Eighteen months go by and what happened on 9/11 still has the power to bring tears to my eyes. I only found out this afternoon that a very sweet woman with whom I worked closely in the early ’90s, Ruth Lapin, perished when the WTC collapsed. We worked together at a regional consulting firm called Automated Concepts and I was recruited to the firm by her husband, David Chazin.
I remember Ruth most enjoyed, other than being with her family, going to Broadway shows. She went to see Les Miserables at least once a month–even driving me a little bit nutty by playing the soundtrack tape every time it was her turn to drive to lunch–and was thrilled to volunteer as a sitter at the Tony Awards. Sitters are the people who get all dressed up and run in to take the place of celebrities while they go onstage, run to the bathroom or whatever; TV demands that no empty seats be seen no matter what.
Ruth had a great, biting sense of humor. We worked on Foxpro and Clipper projects for large corporations (Merck, Sandoz, ATT, Johnson & Johnson among others) and she was a really strong programmer. Dedicated to her work but not someone who put up with a lot of office politics. A good match for David, no doubt, they obviously had the chemistry a truly loving couple needs.
Ruth loved really spicy food. I mean really spicy! The last time I saw Ruth was a farewell dinner with her and David and me and my ex-wife at a Thai restaurant in Somerville (NJ) just before I moved out here to California. After taking our food orders, the waitress asked how spicy we’d like the dishes on a scale of one to four. One is where the cook waves the spice bottle over the dish, two is about as much as an American-trained palate can handle, three is standard for Thai natives, and four is where the chef laughs and laughs as he cooks. Ruth, without hesitating, took her’s at four and then totally enjoyed the meal.
RIP, Ruth.
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