Adventures with Alice in Dairyland
I never imagined it was particularly dangerous to be Alice in Dairyland - though to be honest, I never spent much time imagining her life at all. So getting to know Gena Cooper '05 has been quite an education.

Cooper is the fifty-eighth Alice in Dairyland, and her reign - which ran from June 2005 to June 2006 - has had its share of perils. Some have come from foes (such as the ethanol opponent who accosted her at a bio fuels event - because of that incident, all future Alices will be required to take Chimera self-defense training). But even well-wishers can present danger.

Shortly before we were scheduled to take Cooper's photo for this story, she had an appearance on a radio show that had a live audience. In the audience was a little girl. "She was about three years old," says Cooper, "and like a lot of three-year-olds, she was attracted to shiny objects."

The object in this instance was Cooper's crown - the fabled fourteen-karat-gold, diamond-crusted Alice tiara. This little girl reached up to Cooper's head, snatched the crown, and snapped off the top arch.

"My heart stopped," says Cooper. She was just six weeks from the end of her reign, and she didn't want to be known as the third Alice to lose a crown. She quickly called a halt to the program and swept up the precious wreckage. Then she called us and canceled the photo shoot.

But this is no Humpty-Dumpty fable. Cooper didn't call upon all the king's horses and all the king's men. Rather, she took the crown fragments to Goodman Jewelers on State Street. Eight days and $50 later, the tiara was once again in one piece. And we hauled Cooper out to photograph Wisconsin's Dairy Queen in what we thought was an appropriate setting - the Blue Star Dairy in Arlington.

On June 5, she'll hand off the tiara into a new Alice's keeping. And may number fifty-nine, Nicole Franzen Reese '06, have a more peaceful reign.

- John Allen