In an era with no photocopying machines, many apprentices did little more than copy documents. These apprenticeships were widely derided as an unsatisfactory way to learn the law. But most young men could not afford such a luxury and so were forced to engage in legal study through an apprenticeship with a practicing lawyer. Those persons with considerable wealth could travel to London to study at the Inns of Court. There were no law schools in the American colonies. Most aspiring lawyers in colonial America had few options for studying law. Wythe agreed, and so for the next five years, he provided Thomas Jefferson with an extraordinary education that equipped him not only to practice law, but also to provide the intellectual and political leadership that the new nation would so desperately need. That year, a Williamsburg lawyer named George Wythe, one of the most distinguished attorneys in colonial America, was asked to take on a particularly promising recent William & Mary graduate as an apprentice in his law office. In some ways, the origins of William & Mary's law school can be traced to 1762. Jim, Alan and Mark left the Law School a better place than they found it. It’s thanks to them that the rest of us were welcomed to HLS by the Drama Society as an enduring organization with a full-length, plotted, springtime musical as its central annual event, so that (as they advertised at the time) our mothers could scream “I sent my boy to Harvard Law School….The following article originally appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of the William & Mary Alumni Magazine. At the same time - coincidentally or not, Jim is not entirely sure - the show itself also morphed into something more cohesive. “Kid Me Not, or Matter of Tot,” in 1966, was the first show with a narrative through-line. The Society changed the nature of the “Harvard Law School Show” in two important ways: First, it turned a fundamentally uncertain event - whose year-to-year continuation to that point had depended as much on luck as on anything else - into an established community that could serve as the basis for a true institution. Their goal was to augment the annual creative outlet with an increased focus on bonding and camaraderie among its cast and crew. Jim performed that year as an actor and singer (his solo in the number "Beef Burgundy" still echoes through Parody history), and by his second year was one of the organizers of “Trover in the Clover: The Recline and Fall of the Law Student.” It was then, in 1965, that Jim, Alan Goldhammer, and Mark Gasarch decided to create a little something called the Harvard Law School Drama Society. Instead of a story, it was like a scripted open-mic night. Jim’s first show, 1964’s “Lawyers, Lunatics and Lovers,” was still much as it had been in ’61: essentially a modular variety show, where a small group of organizers booked performers as separate acts. In our last note, which was ironically our first note, we talked about the hilarious and unintentional origins of what eventually became the Parody. It didn’t take long for that show to outgrow its progenitor, the Dormitory Council, so we now turn to the second notable milestone in our history: the creation of the Drama Society itself, as a group with a name and an identity. Jim Friedlander ’66, was instrumental in the transition, and shared his recollections with us.
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