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75-year-old trots the globe with Shakespeare The Bard helps this student keep her brain going By VALERIE STRAUSS The Washington Post For a while, Zelda Lipman�s three grown children and friends began to wonder about her, so much so that her elder daughter, a college professor, asked a colleague whether her behavior made sense. The answer: Absolutely. Very good sense. What elicited such concern was not the typical eyebrow-raising behavior. Rather, Lipman had thrown herself into the study of Shakespeare � with an intensity that had those around her shaking their heads. Finding the Bard�s works as relevant today as when written, Lipman has taken no fewer than seven university courses in several states over the past seven years � some of them repeats but with different professors � as well as an assortment of shorter workshops in various countries. One, naturally, was with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England. "I feel Shakespeare will last me all my life," said Lipman, who turns 75 this week and celebrate by taking an intense three-week course on the playwright at Oxford University in England. Lipman�s studies are part of a life revival she began to engineer nearly 10 years ago. She had received a master�s degree in educational psychology, raised three children, retired after nearly 20 years as the pre-med adviser at the University of Miami and enjoyed life on three continents for more than four decades with her husband. After her husband died and her children moved away, she suddenly found herself living alone in Miami. While searching for a focus, she read about research suggesting that brains keep developing at any age as long as they are active. The importance of lifelong learning had never been clearer. "I put myself into some things I wanted to learn to keep my brain going," said Lipman, who decided to focus on computers, finance and Shakespeare. Along the way, she picked up the recorder and still sits down at her piano. To help in her studies, she turned to Elderhostel Inc. and Learning in Retirement Institutes, organizations that offer educational adventures for retirees across the country. She eventually devised her own plan � taking courses mostly, but not exclusively, in Shakespeare, at places such as Yale University, the University of Miami and Duke University. Lipman never took Shakespeare in college but wished she had. When she embarked on her new academic life, she started with a seminar at Yale University that included a visit to a Shakespeare festival in Canada. Watching a nontraditional version of "A Midsummer Night�s Dream," she realized that she had fallen in love with Shakespeare and that she didn�t care for modern versions of his plays. "They cut things out and change it," she said. "I think that takes real chutzpah." Lipman views Shakespeare�s themes as timeless. "You talk about �Coriolanus,� and you realize that even now, there is a tendency to make a great general the president of a country," she said. Sometimes her fellow students are her age, sometimes they are teenagers. In one University of Miami class, a professor held her up as a role model, saying: "She is a person who comes to this class for fun, because she likes it. She doesn�t need a single credit." She repeats courses with different teachers because "each professor has a different point of view." That is a perspective appreciated by Harold Bloom, an authority on the Bard at Yale University. "She is a very wise woman," he said. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.