After two years at Woodward after I moved to Rockville from Cherry Hill, N.J., I went to the University of Maryland and immediately immersed myself in the daily student newspaper, The Diamondback, as a copy editor, fixing grammar, writing headlines, etc. There I also met my future husband, Mark Holt.

After graduating in 1980, I got a job at Baltimore Magazine, then within a couple of years, as a copy editor in The Washington Post's Style section, writing headlines with puns in them. I worked in the Style section for 26 years before taking a buyout in 2008. But during that time, I also became the "Empress" of The Style Invitational, The Post's weekly humor/ wordplay contest, and continued to work for The Post for 14 more years before they killed the contest in 2022.

But I almost immediately joined forces with my Invitational predecessor, Gene Weingarten, and now continue the Invitational every week on his Substack blog, The Gene Pool.

My husband Mark and I have lived in the woods of Fort Washington, Md., close to the Potomac River a few miles south of the Beltway, since 1987. In my semi-retirement I walk 10 miles a day, including down to nearby Piscataway Creek where I share photos of sunrises and sunsets year round on Facebook.
I also continued my love (if not talent) for choral music and for decades have sung with a local community chorus.

Most of my fondest memories at Woodward were from singing in choruses, especially the Madrigal Singers, led by Miss ("Ms." wasn't invented yet) Dawson. In one Christmas concert, we sang a song in which various Madrigals would each sing one line a cappella, then the chorus would join in. One guy wasn't quite ready, and when his solo came up, he called out "Oh, shit!," which was not part of the original lyrics.

I also could never forget my 12th-grade English class with the fearsome Mrs. Wittman, who was chairwoman of the department. I knew I was out of my league in the Honors class, and anyway I wanted to sing in the choir, which met at the same hour. But I had good standardized-test scores if not good grades, and Mrs. Wittman just refused to let me out of the class, dripping with derision of her own staff: "What teacher do you want, then? Mr. XXX? Mr. YYY?" I did gut it out for the year, and I'm sure I'm the better for it, somehow.