URBAN UNDIES

UC Davis senior Erika McGriff-Parrish with the line of clothing she has designed, Urban Undies. (Photo: Debbie Aldridge/UC Davis Mediaworks)

McGriff-Parrish’s love for fashion was evident early on. Growing up in San Francisco, she designed prom dresses for herself and for friends and family and staged high school fashion shows. After graduating, she started her own fashion styling business, Signature Styles, and worked as a free-lance stylist for magazines and department store fashion shows. In 2000, McGriff-Parrish decided she wanted to get a degree in fashion design and began taking classes at Skyline Community College. Three semesters later, she graduated with recognition as an Outstanding Scholar, a member of Phi Theta Kappa (the junior college counterpart to Phi Beta Kappa) and member of the national dean’s list due to her 4.0 GPA, all while working full time and being a single parent to her son, Doug Jr., now 10. In fall of 2001, McGriff-Parrish transferred to UC Davis and will graduate this spring with a bachelor’s degree in textile and costume design.

Her current schedule includes a four-hour commute to Davis several days a week to attend classes, in addition to working full time at a San Francsico advertising agency, raising her son and running Urban Undies. As for the future, McGriff-Parrish intends to get her master’s degree and launch a new line called UU, an elegant counterpart to the street style of Urban Undies, which will feature blouses made of luxurious fabrics like silk and velvet, accompanied by matching underwear.

When McGriff-Parrish is asked how she manages to do it all, she talks about trying to be a model of strength in her son’s life. “Everything I do is about setting an example for my son. And that example is to believe in your dreams and work toward making them happen.”

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF SCIENCE

Ted Dunning (from left), Greg Yen and Kirsten Sanford—hosts of the weekly KDVS radio show “This Week in Science.” (Photo: Debbie Aldridge/UC Davis Mediaworks)

Whoever said science has to be somber? Physiology graduate student Kirsten Sanford and two other science enthusiasts find plenty to joke about on KDVS radio show “This Week in Science.” Young, hip, informative and irreverent, the weekly hourlong talk show is sort of a cross between New Scientist magazine and cult television program “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” The science is factual, culled from the latest reports from the Internet, scientific journals and magazines such as New Scientist. The commentary by Sanford and co-hosts Ted Dunning and Greg Yen sounds a bit like “The Daily Show”—“without the same mock seriousness,” said Yen, who graduated from UC Davis last year with a self-designed major in science and technology studies.

“Humor is a good way of reaching people,” said Sanford. “I hope so,” added Yen. “If not, I’ve got to get myself a new gig.”

Sanford and Dunning, a Davis native who studied geology and oceanography at UC Berkeley, created the show about three years ago. Sanford said she and Dunning, then neighbors in the same apartment complex, were doing what they usually do when they get together—“hang out, drink pints of beer and talk about science”—when inspiration struck. “We should do a radio show,” she told him.

They approached KDVS’ program manager, who initially gave them a half-hour time slot every other week. Within a couple months, the show went to an hour every week.

Yen joined the show about a year later, when Sanford left to work in a lab in San Francisco. After she returned, they found the show worked better when all three of them were on the air.

Topics on one recent show ranged from astronauts’ spacewalks outside the international space station; pheromones; rhodopsin, a light-sensing molecule in the retina of the eye; and a caller’s itchy skin.

“If anyone out there has malaria, they’re working on a cure,” Sanford said, segueing into a discussion about the sequencing of the genome of plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria.

Sanford told listeners that scientists discovered that one-tenth of the parasite’s genes are plant genes, suggesting possible treatments may lie in herbicides. “So if you get malaria, you’d get a shot of Roundup?” piped in Yen.

Even off the air, the three tend to talk in quick repartee. Asked what they hope to accomplish through the show, Yen says: “Total world domination.” “I’m down with that,” said Dunning. “That and we thought talking about science would be a really good idea, to make science accessible to people. It’s what we do in our free time anyway.”

The program airs 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. Tuesdays on KDVS 90.3 FM, which broadcasts to the greater Sacramento metropolitan area, reaching as far west as Vallejo and east to Truckee.

The three hope to syndicate their show someday, but thanks to streaming on the Internet, the show can already be heard around the world. “My sister once actually heard us in Thailand,” Dunning said.

NAMESAKES: WRIGHT HALL

Celeste Wright 1906–1999

The Wright Place. When Celeste Wright came to campus in 1928 as the first female tenure-track professor, UC Davis was a 350-student agricultural school that had been described to her by one of the only eight co-eds as “the dullest place she’d ever seen.” “Why,” she told Wright, “the co-eds have to run up and down the fire escape for excitement.” But Wright loved the campus right from the start and would continue to do so during her 51-year career. When a boyfriend left for a faculty position at UCLA, she stayed, later explaining, “I adored every aspect of Davis.” When, after she married, her husband accepted a job at Purdue University, she stayed, later explaining, “For me the campus was really the ideal world.” Her ideal world would include dismal office spaces (at one point she was housed in a metal building that had been a Navy psychiatric ward), second-class status for the College of Letters and Science and low enrollment for upper-division classes (to keep one class going, she gave students a ride to school) and trying periods like the ’60s (when some students were not only “anti-academic” but on drugs). But her love of the campus never wavered. At the end of her career, an interviewer asked what would have happened if a prophet had told her about her future when she was a girl: “He might have shown you a few stucco buildings, two wooden dormitories, and a lot of sheds and barns. What would you have thought if he’d told you that those buildings would be your university?” She answered: “It would be more like Cinderella looking at the pumpkin and hearing that it would become a coach. . . . In 1928 I came to those farm buildings and couldn’t ask for anything better.”