It’s hard to know what to say when what’s needed is a good biographer. Which would result in a multi-volume set that would make a very good read, for sure … I toyed with setting highlights of Alan’s life to the Modern Major General patter song from Pirates, but that would take a braver person of different talents – an actor. We techies spoke mostly in terse whispers, and more or less avoided audiences.

But I do have these words, meant less to chronicle than to conjure.

Alan was my oldest friend. Outside nuclear family, there’s no one I’ve known longer; other than my wife, no one with whom I’ve spent more time.

Many, perhaps most here, knew Alan as a theatre guy -- I also knew him in the lighting worlds of dance and architecture. An early memory is of lighting a dancer in a second-floor Newbury Street storefront, one of the events of the very first First Night. And he got me into architectural lighting design, perhaps chief amongst many things for which I am deeply grateful to him. Once we stood atop Comm. Ave. rooftops lighting statues, such as Samuel Eliot Morison’s, which won him one of his many lighting design awards. We aimed lights at jousting knights on display in the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, animated robots and tinkered inside a building-sized computer of his design at the Computer Museum, and using the Agassiz as a base of operations, we recreated Robert Wilson pieces for a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts -- some of you here may remember the pneumatic Fritz (and the rubber rats … ). Alan’s contributions to art, lighting and preservation are everywhere.

He and I had spent years together here and in the Pudding when the Agassiz T.D. position was posted circa 1986. He came to me with the idea that we take it on together; a half-time position split between us -- two people who knew the place better than anyone. How hard could it be…?

Well … half-time wasn’t even half right -- not the way we chose to do things, anyway. To say we lived here only slightly stretches the truth. We moved in with hearts and souls and made it our own - which is simply … quintessential Alan.

The Agassiz gave Alan an opportunity to build something much bigger than the job -- a venue for student community and creativity, a place to teach skills and foster passion. And in time, it also gave him the springboard to an even wider venue – all of Harvard. And I don’t just mean its theatres and dining hall performance spaces, where his role is immune to hyperbole. From the wide-ranging ambitions of the Freshman Arts Program, a child of his enthusiasms, to student design theses such as one that painted the Carpenter Center in colored light, Alan got wholeheartedly behind anyone who needed him. And to no one’s surprise, that was pretty much all of Harvard. The phrase “tech god” is applied frequently enough to deserving, over-achieving undergraduates, but when you understand that title in Alan’s context, well … no others need apply. Mad skills, sure, but even better, a magnificent person. Artist, technician, inventor, expert. Leader, teacher, friend.

In the days after receiving the news, after denial began to ebb, I found myself awake at odd hours wishing I could talk to him, him above all, about all that was coming up, and in that silent, not-quite-dialogue, lines and phrases came to me -- phrases which I’d get up to write down, whatever the hour. Over a couple days they coalesced into a sort of letter; sort of to him. I think it works for this time and these ears as well.