On May 3rd, 2012 I was lucky to be an audience member for Somers’ WISE student, Erika Panzarino’s one act version of Sophocles’ Antigone. I had previously witnessed her model presentation where she told of her dream to rewrite Antigone as her WISE project ever since she read it while in her ninth grade English class. In fact she even chose her ninth grade English teacher, Mr. Anthony Di Fabbio to be her mentor.

After spending several weeks of writing, editing, rewriting and doing even more editing right up to the day before the scheduled performance Erika, Anthony, and co-coordinators John Murphy and Ann Ferraro were all tears of joy during and after both Erika’s presentation and the performance of her version of Antigone.

A postscript: Erika had applied to Adelphi University’s honors program. She was accepted as a direct result of her interview, which was all about…. Antigone.