In an article about Mark Nozette '71, the Colgate University alumnus describes how his education at Colgate impacted his legal career.

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Laura, Nellie and Almanzo. Charles and Caroline Ingalls. The wide open land, the unforgiving climate, the death of a baby boy. The characters and stories of “Little House on the Prairie” have delighted readers and television viewers for generations, but now they are being put to a test not unlike a cruel Midwestern winter: Will they thrive in the forbidding world of new American musicals?

After four years of fits and starts, previews for the premiere of “Little House on the Prairie,” the musical, began on Saturday at the Guthrie Theater here, in the part of the world that Laura Ingalls Wilder chronicled in her books of the 1930s and '40s.

While “Little House” is perhaps best known from the Michael Landon TV series that began more than 30 years ago, and a star of that show is taking part in the new one, the producers have gone back to the books seeking a story of family, journey and rebellion that will, they hope, suit 21st-century audiences.

“Creating a musical is a challenge, no question, but especially one that so many people will have expectations about because of their love for the books and the TV show,” said Francesca Zambello (Colgate University Class of 1978), who is the director and main creative force of the production. “But we have very high hopes.”

While the familiar setting of Walnut Grove has been replaced by the real-life Ingalls home in South Dakota, and the harridan Mrs. Oleson is not around to make mischief, fans of the television show will find much familiar here. Ms. Zambello has cast Melissa Gilbert — television's Laura — as Caroline Ingalls, the Ma, and transplanted the sassy young villain Nellie Oleson to the hometown of the Ingalls.

Ms. Gilbert — who at 44 has a voice that still sounds just like Half Pint's (Laura's childhood nickname) — said it was surreal to be playing her former character's mother but added that her delight in returning to “Little House” trumped other feelings.

“I feel like I'm operating in an alternate universe,” Ms. Gilbert said during a day of rehearsals this month. “On days when I'm tired and overwrought, I could go to my jaded place, but I can't actually go to that place because this is such a new and amazing experience.”

The project began in 2004 when Ms. Zambello, a well-known opera director who has also staged many musicals, including the current Broadway production of “The Little Mermaid,” decided she wanted to create a family musical. Ms. Zambello said she felt the pioneer adventure and the defiant Laura would prove popular with musical audiences.

“The story goes to core American values, the search for the American soul, and I think that will resonate at a time when the religious right and the current administration are still trying to kidnap those values,” said Ms. Zambello, who lives in New York City.

“We show the dark side of life too, the foreign Swedes and Norwegians coming into the heartland, which reminds us of the immigration crisis today,” she added. “And the lessons Laura learns: near the end, Ma sings a song called ‘Wild Child,' telling Laura to embrace that side of herself, that it's O.K. for a girl to be who you are, be different, be independent while still drawing on her family.”

As she lined up producers, Ms. Zambello presented her vision for the musical and presented two songs for representatives of the Ingalls Wilder estate. They approved, and workshops of the piece were held in New York. To heighten the project's commercial appeal, Ms. Zambello reached out to Ms. Gilbert, despite the concern that Ms. Gilbert is not an experienced singer.

Another clinching moment came when Ms. Zambello, after conversations with several regional theaters, found a willing partner in Joe Dowling, the artistic director of the Guthrie. While the theater does not undertake many original musicals, its grand new performing space — designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel — could accommodate a musical made to be easily transferable to other theaters.

“Given where we are, on the edge of the prairie, and the devotion to Laura Ingalls Wilder in Minnesota and Wisconsin and South Dakota, this material suits our mission perfectly,” Mr. Dowling said. “But the story of a young girl coming into womanhood will also have a resonance way beyond this region.”

Hundreds of actresses auditioned for the role of Laura; ultimately Ms. Zambello chose Kara Lindsay, who graduated from Carnegie Mellon University last year. Whatever intimidation Ms. Lindsay felt performing under the watchful eyes of the original Laura dissipated, she said, on their first day of rehearsals.

I thought, ‘O.K., Melissa Gilbert is playing my mom, and I'm playing her old role — no pressure,' ” Ms. Lindsay said. “So I went up to Melissa and said, ‘It's such an honor playing your daughter,' and she smiled and said, ‘Oh, shut up.' I thought, ‘Great, a normal person.' ”

Ms. Gilbert said she has made a point of not telling Ms. Lindsay how to play the Ingalls heroine. “Kara is a little more wild with the role than I was, and there's a wide-eyed wonder that was missing in my interpretation of Laura,” Ms. Gilbert said. “But it's all very freeing for me. I've been pigeonholed as Half Pint for such a long time.”

Among their common bonds is that, just as Ms. Gilbert became best friends with Alison Arngrim, who played her archenemy Nellie Oleson on the television show, Ms. Lindsay is close to Sara Jean Ford, who plays Nellie at the Guthrie. Ms. Lindsay and Ms. Ford were classmates at Carnegie Mellon and later lived together in New York City.

Laura's rivalry with Nellie — as girls on the prairie, as love interests for the hunky Almanzo Wilder — also helped address an abiding concern of the director, Ms. Zambello: whether the musical would have enough dramatic tension. While Laura Ingalls can be unruly and has to deal with her sister Mary's blindness and the harsh Dakota winters, the early drafts of dialogue and scenes had a mildness that might have dulled audiences, the director said.

The first writer of the musical's book, the playwright Beth Henley, best known for “Crimes of the Heart,” withdrew from the project because of “differences concerning the collaborative process,” Ms. Henley wrote in an e-mail message. Ms. Zambello declined to comment on Ms. Henley's contributions but said that her replacement, Rachel Sheinkin (who won the Tony for the book of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”), “was really helpful adding dramatic tension that we weren't getting before.” (Ms. Henley said the “Prairie” production team is “extremely gifted, and I wish them the very best.”)

Still, Ms. Zambello has been refining the dialogue through rehearsals and dropping musical numbers that she believed were stilted or childish.

The first day of ticket sales for “Little House” was an event at the Guthrie. Long lines formed hours early; many women came with their young daughters; Guthrie staff blogged live about the day on the theater's Web site, guthrietheater.org, capturing the thrill of girls meeting Ms. Gilbert and Ms. Lindsay. The production will run for 12 weeks, double the length of a normal Guthrie run, a reflection of audience interest thus far.

Though the show's producers might be dreaming of an eventual transfer to Broadway, this “Little House” does not feel like a typical New York musical event. The orchestra is dominated by strings and the fiddle. Rachel Portman, who wrote the score, said she sought to evoke a spirit of Americana and homesteading, though she is mainly an opera writer from London who was largely unfamiliar with the books and television series. The lyrics are by Donna di Novelli.

Ms. Gilbert, despite her veteran status with the story, has had her own learning curve at the Guthrie. She has been taking singing lessons steadily and has been working with the musical's voice coach. Ms. Gilbert said she felt “much more confident and definitely comfortable with the singing now.”

Beyond the technical adjustment, she has had an emotional one too. Ms. Gilbert said she feels deeply protective of the story and had told Karen Grassle — who played Caroline on television — that hers were “big shoes to fill.” Asked if she thought Mr. Landon, who died in 1991, would like the musical, Ms. Gilbert — who was very close to her screen father — warned that she might start to cry.

“I think about Mike every day,” she said. “I'd like to hope he'd be very proud of this.”

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Big Green grads are in the money. So says a recent study compiled by PayScale.com that looks at earnings of alumni at colleges around the country. Graduates of Dartmouth College finished on top of the list with a median compensation of $134,000, edging out alumni of Princeton University who finished second with a median comp of $131,000.

While many rankings look at what newly minted college graduates are making, we ranked the schools based on the pay of alumni with 10 to 20 years of work experience. After all, it is not how you start but how you finish. "Starting salaries do not tell you a whole lot, but there is a real divergence in dollar terms as you go over the course of a career," says Al Lee, director of quantitative analysis at PayScale.com.

Looking at the pay of alumni with less than five years of work experience, Dartmouth trails 18 other colleges with an average paycheck of $58,000, although most top schools are bunched closely together. The two outliers are Stanford University with median pay of $70,400 and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where recent grads earn $72,200 thanks to lucrative engineering jobs secured straight out of school.

Top employers for Dartmouth's 2008 graduating class include Bain, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, which are almost all high-paying posts. Yet two other big employers of recent grads fall on the other end of the pay scale: Teach for America and the Peace Corps. Both organizations are focused on helping the less fortunate and require two-year commitments. So how do Dartmouth grads, many starting at nonprofits, leapfrog their peers when it comes to compensation as they gain more experience?

"Dartmouth produces well-rounded people who can move into senior-level positions easily," says Monica Wilson, associate director of career services at the school. Another important factor in the success of Dartmouth grads is an extremely tight and loyal alumni network. Dartmouth is located in tiny Hanover, N.H., and is the smallest of the Ivy League schools with 4,100 undergrad students enrolled. Yet the alumni network is extremely impressive and stretches from Daniel Webster to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson during its 239 year history. Other prominent grads include General Electric head Jeffrey Immelt, eBay chief John Donahoe and former IBM boss Louis Gerstner.

In order to compile the ranking of colleges, we turned to PayScale.com, an online compensation comparison tool. PayScale's database includes real-time salary data culled from 13 million unique compensation profiles. PayScale allows users to compare their salary online to other people with similar individual and job characteristics.

We only included schools with more than 1,000 people enrolled. The median salary figures are only for full-time employees and exclude anyone that went on to receive a graduate degree. Salary numbers include bonuses, commissions and profit sharing but not equity compensation.

The only public college to appear on our list of the top 20 schools was the University of California at Berkley. It ranked 12th with a median salary of $112,000. A separate ranking of public schools shows eight California schools in the top 20. The University of California system is one of the best in the country and has 220,000 students spread across 10 campuses. However, the California schools and those schools on the East Coast get a significant boost in our rankings because they are largely placing people in careers in big coastal cities like New York and San Francisco where salaries tend to be higher.

Overall, Dartmouth students at mid-career (10 to 20 years experience) finished above any other school. Yet when it comes to the top earners from each school, Yale University grads just nipped out those from Dartmouth. The highest-paid 10% of Yale alums earn more than $326,000 compared to $321,000 for Dartmouth's best paid. The third and fourth ranked schools by this measure were fellow Ivy members Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania. The fifth- ranked and first non-Ivy school among the top earners was Colgate University located in Hamilton, N.Y., where the highest-paid graduates earn $265,000.

Wilson says that recruiters visiting Dartmouth tell her that Dartmouth doesn't have as strong a business background as some of its competitors but that students can always learn the business. What they do like, she adds: "The ability to think outside the box and adapt as easily as Dartmouth students do is what puts them ahead."

Ahead and straight to the top.

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Dr. Keenan Grenell has been appointed Colgate University's vice president and dean of diversity. Grenell comes to Colgate from Marquette University, where he served as associate provost for diversity since 2005. Grenell earned a bachelor's degree in political science at Tougaloo College, a master's degree in public policy and administration (MPPA) from Mississippi State University, and a Ph.D. in political science from Northern Illinois University. He is also the co-editor of the upcoming book, "Entrepreneurship in South Africa and In The United States: Comparative Studies."

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Jillian Ferris, 22, is a native of Lockport who attended John Pound Elementary School, Emmet Belknap and Lockport High School. She studied Latin for four years and was editor of the Lockport yearbook and newspaper.

The daughter of Gary and Laurie Ferris graduated from Colgate in May, 2008 with a degree in history and education. Jill was the editor of the Colgate Maroon News student newspaper in her junior and senior years.

She studied in Great Britain her junior year and spent almost a month in Australia working with Aborigine people this spring. She is a Fulbright Scholar.

Jill and her sister Kelly, 20, grew up at the Lockport YMCA where their mother works. Jill has worked at Camp Kenan since she was 16 and is the aquatic instructor.

On Thursday, she leaves for Taiwan to teach English to children for 11 months.

QUESTION: What do you do as an aquatic instructor?

ANSWER: I get to go kayaking, canoeing and swimming in the lake every day. It's awesome. We had a great summer. It's a lot of fun.

Q: How long have you been going to Camp Kenan?

A: This is my fifteenth summer. I grew up and Kenan and grew up here at the YMCA. The YMCA is where we came after school to take swimming lessons and hang out. I volunteered and attended programs.

Q: What's it like to be an editor of a college newspaper?

A: It was a lot of work but I lked the news and spreading the word. We were close knit. We did a lot of work and had fun together. It's the oldest weekly college newspaper in America.

Q: You've done some traveling?

A: I spent my junior spring semester living in London. I was doing historical research in the archives of London. I also traveled to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Belgium and Austria and took a spring break in Italy.

Q: What did you do after you graduated in May?

A: I went to Australia for three weeks to be with an Aborigine tribe. It's complicated. I interned at the art gallery in Colgate and updated their discovered collection of Australian Child Art.

Q: What's that?

A: There was forcible removable of Aboriginal children from the late 1800s to 1970s. They put the children into camps. In the 1950s a teacher, Noel White, would have them go out on bush walks and he said, ‘draw what you see.' These 12-13-year-old boys had incredible pastel drawings.

They were shown all over and wound up in Colgate and formed the basis of our art gallery collection. Colgate started to build a relationship with the tribe in Australia and some of the paintings have gone back to Australia. We were doing a lot of community building and relationship building work. We have the largest private collection in the world.

Q: What did you do in Australia?

A: We did a lot of listening, which doesn't sound really important, but it turned out to be one of the most important things we could have done just because this tribe we were working with, the Noongar, was so decimated by forcible removal. We were working with a bother and sister who were catering our meals.

Q: What happened?

A: She shared her story with us. Her brother was listening to the story and he just started crying. He explained that he never heard his sister's story before.

They had grown up apart and united when they were older. In that time he had never listened to what she had gone through when she was in the camps. He never knew what it was like to be taken from your parents.

A lot of it was just sharing stories, giving people encouragement to talk.

Q: How are aborigines treated now?

A: It's a mixed bag. There is still a lot of prejudice there and we were really surprised to see so much prejudices. We were so conscious of tension between aboriginal peoples and European settlers there.

In talking to people we had to be careful not to be judgmental because we've had such a terrible history of racial injustice here. It made us look at our own racial situation.

Q: How do you teach English when you don't know their language in Taiwan

A: I get to study Mandarin while I am there. Right now I can say hello, good-bye and thank you. Hopefully I'll learn more than that.

We're working with teachers in the classroom who have some English. I think I was chosen because I have some background in education. I think I'm bringing some education experience to the group.

Q: Are you nervous?

A: I'm scared. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance, so I'm pretty excited about it as well. Still there's an incredible working experience. There's an American support network.

I'm expecting to be overwhelmed by a new culture and just have this incredible growing experience. I'm not sure what to expect. I will have to do a lot of things on my own that are a little scary, like getting my haircut or ordering food when I really don't know what I'm

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Colgate University alumnus Greg Fleming '85, the president and COO of Merrill Lynch, was recently profiled on CNBC.

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When you cast your ballot for president in November, something as simple as the candidate's face could play a role in your decision.

A growing body of research supports the notion that a candidate's attempts to establish himself as a powerful leader can be helped or hurt by his facial features. Appearance is not, of course, the sole factor that sways voters, but experts who have studied the link between faces and people's perceptions say we place more emphasis on looks than we think.

Facial structure can play a role in how trustworthy, strong and charismatic we perceive someone to be, said Caroline Keating, a psychology professor at Colgate University who studies facial structure and perceptions of power.

Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama, the likely Republican and Democratic nominees, respectively, both have strong features that convey leadership, she said. But their faces may send different messages depending on the qualities most important to a voter. A square jaw, prominent eyebrows, smaller eyes and thin lips are equated with dominance and strength. Round eyes and a weak chin can denote a baby face and chip away at his power. One reason why it's so important for us to perceive our leaders as competent, credible and sincere is because that makes us feel secure, Keating said. We identify with leaders. If leaders look confident, brave, bold and true, then we feel we can take on the world. Keating has conducted research on people's reactions to former presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. Using digital images, she made subtle, almost undetectable changes designed to enhance or diminish their facial features and tested reactions.

Giving the youthful Kennedy a more mature appearance made him appear more cunning, while people thought the already-mature Reagan's power diminished with added wrinkles.

Reagan and Kennedy had faces that conveyed power but also caring, which are ideal features for candidates, she said.

Researchers say candidates need more than just strong facial features to win an election.

Even so, appearances can play a role. In the first-ever televised presidential debate the 1960 matchup between Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Vice President Richard Nixon viewers perceived Kennedy as the winner after Nixon showed up pale and sickly with a 5 o'clock shadow.

Kennedy, by contrast, looked tan and well rested. Those who listened to the debate on radio, however, declared Nixon the winner.

There is evidence that people can often predict the election winners just by looking at faces.

Alexander Todorov, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, gave people photos of unfamiliar political candidates who won and were runners-up in state governor races.

He asked people to pick the most competent candidates, and they chose the winners 68 percent of the time.

Whether this reliance on snap judgments is good or bad is hard to tell, Keating said. What's the job of a leader? It's to move us, she said. If you don't look sincere, then you're never going to move anybody. You're not going to instill in them the confidence and the emotional tenor you need to get them to sign onto the programs you think are important. So when it comes to motivating people, it's all about the non-verbal.

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