The fundraiser? An online auction, the third such event hosted by the Fordham College Alumni Association (FCAA), with a novel twist this year: celebrity alumni. Several offered virtual face time to the highest bidder, helping to propel the event far beyond its usual total.

The auction “gets bigger and better every year,” with all proceeds going toward scholarships and grants for students, said Debra Caruso Marrone, FCRH ’81, the association’s president.

It’s one of several events sponsored by the FCAA each year, complementing the broader efforts of the Fordham University Alumni Association, the Office of Alumni Relations, and other groups that serve students and the alumni community.

Founded in 1905, the FCAA is the University’s oldest alumni organization, and primarily serves Fordham College at Rose Hill students and alumni.

Contacting Celebrity Alumni

The idea of featuring celebrity alumni in December’s auction was driven in part by the pandemic, which put the kibosh on, say, auctioning off event tickets. “We really had to pivot,” said Christa Treitmeier-Meditz, FCRH ’85, who spearheaded the effort to reach out to various prominent alumni.

In the end, they were able to auction off a virtual comedy writing lesson with Saturday Night Live writer Streeter Seidell, FCRH ’05 (someone bought that for his wife, an aspiring comedy writer, Treitmeier-Meditz said). They also got help from some prominent alumni thespians: Golden Globe winner Dylan McDermott, FCLC ’83, contributed a virtual meet, and Golden Globe winner and former Oscar nominee Patricia Clarkson, FCLC ’82, contributed a virtual master class and a post-pandemic in-person engagement—dinner out and tickets to the next Broadway show she appears in.

People also contributed various items, memorabilia, or experiences, such as a master cooking class or a trip around Manhattan by yacht. “It’s everything and anything,” Treitmeier-Meditz said. “The Fordham alumni community is very generous.”

Other planned events were canceled due to the pandemic lockdown last year: a sit-down for a dozen alumni with John Brennan, FCRH ’77, former CIA director and counterterrorism adviser to President Barack Obama, and an event with sportscasters Michael Kay, FCRH ’82, and Mike Breen, FCRH ’83.

Through such events, the association has raised money for various funds, including a summer internship fund for journalism majors, recently renamed for Jim Dwyer, FCRH ’79, the New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner who died in 2020. A new scholarship fund named for Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, is for students who reach new heights of academic achievement after arriving at the University.

The association provides other important support such as funding for undergraduate research and for student travel, noted Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. “I’m so pleased to see how that support has grown over the past several years,” she said. “I am grateful for their commitment to the college, to our alumni, and to the larger Fordham family.”

The association’s Giving Day gift—a matching gift—was split between two scholarship funds: the FCAA Endowed Legacy Scholarship, a need-based scholarship for legacy students, and the Rev. George J. McMahon, S.J., Endowed Scholarship, awarded to students at Fordham College at Rose Hill and the Gabelli School of Business.

Serving on the board is a labor of love, Caruso Marrone said. “We’re doing something good: we’re raising funds, we’re helping students go through school,” in addition to bringing alumni together at events, she said. “The members of our board [are] of various age groups, various backgrounds, various careers, [and] we all come together and do this work and enjoy it immensely. We have just a great group of people who are dedicated to Fordham.”

Fordham Theatre alumna Betty Gilpin, FCLC ’08, has once again been nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her portrayal of Debbie Eagan in Netflix’s GLOW. The comedy series from the team behind Orange Is the New Black centers on a crew of misfits in 1980s LA who reinvent themselves as the “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.”

In a recent interview with The New York TImes, Gilpin echoed a sentiment she previously shared with graduating Fordham Theatre students in 2016: Embrace the weird.

“We studied a lot of theater of the absurd at Fordham and ‘building your inner ocean of weird’ was the thesis statement,” she told the Times. “Then graduating and auditioning for things like Gossip Girl, where the No. 1 priority is muffling your ocean of weird and curling your hair, I didn’t work for a while because I was bad at both the muffling and the curling.”

This is the third consecutive year in which Gilpin has been nominated for the award; perhaps this third time will be the charm for “weird.”

Dylan McDermott, FCLC ’83, has been nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his portrayal of Ernie—the owner of Golden Tip Gas, a service station that doubles as a high-end brothel—in Netflix’s Hollywood. The Fordham Theatre alumnus was last nominated 21 years ago for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his role as Bobby Donnell in ABC’s The Practice.

In the emotional drama, a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers will do virtually anything to realize their showbiz dreams in post-World War II Hollywood.

In May, McDermott told Town & Country that he drew inspiration from real Hollywood greats, his own imagination, and a documentary on Scotty Bowers, on whom Ernie is based.

“I certainly watched the documentary on Scotty Bowers and got useful information out of that,” he said. “I also used Clark Gable as my muse for this role. So, between the information I had from watching great movies from the 1940s, what was in my own imagination, and what was on the pages of the script, it all came together. That’s the great thing about collaboration, whatever comes out can be magical and I certainly feel that’s happened on this show. There’s nothing like this on television, that’s for damn sure.”

Rounding out the alumni nominees, Seena Vali, FCRH ’10, received two nominations this year. The Last Week Tonight with John Oliver writer—along with a team of writers—is nominated for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for the song “Eat Sh!t, Bob,” featured on episode 629, and for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series.

Vali, who studied mathematics and music while attending Fordham, previously took home Emmys for Outstanding Writing in a Variety Series in 2018 and 2019.

Tony Award-winning actress Phylicia Rashad, a former Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre at Fordham, has been nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her work on NBC’s This Is Us. Rashad was the first person to hold the Fordham position, established in 2011 thanks to a $2 million gift from Washington, FCLC ’77.

Perhaps best known as “America’s Mom” for her role on The Cosby Show, Rashad portrays Carol “Mamma C” Clarke, mother of Beth Pearson (Susan Kelechi Watson). Referencing a scene the two actresses share, Watson told The Los Angeles Times: “I will say, there’s this amazing moment between when Mamma C and Beth where Beth says to her, ‘I’m strong because of you.’ And in that moment, I felt more of a Susan-Phylicia thing. I’ve always looked up to her path and what she’s gone through and come through as an artist, as a woman … and continuing to go through, because she’s not stopping any time soon.”

This is the second consecutive year that Rashad has been nominated in this category. She previously received Lead Actress nods in 1985, 1986, and 2008.

The 2020 Primetime Emmy Awards, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, will air on ABC on Sunday, Sept. 20 at 8 p.m. EST.

There was only one problem. No one wanted him to take it.

“My agent at the time, my manager at the time, my publicist at the time, my lawyer at the time, they all said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t do this show.’ But I just had a huge instinct on this,” McDermott recalled.

His instincts paid off. The Practice became a commercial and critical success, as it picked up a loyal and passionate audience and numerous awards, including back-to-back Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series in 1998 and 1999.

On April 6, McDermott discussed The Practice, his career, his personal life and his thoughts on law and society during “A Conversation with Dylan McDermott,” sponsored by the Fordham Forum on Law, Culture and Society.

While introducing McDermott, Thane Rosenbaum, the John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer in Law at the Fordham School of Law and director of the Fordham forum, added Donnell to the pantheon of great fictional lawyers.

“Most fictional lawyers are either heroes or jerks,” Rosenbaum said. “But they are never self-aware of who they are or what they should be. Bobby Donnell will forever be the poster boy for the tormented attorney. No one has ever played anguished in a TV drama better than Dylan McDermott. He made inner turmoil an Olympic sport.”

To prepare for the role, McDermott turned to several New York attorneys—including a longtime friend and fellow Fordham alumnus.

“I tried to get to the most earnest people,” he said, “the people who were not doing it just for the money. I think that Bobby lived in that world.”

He said his research made all the difference in bringing Bobby to life.

“Mostly I was interested in their internal world, because I knew that would make or break my character, and I knew it would make or break the show.”

Throughout the 90-minute event, Rosenbaum played clips from The Practice to underline the show’s interest in the tension between what is right and what is technically right under the law—a tension played out most notably between Donnell and Zoey Hiller, a senior judge known for siding with precedent over personal opinion.

 “That general theme was always prevalent in every episode,” said McDermott, who earned a Golden Globe Award for the role in 1998, “that, and our [characters’] moral crises.

“One of the most interesting things about being a public defender is the question, when do you become corrupted? I think for Bobby there was always that element of, when is that going to happen to me?”

Rosenbaum also touched upon the actor’s charitable work.

McDermott recently returned from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where his adoptive mother, playwright Eve Ensler, established City of Joy, a facility for survivors of sexual abuse in Bukavu, Congo.

In addition to praising Ensler for her work as an activist and artist, McDermott credited her for helping him straighten out his life and build his career, from dropping him off at his first acting class to influencing how he selects his roles, Bobby Donnell in particular.

“She always instilled in me this love of the writer,” he said. “I felt like in some of my [early]film work, the writing was never there. I felt like if I wanted to get better as an actor, I needed someone to write for me. That was the thinking. When I read [David Kelly’s] script [for the pilot episode of The Practice], I just responded to the writing.”

Since leaving The Practice in 2003, McDermott has appeared on stage and in a number of films and TV roles, including The Grid, a four-part mini-series with Julianna Margulies, and Jerry Bruckheimer’s Dark Blue. Both shows aired on TNT.

This past November, McDermott performed in a stage reading of Rosenbaum’s novel Second Hand Smoke (St. Martin’s Press, 1999) at the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. McDermott played a traumatized son of Holocaust survivors.

“I like complicated characters,” he said, “probably because I’m always trying to figure something out on a fundamental level. As an actor, you have to borrow from yourself to really get in there.”

During a question-and-answer session, an audience member asked McDermott what he learned most from Bobby Donnell.

“The idea of corruption,” he said. “We all have to wrestle with this notion. Sometimes we fall, sometimes we rise, but we all have to wrestle with it.”

More than 200 people attended the event, which was held at the Time Warner Center.