ncidence of seeing an ad for a meeting taking place at her col- lege almost ten years to the day after she had left made it seem some- how like a calling. She told her husband, "Watch the kids," and trotted off to the subway. The meeting in the Barnard College Auditorium was a madhouse, with 500 people talking at once. Fewer people came to the second meeting and fewer still to the third and subsequent meetings, teach- ing Laurie the first rule of social activism, which, as Woody Allen might put it, is "just showing up." After two months, there were only five people left; everyone else had fallen by the wayside. When the Understand the Power of Symbols small group discovered that Laurie had a degree in English, they named her to handle all their communications. That's how, on April 22, 1970, she found herself sharing a micro- phone with New York City Mayor John Lindsay, whom she had some- how convinced to close off Fifth Avenue for two hours SO that 100,000 people could stroll in the sun, listen to guitar players, and attend an ecology fair in Central Park. That led to a freelance assignment editing an environmental supplement for the New York Times and, in I97I, to a job offer from AT&T, which was trying to organize employee envi- ronmental activities. Eventually she moved to the company's public relations depart- ment. Short, blond, and speaking with the no-nonsense cadences of a New York City traffic cop, she was put in charge of training AT&T executives for press interviews. She was SO aggressive in putting the executives (most of them old enough to be her father) through their paces that AT&T's chairman, Charlie Brown, recommended her for an assignment that no one else wanted by saying, "Give it to Marilyn; she's not afraid of anything." By the end of the decade, she was the highest-ranking woman in the department, and by 1987, she headed it. All this is by way of explaining that Marilyn Laurie was not of the "this too shall pass" school of public relations. But as I would later learn, being the top public re