Banks-Johnson says she is also grateful for the lasting friendships she has established with Gore and Porter-Lipscomb.
“I consider myself very fortunate that my two roommates from freshman year are still to this day my closest friends,” she says. “I don’t know how we were matched up, but we’re still great friends. We’ve been in each others’ weddings. We talk all the time.”
And last June a new person joined Banks-Johnson’s life—her baby daughter Natalie.
“It’s pretty much considered, I don’t want to say it, a medical miracle,” says Banks-Johnson, who gave birth to the child at the age of 46.
And so Banks-Johnson has managed to balance the dichotomies that loomed so large in her life, as her job as post-production producer of the Oprah Winfrey Show proves. It allows her to continue working in entertainment as she did at Harvard yet also to have a greater modicum of security.
“I have a great life, but my family is the most important part of that,” she says.
—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.