Melissa Harris-Perry (formerly Harris-Lacewell) will speak about “Bayard Rustin, Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement,” at the Princeton Public Library on Wednesday, November 3, at 7:30 p.m.

Harris-Perry is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University. Harris-Perry provides expert commentary on politics, racial issues, religious questions, and gender concerns on MSNBC shows, such as the Rachel Maddow Show and Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and she writes a “Sister Citizen” column for The Nation magazine and contributes to TheNation.com.

Rustin, an openly gay black man who was raised as a Quaker, mentored Dr. Martin Luther King in non-violent tactics during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, and was a credited as a brilliant, visionary, charismatic civil rights activist.
The series on Rustin is co-sponsored by Princeton Friends Meeting and Not in Our Town (NIOT).

Leading up to Harris-Perry’s talk are a documentary and discussion. The acclaimed feature documentary “Brother Outsider” was shown at Princeton Public Library on October 27 and is also available for checkout. Also, one of NIOT’s “Continuing Conversations on Race on Monday, November 1, at 7:30 p.m. Delia Pitts and Ann Yasuhara will facilitate a discussion on Rustin, in particular his essay “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement”.

More information can be found here.

Be prepared to start over — again and again, says Robert Dilenschneider, best-selling author of “Power and Influence,”. He will speak at NJ CAMA’s “Communicating in a Web 2.0 World” event on Wednesday, October 27, at 6 p.m. at Rider University. Cost: $20 at the door or $15 in advance. E-mail newjerseycama@gmail.com or call 609-397-3737 or register online

Dilenshneider’s book, subtitled “The Rules Have Changed,” was published three years ago, and in this fast-moving media environment, the author will presumably tell how he takes his own advice — to keep starting over as the rules change.

I’m curious to see how my boss at U.S. 1 Newspaper, Richard K. Rein, reacts to this talk. Rein is the moderator for the evening. I have two competing events that night (the Bayard Rustin documentary is the same evening, but when your boss speaks, curiosity prevails.

In my previous post I put in a cry for help, and it’s been answered.
Thanks to @LynetteRadio and @PurpleStripe Productions, I have managed to turn off the Twitter feed from my Linked In. I ran into Lynette Young (the writer behind both and the awesome speaker at TedXNJLibes) at the Princeton Regional Chamber’s 50th anniversary party last night. She agreed with my diagnosis that too many of my tweets were bogging down everybody’s LinkedIn pages, and she gave me the clue to how to turn it off.

Thanks Lynette, and hurray for Hopewell Valley Community Bank’s Cathy Frank-White, her committee, the chamber staff, and especially the Frank-White family. They all pitched in to create one of the most fabulous parties I’ve ever been to. Loved Grant Somerville’s Lindy and Cheri Durst’s get-up, among others.

Another after-note: When Glenn Gabe spoke of the ROI of social media at the Princeton Chamber’s Trenton Small Business Week event on Wednesday, he admitted that the very best marketing tool was still a well-scrubbed opt-in mailing list. I know of two such lists — mine and U.S. 1 Newspapers. Everybody who is getting this email (and there are enough that periodically Google takes away my mailing privileges) has opted in and is free to opt out. I send different posts to different groups of people, for total of more than 1,000 people, and just 50 people get everything.

The other scrubbed list is the U.S. 1 Newspaper email newsletter. We used to call it “Sneak Preview.” It has links to all the stories and usually gets sent on Tuesday before the paper comes out. You can opt-in by sending your request to info@princetoninfo.com with “email newsletter” in the subject line.

Teens and their parents are invited to a special forum on bullying of all types — cyberbulling and sexting — tonight, Thursday, October 21, 7 to 9 p.m., at Princeton University’s Carl A. Fields Center. Detective Benjamin Gering will speak, and there will be refreshments provided.

Sponsors include the Committed and Faithful Princetonians, Community House, and Y Scholars. Thanks go to Larry and Fern Spruill for arranging this.

I met lots ‘n lots of people today, starting at 7:30 a.m. at Thomas Edison State College for the Trenton Small Business Week, which continues Thursday. Jane Gore of Amboy Bank and I got lost together in the State House parking lot but arrived at Thomas Edison State College in time to hear Doug Dixon of Manifest-Tech wow the Princeton Chamber breakfast audience with a tour-de-force demo of gadgets that are potentially useful for business, including an Android app that provides voice translations. Speak into it and click to hear it in French. Plus an app so you can program your DVD remotely.

Then Glenn Gabe of G-Square Interactive dashed cold water in the face of anyone who thought getting an ROI for social media was easy. To be successful, you need to allocate 10 to 20 hours a week to it — and that’s when you know what you’re doing.

After a stint of Bible study at my church (did you know that Adam and Eve had a 3rd son named Seth?), and a failed interview (my source couldn’t take my scheduled call), I went to Charlie Brown’s for the Einstein’s Alley Entrepreneurs Collective, a group of techie entrepreneurs. Eric Kutner had enlisted a most intriguing panel of sports entrepreneurs (top, from left, Tony Caruso, (sports & entertainment attorney), Howard Moses (Blue Star Jets), John Romanowich (SightLogix), and Sam McCleery (formerly with Prince and now Princeton Video Image.) Second photo is Mark Silverman, ex of Ernst & Young, and Romanowich. For more photos (Moses, Kutner, and McCleery and the EA organizers, Steven Georges and Marion Reinson of To the Point Communication try this link.

New to me though not to Princeton was Mark Hall, president and CEO of EGOEAST, a public relations, marketing, and branding firm with the toniest business card I have ever seen. It was illegible to me — one shade of beige, with raised letters. I had to rub it with a pencil, like a stone carving, to read it. The website is similarly styled.

Curious, I turned back to the cards collected this morning and smiled to discover how evocative they were of the entrepreneurs and their businesses. Edgy but dignified for architect Marina Rubina, straitlaced-corporate for Melinda Skarupsky who represents a security service that I won’t mention so as not to get her in trouble, colorful in both Spanish and English for Hilda Lopez of Mercer Business & Technical School, minimal for project management consultant Steven Rabbe, and quietly strong for Joan Brame’s Empower Fitness.

There on the top is my new business card from Document Depot, complete with Twitter handle. I’ve had the same logo — an abstract dancer because I used to be a dance critic — for too long to count. The new ones have my Twitter handle but tonight, from David Gange at the EA meeting, I found to my horror that the Tweets show up on everybody’s LinkedIn pages. I apologize to that network; I didn’t mean for the Tweets to go to you. If Dixon or Gabe can tell me how to turn them off, that would complete the circle of the day’s learning.

An article in today’s New York Times, “Turning Business Owners Into Stars of their Own Stories”, made me chuckle. The reporter, Jessica Bruder describes Abe’s Market as a “new idea” in the business marketing game, using “my story” marketing to emphasize the people behind the products. A Harvard expert says it’s “about humanizing the businesses and connecting who they are with the imputed values of their target customer set.”

U.S. 1 Newspaper has been doing that, emphasizing the people rather than the products, for more than 25 years, and I can’t count the number of times I was yelled at, by someone I was trying to interview. “Why do you have to write about me? I don’t want this to be about me! This story should be about my product..my service…my store…my company.”

I’m pleased to see that U.S. 1 Newspaper’s approach (actually Rich Rein’s approach) has finally gone main stream. As Bruder describes Abe’s Live, a “streaming online broadcast where sellers will tell their stories and demonstrate products in real time,” it’s significantly different from real reporting, more like an online advertorial.

But the principle is the same. Buyers are interested in the personalities behind the product. People buy ice cream because of Ben & Jerry, and they buy Microsoft in spite of Bill Gates.

My answer to the dissatisfied source went something like this: “You think the story is only about your company? Umm, maybe not. First off, this is our story, not yours to control. And the way we tell a story is to start with the personality, so let’s start with your background. Where did you grow up? ….”

PS: Trenton Small Business Week is next week and until this morning, the TSBW website had no details of what events are free and what are paid. U.S. 1 (in print and online) has always had that information for any event listing. It’s a reader-friendly point that Rein has always insisted on: Don’t leave the reader in the dark about costs.

The page Mercer Chamber’s Tuesday lunch and Princeton Chamber’s Wednesday breakfast DO have a fee, as do some of the receptions.

Happy 100th birthday to the Princeton Public Library. Mary H.and I went to the party in the early afternoon. She’s a long-time denizen of Palmer Square and member of Princeton United Methodist Church, and we had a fabulous time. Here’s a photo sequence, featuring the Princeton High School Stage Band and some of the folks (two-footed and four-footed) who let us make friends with them. Great party!
Thanks to the sponsors — listed on the pictured sign and here:
Presenting Sponsor – Church and Dwight
Platinum Sponsor – Glenmede Trust
Gold Sponsors – Howe Insurance, Deborah Bailey
Silver Sponsors – Fidelity Investments, Novo Nordisk
Bronze Sponsors – Bank of Princeton, Drinker Biddle, Mason, Griffin & Pierson, Miele
Palmer Square, Princeton Tour Co., Princeton University, Princeton University Press,
The Residences at Palmer Square

Underwriters: In Their Own Hands
Auction: The Gould Group of Wells Fargo Advisors
Birthday Cake: Johnson & Johnson Consumer Group
5K Family Fun Run/Walk: Firmenich, Terra Momo Restaurant Group, Princeton Running Company
Character Lane: PNC Bank

If he did it in Pittsburgh, somebody should be able to do it in Princeton — and Trenton.

Social entrepreneur Bill Strickland speaks at Princeton University on “Make the Impossible Possible” on Tuesday, October 12, 4:30, in the Friend Center on Olden Avenue. It is free and a reception, co-sponsored by the Keller Center and the Center for African American Studies, follows. For information, contact Jennifer Loessy at jloessy@princeton.edu or 609-258-3216.

A MacArthur fellowship winner, Strickland is president and CEO of Manchester Craftsmen Guild and Bidwell Training Center in Pittsburgh. His book “Make the Impossible Possible” sells for from $10 to $14.

From the press release: Manchester Craftsmen Guild offers programs in ceramics, photography, digital arts and painting to more than 500 children a year, as well as 3,400 students in the Pittsburgh inner-city school district. Ninety percent of the students receive high school diplomas, and 85 percent go on to enroll in college or secondary education. Bidwell Training Center trains more than 600 adults each semester for professional careers in the culinary arts, pharmacology and horticultural technology. Through partnerships with major corporations in the area, Bidwell Training Center has helped 73 percent of its graduates land meaningful full-time employment. Manchester Bidwell now includes a 350-seat jazz auditorium, a 40,000-square-foot greenhouse covering half a city block, a state-of-the-art chemistry lab, a full-scale ceramics department and a culinary institute.

Also of interest: Eric Foner and Cornel West speak at Labyrinth Books on Monday, October 18, at 6:30 p.m. on “Lincoln and Slavery in America.”

Robert Moses and Imani Perry dialogue on Monday, October 19, at 4:30 p.m. in McCormick Hall 101 on “Quality Education as a Constitutional Right.”

Other events from the Center for African American Studies.

Events focused on civil rights at the Princeton Public Library include a series on Bayard Rustin starting October 27.

In this week’s issue of U.S. 1, we tell of lakefront properties for sale in Princeton. As below:

Maybe you’ve seen our bright yellow canoe-like rowboat on Lake Carnegie. My husband and I like to launch our bright yellow Vermont Dory (her name is Buttercup) and row from the boathouse toward the Harrison Street bridge. There’s lots to see even at dusk, after the crew teams are done for the day. We can always spot at least two herons, plus a couple of kayaks and a fishing boat or two. But mostly we ogle the houses…

Four houses are on the market now, but as I researched the story I was fascinated by some of the others that sold before. For instance,

146 Philip Drive. It comes with a 15-foot wide strip that leads down to Carnegie Lake, for launching a boat or perhaps for al fresco dinner parties. From the five-bedroom, 2 ½ bath house you can see the lake from three vantage points. It sold for $920,000 in 2007.

These homes sold recently along Prospect, and I am intrigued by the contrast between the curb view and the lakeside views. If you never get to see the from-the-water view, here is a link to those photos.

689 Prospect: This copper-toned seven-room home – new except for two original rooms — sold for $1.4 million in 2001. Its owner keeps three kayaks, a scull, and a canoe at the ready.

735 Prospect. The four-bedroom house, on one of the nicest lots on the lake, sold in 2002 for $1,455,000. Enlarged and completely redone, it sold for $2,5 million in 2006.

681 Prospect. In 2002, when this eight-room house sold for $1,210,000, it had so little curb appeal that agents were warned not to take clients on a mere drive by. In 2007, totally renovated to include a soaking tub that looks out on the water, it sold for $1,763,750.

713 Prospect. When this nine-room house sold for $1.6 million in 2002, it had a red brick front and hung out over the lake as if it were on a Venetian canal. It still juts out over the lake, but it has acquired beige shingles.

759 Prospect. A heron keeps watch over this landmark house, which used to belong to the commodore of the lake’s tiny sailing fleet. With a driveway at the corner of Prospect and Nassau streets, it looks out over the marsh. After being totally rehabbed, it sold for $985,000 in 2002 and quickly sold the following year for $10,000 less. Then it went to $1,220,000 in 2009.

Jamie Majeski has it right. As he says in the story, looking at the water never gets old. “The water is vibrant and alive. When you wake up in the morning, you get that shimmer. All the windows back up to the water, and it’s a constantly changing scenario, as pretty as can be.”