Paging Dr. Van Nostrand
One of those beneath the radar Vo Dilun legends, Dr. A.D. Van Nostrand, a retired and greatly loved English professor from Brown University, moved on from this jumping bean sphere (as Lord Buckley would say) two weeks ago.
He was 85 and had been battling cancer. He was Dad to Kipp, Douglas, and perhaps the greatest and most talented “babe” to come out of the Biggest Little, actress Amy Van Nostrand, spouse of another first-rate thespian, Tim Daly. (P&J checked with a few of our intimates and were not surprised to find that that, if you were a hetero male with an IQ over 100 and did not have a crush on Amy Van Nostrand — this is a few decades back when she deigned to live amongst us — you probably did not have a pulse.)
Enough about Amy. Son Kipp notes a few salient bits of marginalia about the good professor: that he was the inspiration for the fictional “Dr. Van Nostrand” on a number of Seinfeld episodes (thanks to one of the professor’s students, writer/producer/TV executive Robin Green, who also managed to reference Dr. Van Nostrand on another show, Northern Exposure).
Just to round out the classic Vo Dilun two degrees of separation: Green just happens to be related to Rita Michaelson, whose husband, you may recall, is Julie Michaelson, one of the state’s finest attorney generals. So there.
Send family trees and Pulitzer-grade tips to p&j@phx.com.
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