Do you have any nicknames? Everyone calls me Tricia.

Family: My wife and our two sons, both in Newtown schools. They've asked to stay out of the newspaper, and I'm respecting that.

Pets: Two cats, Natasha and Scarlett, both named after Marvel characters, which tells you something about this house.

How long have you lived in Newtown? Since March 2018. I moved up from Long Island.

Career: I started out coaching — head age group coach at the Long Island Aquatic Club, then aquatics director and assistant swim coach at St John's University. From there I moved into education and spent more than twenty years in New York City public schools, as a guidance counselor and then an assistant principal. I never stopped coaching, though: girls varsity swimming at Bethpage High School, three seasons of soccer, and a club team I founded through the Bethpage PAL — the Barracudas — which I ran until we moved to Newtown in 2018.

Are you an active member of any local clubs, organizations, and/or communities of faith? I joined Newtown Lions Club in January 2024. A couple of years in, the club made me Tail Twister, which meant keeping meetings lively and making sure everyone in the room felt part of it — not just the people who already knew each other. Then they honored me with the presidency. It's an excellent group of men and women, and I'm humbled to be part of something bigger than myself.

What keeps me here is the work itself. Our vision screenings catch problems in schoolchildren that might otherwise go unnoticed for years. I've come to personally love the environmental side — helping maintain Newtown's trails, and our litter cleanup day. And the food drives and Stuff-a-Truck put real food on real tables in this town. The Great Pootatuck Duck Race and the Mustang raffle are my favorites. The Duck Race gets the whole town out in one place, which is getting rarer everywhere. The raffle works the other way around — we're out across the area most of the year selling tickets, and by now the Mustang is the thing people in Newtown know us for.

Am I correct in thinking you are the first female president of Newtown Lions Club? I am. Women have been Lions in this club for years — on committees, on the board, doing the work that actually gets done. I'm the first to sit in this particular chair. What I keep thinking about isn't me, it's whoever comes next. If a woman joins this club and never once wonders whether she could run it someday, that's the real result. Being first is a fact about timing. What I'd like to be measured on is the year itself — what we get done, and what shape the club is in when I hand it over.

What do you enjoy doing in your free time? My family comes first — that's not a line, it's how the calendar actually looks. Beyond that: gardening, and filling my house with people. Friends, family, a long table. That's my idea of a good evening.

What is your favorite thing about Newtown? I moved up from Long Island in 2018 and fell for the character of this town almost immediately. The small-town feel. The open space. The Labor Day parade, Halloween on Main Street — days when the whole town turns out for no reason other than that it's what we do here. I grew up with an idea in my head of what a community was supposed to look like. Newtown is the closest I've found to it.

What is your proudest accomplishment? More than twenty years in schools, and the part I'm proudest of has nothing to do with a title. It's the updates. Students I had years ago still find me — a new job, a wedding, a baby announcement. Watching them build lives after high school is the whole job, right there.

And my two sons. Quiet kids, both of them, but strong. They know what they believe and they don't bend on it.

What is your favorite thing to read in The Newtown Bee? Snapshot, honestly. I moved here in 2018 and spent years not knowing who anybody was. Reading about people I pass at the grocery store — that's how a town stops being a place you live and starts being a place you know. And the crossword. That's not reading, exactly, but it's the first thing I go to.

Do you have a personal credo? I do have one, and it's the one I took into this year with the Lions: “Honor what we've built. Serve what's next. Together.”

This club has been at it since 1949. I didn't build it and I won't be the last to run it. My job is to hand it on in better shape than I found it.