter because he was a low key guy. He never excelled in athletics, nor, if I recall, scholastically either. He kind of went with the flow, just getting by until graduation. He was a nice guy and a good roommate. Peter's father was president of the Andover Theological Seminary and would come once a year to give a sermon. It made Peter uncomfortable to say the least especially when he had to dine at Howard Rubendall's table on the Sunday that his father preached.
I had lost touch with Peter after we graduated, but one Sunday as I perused the “wedding of the week” in the New York Times, I saw Peter’s name staring me in the face. After reading the article which follows, it seems as though Peter had changed significantly since graduation.
I am sorry that he can’t be with us but his memory will be.
New York Times, August 4, 2002:
Weddings; Vows; Wednesday Sorokin and Peter Gezork, By Lois Smith Brady
Many things from the 1960's have been preserved or recreated in Northampton, Mass., a college town in the Berkshire Mountains filled with students in dreadlocks and hemp sandals, with lava lamps and conversations about social justice.
Peter Gezork, 63, is one of the town's best-known residents, having survived the actual era. Friends remember Mr. Gezork reading his poetry aloud in cafes, living on brown rice and traveling the world with a backpack and a lover. ''Peter stood out,'' recalled Alec Dubro, an old friend. ''He was cool, sphinxlike.''
Mr. Dubro eventually left Northampton because, he said, ''everybody either overdosed or went into retail.'' Mr. Gezork became a buyer at Faces, a dorm-room furnishings store in town with arty posters and campy Christmas lights.
In 1977, when he was 38, he met Wednesday Sorokin, then a 23-year-old student there at Smith College with wild black hair. One friend described Ms. Sorokin, who changed her name to Wednesday in high school, as ''bright, sexy and full of opinions.'' Mr. Gezork asked her to dance at a party, though neither can recall how they ended up at it. ''You'd just hear about parties through the grapevine and go,'' Ms. Sorokin remembered. ''That was doable then.''
That same night, Mr. Gezork invited her to his two-room cabin in the woods. Ms. Sorokin stayed for three years, long enough to help him install plumbing. ''We tiled the bathroom to Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner,'' she said.
They had only two arguments during those years, but they had them over and over again. She wanted him to be more emotionally supportive; he wanted her to be monogamous. ''I wasn't ready to be limited,'' she said. ''It was a wild time.''
So they split up in 1981, staying only ''vaguely in contact'' for the next 20 years. She moved to Brooklyn, then California, where she married and divorced. By 1997 she had officially given up hope of falling in love again and eventually ended up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, studying art at James Madison University.
Mr. Gezork had married, too; fathered a son; divorced; and been promoted to chief financial officer at Faces. But his life had become like a pond in autumn -- getting quieter and quieter.
Then, in June 1998, Ms. Sorokin pulled into Northampton in her bright blue Toyota truck (it matches her nail polish) to visit friends. On a whim, she said, she stopped into Faces to say hello to Mr. Gezork. They went out for coffee and talked for hours and then made plans to go to a reggae dance concert a few nights later. ''I'm 48, and I've never stopped going out dancing,'' she said.
By the time she left town a few days later, they were back together. Before long, she was visiting Mr. Gezork regularly, spending time with him the way she used to: floating and holding hands in his backyard pond, listening to Tom Waits.
''Everything is the same but it's different,'' she said. ''Peter and I both changed. Having a son made him more supportive, and having a broken heart made me more interested in being monogamous.''
On July 27 they were married at the Garden House in Look Park in Northampton, at a potluck-supper wedding that evoked the 60's, especially in its cost: $13 a head for the dinnerware rental and cleanup. The couple provided salmon and chicken, while some of the 200 guests brought ceramic bowls of pad thai or vegetarian chili.
Ms. Sorokin sewed her tunic-style top and skirt out of her first wedding outfit, saying it was important to ''use and transform the same silk.'' Over it she wore a rainbow-color kimono, which she had hand-painted days before, and purple flowers bloomed from her grayish hair.
''As long as marriage exists out there, one is either saying yes to it or no to it,'' Ms. Sorokin reflected. ''In my relationship with Peter, I really wanted there to be a yes at every level.''
