Los
Angeles may be the city of angels, but it’s hard to know
who your friends are in Tinseltown.
“All
the stereotypes you hear about L.A. are true,” says Curley
Bonds ’87C (below), president of the Los Angeles chapter
of the Association of Emory Alumni. “This is a city of
transplants, and it can be very hard to make solid connections,
real friends. It really does help to feel like you have a genuine
connection with someone.”
 Connecting
with friendly faces who share a common bond is one of the primary
purposes of the L.A. alumni chapter, which has seen a surge
of growth and activity in recent months. Bonds, a psychiatrist
who works with heart-transplant patients at a major cardiac
center, has been in L.A. since 1992 and was recently made president
of the group. He and his partner live in Santa Monica.
“So
far, it’s been really fun,” says Bonds, over breakfast
at a favorite Third Street diner. “There’s a core
group of about fifteen people who have really expressed a lot
of interest. This is a town where everyone is young, so there
are a lot of young alumni here. People seem very enthusiastic
about showing support for the Emory club.”
There
are reportedly some twelve hundred Emory alumni living in the
Los Angeles area, but the size and sprawling nature of the city
make it challenging to plan events at central locations, Bonds
says. Still, leaders of the chapter, including Staci Weiss
’97C, who keeps tabs on young L.A. alumni, are aiming
to offer five events a year. They have held parties at Beverly
Hills Porsche, owned by Geoff Emery
’86L, and at the home of West Wing screenwriter
Mark Goffman ’90C.
Chapter officers also organized an effort for Emory’s National
Volunteer Day, working at an L.A. food bank, and attended the
Regional Leadership Conference at Emory in November.
The
Food Bank volunteer day was “kind of a continuation of
something that was part of our Emory experience,” Bonds
says. “This was like the L.A., grown-up version of Volunteer
Emory, for people who enjoyed that.”
Bonds
was one of those, as well as a Martin Luther King scholar, a
leader in residence life (“my first introduction to counseling,”
he says), editor of the Phoenix, and a member of the Stipe Society.
“Emory was a great experience for me,” says Bonds,
a native of Mobile, Alabama.
Emory
is becoming more well-known on the West Coast, which is helping
to promote the alumni chapter, according to Bonds–particularly
among the young graduates in the area.
“I
see young alumni as both our future and our present,” he
says. “The other day, I was driving along and I saw a young,
attractive person driving a nice car, and I looked, and they
had an Emory alumni sticker on the window. I never used to see
that. It was kind of exciting.”–P.P.P.
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