FEBRUARY/MARCH 2000
A marriage of art and science
By Bonnie Egan
Special to the Florida State Times
They live in a ground floor apartment on a block full of millionaires in Greenwich Village. He's the courageous physicist who galvanized 33 of New York City's famous cultural institutions to stand up against an attempt to kill the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
She's a successful mystery novelist and a former reporter for the San Francisco Examiner - not to mention a woman standing fiercely by her husband's side when the going gets tough. Glamour! Danger! Intrigue! Headlines! Could these two be the Nick and Nora Charles of the '90s? A new "Thin Man" with cats, and hold the martinis, please?
The mayor of New York, a tough guy who doesn't like to be crossed, was angry about a painting the museum was showing with elephant dung on it. The show is called "Sensation," and the mayor has made it a big one. In the middle of the uproar are Alan and Mickey Friedman, mild-mannered alumni of FSU.
Mickey Friedman (Michelle Thompson, B.A. '66, M.A. '68, both in English) has published seven novels and more short stories. Alan J. Friedman (Ph.D. Physics '70) is director of the New York Hall of Science, the City's fastest growing museum.
Alan and Mickey don't think of themselves as glamorous. But for a man who's heading an institution with a $7 mil budget and a $50 mil capital campaign, a few millionaires around come in handy. So does a tuxedo. And a smartly dressed wife with a gracious manner and a nose for subtext.
Northern California was the place Alan started as a museum director and Mickey got into the newspaper business. He created a physics and astronomy program at U.C. Berkeley and Mickey got out her old typewriter after coming home from the paper. Pretty soon there was one book, two. They liked California in the late '70s and early '80s, especially East Bay, and thought they might stay. Then there was Paris.
While Alan was helping establish the new Museum of Science and Industry in Paris, Mickey worked on her third novel and made notes for two more with a Paris setting. Then the letter came inviting Alan to take over the Hall of Science in New York.
Success is in the details, and Southern charm is an asset of both Friedmans. Although born in Brooklyn, Alan grew up around Atlanta, and Mickey's family is from Dothan, Ala. She grew up on the beach in Port St. Joe, Fla.
Both Mickey and Alan say Florida State steered them to their vocations. Jerry Stern's creative writing classes made Mickey want to be a writer, but it was Jim Preu who turned her on to mysteries.
"I was working for Jim at the Florida State University Press (now part of the University Presses of Florida) when he started bringing me mystery novels to read." She had a low opinion of the genre, but read books by Dashiell Hammett and Ross MacDonald out of respect for Dr. Preu. Then she was hooked.
Alan ascribes his gravitation to science museums to his interest in literature and science in the broad context - sparked by Hardin Goodman's English class.
"He introduced me to literature that made use of science," he explained. Alan went on to write essays relating the two disciplines, including one on Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet examining Durrell's claim that he had built his novels around the theory of relativity, with the first three books located in space and the fourth in time. "I just pointed out where he got it right and got it wrong," Dr. Friedman said. Mickey recalled when she met Alan at FSU. She'd accepted a date with another guy to go to Wakulla Springs and he showed up with Alan, who had a car - a 1947 Cadillac. That was the summer of 1965 when she was living on Jefferson Street.
They got married in December 1966 and moved into a little duplex on Stuckey Street when the FSU farm was there. "It was beautiful out there then - really out in the country."
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