Tag: generation fabulous

Mother of Reinvention

I am a member of the Generation Fabulous group of midlife bloggers, which runs a monthly bloghop. This month’s topic is “Reinvention.”

English: Agraulis vanillae butterfly. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My home town of Los Angeles didn’t invent the concept of reinvention, but it is probably the capital of it. For generations, my city has beckoned folks from around the world to relocate, rethink and make a new start. I don’t know if it’s California’s climate, laid back attitude or relative newness, but this place seems to be a magnet for people who know in their hearts that if they can’t make it where they are, here is where they will have a shot.

This is great for all of them – but it leaves me kind of cold. I was born here and have lived here just about all my life. Where do I go to get a fresh start?

The truth is, reinvention is not a process just for artists or hustlers, nor does it require a change in geography. All of us hit stages where the life we define for ourselves no longer fits, when we need to shed an old skin and start anew. And I think it happens more frequently for women.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot these last few months as my daughter entered 12th grade and I’ve been hit with the reality of the empty nest looming just ahead. Being a stay at home mom was never in my plan; before she was born I was confident that I would handle motherhood and career with the same competency I had always displayed in my professional life. I was wrong, and admitting that shook me to the core.

I did not reinvent myself as a full time mom – the world did that for me. I became aware of this the first time I accompanied my husband to a work event, and I got that inevitable question, “And what do YOU do?” My answer – that I was home with a toddler – stopped the conversation cold. I got the message, loud and clear: to the world at large, there is nothing interesting about being a mom. Better keep that information to yourself and let the people who matter do the talking.

Of course, the work of raising a child DOES matter, and I am immensely proud of my daughter and the fact that she is secure in the knowledge that no matter what happens, she has a mother and father who are always there to support her.

I am also proud of things I have accomplished these 15 years at home that have little to do with her, especially this little blog I started a decade ago as a creative outlet – long before anyone was using the term “social media.” It has introduced me to a world of fabulous, interesting people who are doing fabulous, interesting things. It has led me to some incredible adventures that I never imagined: including an appearance in People magazine and the opportunity to cover a Presidential convention.

As a stay at home mom, I have reinvented myself as an automotive writer, a political pundit and a podcaster. But I did not arrive at any of these reinventions with any sort of plan: they just happened.

And now, I am at a crossroads. My blogging and other ventures don’t add much to the family purse. And now that my daughter doesn’t need me to be a presence 24 hours a day, what I really need to do is get back out into the world and earn a living. The problem is, regardless of what I have done these 15 years at home, the world still sees me as “just a mom.” And a 57-year-old one, at that.

I am finding re-entry hard. And I can’t see the way to get it done.

I don’t think I need to reinvent myself. But I think we all need to reinvent the world’s idea of the vibrancy, energy, wisdom and value of women who happen to have spent several years raising a family.

We are a force. And a natural resource being wasted. And that is a shame.

Tags generation fabulous, midlife, reinvention

Summer Songs, Good Times

1979's summer songs were heavy on disco — Dance tunes were hot summer songs in 1979.

I am a member of the Generation Fabulous group of midlife bloggers, which runs a monthly bloghop. This month’s topic is “Songs of Summer.”

Did you catch that viral Stephen Colbert dance video to Daft Punk’s hit summer song — “Get Lucky” — a couple of weeks ago? No? Go look at it now and I’ll refrain from asking you which rock you’ve been living under …

Didn’t that make you smile? I first heard that song back in May, when my daughter had it in her head and couldn’t stop singing it. I liked it so much I actually purchased it on my iPhone, because it reminded me of the stuff I used to dance to back in the 1970’s.

I only recently learned that the “Song of Summer” is a thing now, with newspapers, radio and TV shows weighing in on whether this year’s title belongs to “Get Lucky” or Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” — which I guess means the real winner is Pharrell Williams, who had a hand in both those hits.

And to be honest, I don’t really care for the exercise of picking one tune and designating it THE song of the summer (or any season, for that matter) — not when there are so many wonderful recordings to enjoy at any time. How do you pick just one? I can’t — and so I won’t.

This year’s “Get Lucky’s” disco-tastic guitar riff was performed by Nile Rodgers, who practically invented that sound in the 1970s.

Mind you, I was a KMET listener back then — and if you are an Angeleno of a certain age, you know that means that I was not a fan of Nile Rodgers or his band, Chic. You would not find anything by the Bee Gees or KC and the Sunshine Band in my record collection. But if you were looking for a steady stream of Led Zeppelin, The Who, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, I was your woman. (I also spent a lot of time listening to Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan and anything Motown.)

In the summer of 1979, I landed a job at Los Angeles radio station KHJ-AM.

Ten years earlier, KHJ had been THE place you dialed to hear the hits — but by the time I got there, the superior quality of the FM signal had spurred a nearly total migration of music programming over to the other band, where a new hard rock “album oriented” format (AOR) took hold. I should know: from the age of 12 until I graduated from high school, KHJ was the only station I listened to. Then I switched over to FM and never looked back… until KHJ hired me to work in their research department.

KHJ was still trying to be relevant with its one-size-fits-all slate of Top 40 hits, as popular music began a rapid fracture into the different micro-formats we see today. It was democratic: Top 40 stations played disco, rock, country, and easy listening — all back to back. The only criteria was that the songs had to make it into the top half of the Billboard Hot 100.

I was part of a team that conducted listener surveys to measure the popularity of the songs we were playing (and some we were thinking of playing). Personal computers were not commonplace yet. Each day that summer, I was given a printout of random telephone numbers to call. If the person on the other end of the call fit our target demographic and was willing to participate, I would play a tape featuring a snippet (usually the hook) from each of about a dozen tunes.

So I spent that summer tethered to a telephone headset and reel-to-reel tape player along with three other individuals, making phone calls and listening to little snippets of hit songs. We conducted those surveys every day, Monday through Friday, for five hours a day, which meant I listened to those tapes a good 30 times or more each shift. It wasn’t a wonderful job in terms of creative challenge or salary — but it was fun, mainly because of the people I worked with. We supported each other. We hung out together. We became friends.

Popular music was going through an interesting phase that year. The charts were still heavy with the wave of dance music in the wake of the “Saturday Night Fever” phenomenon, but there was a backlash popularized by AOR disc jockeys like Chicago’s Steve Dahl. “Disco sucks” was their rallying cry, and I agreed.

But it was already too late. The taste of the music buying public was morphing. The punk rock aesthetic of high energy, less technically perfect production was coming into its own, commercially. The airwaves still carried a lot of dance music, but there was suddenly room for new sounds, too — from acts like Blondie, the Clash, the Pretenders and the Police — as well as a revolutionary little ditty from an act that called itself The Sugarhill Gang. Little did we know when we heard “Rappers Delight” that it would mark the beginning of an entirely new direction in popular music — which is still morphing today.

Hearing these songs makes me smile and you know what? It’s good to hear Nile Rodgers again.

This is a Blog Hop! Read other Summer Song posts by members of Generation Fabulous:

Tags 1979, Billboard Hot 100, generation fabulous, los angeles radio, music, song of summer, summer song

Cardiff England Generation Fabulous Travel

A Family of Travelers

Dec. 1991: The Norman Keep and me. At Cardiff Castle.

Dec. 1991: Upon landing at Heathrow, we took the Tube so I could get my first glimpse of Buckingham Palace before going on to Wales.

I recently became a member of the Generation Fabulous group of midlife bloggers, which runs a monthly bloghop. This month’s topic is “Transformative Travel.”

I rarely went anywhere in my 20s and early 30s. I was too focused then on trying to stay employed in the entertainment industry… and looking for love in all the wrong places.

And then: I finally found it, with someone who was here on a student visa. And a few years later, I found myself on a plane to London so I could meet his family.

It was Christmas, and as a lifelong Californian, I expected to be cold. That frightened me.

“I’m kind of a hothouse flower,” I reminded him.

But you know what? Weather conditions that would keep me indoors here in Los Angeles didn’t phase me in the United Kingdom. OK, there was that one outing on the top of Caerphilly Mountain that brought tears to my eyes that I swore at the time were frozen — but I discovered that I could handle freezing temperatures, rainy weather and cold, blustery wind just fine… so long as I was experiencing them anywhere but California.

That trip taught me a few other lessons:

That my American accent was just as incomprehensible to my future in-laws as theirs was to me.
That the United States and Britain are indeed two countries separated by a common language. (Helpful tip: Do not put “salad cream” on your salad — unless you want said salad to taste like cole slaw.)
That socialized medicine is a beautiful thing in action. (Both of my husband’s parents ended up in the hospital – for separate ailments – over my two weeks in Britain on that first trip. And the care they received was impressive. With no scary bills to pay.)
That I love to travel.

I love seeing new places, trying new foods, learning new histories, taking photographs (prior to that trip, I did not even own a camera). And as the years have passed and we married and became a family, this love is something we shared with our daughter. She made her first trip to meet her British grandparents when she was just four months old and we visited as often as our budget would allow — until the economy crashed. By then, my father-in-law had passed away. We could have saved a lot of money by staying home, but I’m proud that our girl has a relationship with her cousins and wonderful memories of her grandpa.

She has also been to big cities like New York and Paris and natural wonders like Yosemite and Alaska’s Glacier Park. And I know she won’t wait until her mid-thirties to get out of her comfort zone and see the world outside Los Angeles. Because we are a family of travelers.

Read the rest of the BlogHop Entries at Generation Fabulous:

Tags generation fabulous, travel

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