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by Melissa Bailey | May 19, 2006 11:36 am

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Posted to: Arts

Jessica Sager (pictured, second from left), who co-founded All Our Kin with Janna Wagner, watched the room fill with well-wishers, including two New York Times Magazine writers, at the agency’s benefit dinner Thursday at Bentara Restaurant. The New-Haven based parent- and family- empowerment agency, which just got a new pad on Grand Avenue, is nearing its seventh birthday.

Lisa Sanders, doctor, New York Times Magazine columnist, and consultant to the TV show “House”, lives in East Rock with her husband, Jack Hitt. The two told stories as a packed house sipped on wine and devoured Malaysian food. She spoke of how the assumptions we make can be obstacles: a 69-year-old patient stumped medics with a strange allergic rash until one doctor realized —‚Äù hey, this woman is having sex! Assumption disproved, the puzzle was solved: a semen-transported delivery of penicillin had caused an allergic reaction.

Hitt (pictured) told the room why they should care about the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird that has mystified ornithologists and divided scientists into those who believe in the bird’s fuzzily documented existence, and those who think it’s folklore. Click here to read his tale in the NYT Magazine. Then add this punchline: In a recent move to increase funding to hunt down the ivory-bill, money was taken out of budgets for “real endangered species” and put towards the search for the most-likely fictional bird.