Dancing With Myself - Billy Idol - 1981

 

I came across a couple of photos of myself while clearingboxes I had accumulated in my attic. I think my friend, Paulette, took one of them with my trusty Kodak. You know the kind… it had those square flashbulbs that you had to carry with you, back in the ’70s.

To my amusement, I sent one to a guy friend of mine who immediately responded by sending me a photo of himself from the same year! There he was, however cool you could be back then, leaning against a tree, hand in pocket, looking like a younger version of his present-day tough self. He was a bad boy from Queens, raised by overbearing, borderline abusive parents in Amsterdam, New York. AKA the middle of nowhere. His words, not mine. My response to him was, “That girl would never have dated that boy!” We got a good chuckle out of it, and the photos were pushed aside.

Then it started.

The haunting image of some old photos and the wonderings of my former self staring so cheerfully at the camera. I started writing down things I could remember, talked to friends who knew me back then, and dug stuff out of old boxes that carry memories of lives past. Silly stuff, memorable moments, painful experiences, things I saw that I can’t unsee, things that I did that I can’t undo, all tucked away, both mentally and literally. I’ll write a few musings or essays to maybe send to my kids in my old age, I originally thought. But the more I found, the more I wrote, and the more I wrote, the more I remembered. Spiral notebooks appeared out of the depths, collages of magazine clippings taped to their covers. Envelopes glued, holding dreams, poems, ticket stubs, and love notes inside to be read again someday.

As a young teen, I was totally obsessed with snipping, ripping, and tearing bits and pieces of pictures, magazines, and photographs, taping them to the back of my bedroom door. Not the front of the door, as that was Mom territory, but I could tape away on the hidden back. Snippets of sayings, pics of my favorite actors or soap opera stars. The fronts of composition books in high school and college, each year’s big red calendar book during my fashion industry days, scrapbooks for my kids to save their childlike artwork covered in clippings. Composition notebooks by the dozens, some with covers glued together, creating an endless collection of notes and memories during nights spent at a hotel front desk. Rip, tear… from the back of the magazine first, working to the front, then actually reading the magazine from cover to cover. There is ritual to this action. Clip, snip. The horoscopes are always at the end of a magazine, and perhaps the stars and oracles have words of wisdom for me to hold me over until next month’s issue. Starting in the back became the norm.

Dreaming of the future while singing to the Top 40 on my bright yellow AM radio, I sang to all the songs 77 WABC could muster up each hour. My radio, which was shaped like a donut once twisted into its “S” shape, sat in front of me while I sang my heart out. You had one chance. No replay, no recording. You just sat and waited, hoping your favorite song would play again. My brain memorized every word. My family still laughs because I burst into songs out of nowhere, the lyrics coming back from some distant part of my mind I thought was long gone, the harmony somehow perfect even if my voice is not. Those song titles, which grounded me for decades, are now my chapter titles, for each song evoked an emotion that led to the words beneath it.

I was quite a spirited child. I showed off my ruffled panties on Candid Camera to all of America when I was five. There are photographs of me smiling with my mouth wide open. At 10, I was a “Save the Planet/Earth Day” advocate and picked up trash on the streets after school. Yes, that’s my young hand holding a Betty Crocker Recipe Card in their ads circa 1972, at age 14, when I was accosted by a young production assistant in a dark room. Don’t worry, my dad took care of him. I was awarded the yearly solo spot in my high school chorus at 16, performing with 465 backup singers. By 18, I had mastered dressmaking. At 22, I managed to earn a degree in musicology while battling thyroid disease. I married at 26, and at 28, I had my first child. It was our first together, but my husband’s eighth, as he already had seven children. At 30, I gave birth to my daughter, who became his ninth child. My decision to marry an older man caused a rift between my father and I and that rift lasted a lifetime as he refused to acknowledge our relationship. He and my mother hit the slots of Atlantic City as I walked myself down the aisle. My husband and my father never met in their lifetimes, even after 25+ years of marriage and two grandchildren. Then, at 30, my daughter was born. Her big dark eyes stared up at me, trusting I had the answers to all her questions.

In the first real professional chunk of my life, I landed a prom‐inent role at one of New York’s top modeling agencies, Wilhelmina Models, Inc. It didn’t just happen. I worked my way through retail, survived the “pig room” in college, and did a post-graduation stint at a production company I quickly grew to hate because picking up other people’s lunches wasn’t for me. I also passed through a direct marketing company that didn’t quite appreciate my ambition.

Eventually, after scoring an agent job representing New York’s top male models, I fought my way up, one position at a time, to Vice President, Chief Operations Officer, and Executive Assistant to the Owner. Spending over 20 years in the New York fashion industry of the 1980s and ’90s, I witnessed the rise and, sometimes, the fall of the industry’s most beautiful people. Studio 54, discos, supermodel parties, and, unfortunately, HIV.

Handsome men, beautiful women, and yes, there’s such a thing as too much available cash. Over the years, I watched many grow, achieve stardom, and stay on top of their game, but then again, I have also watched as others crash and burn. Meanwhile, I grew up, got married, and had children who were all surrounded and supported by my Wilhelmina family.

Decades later, nursing my very wounded ego after leaving New York City and the fashion world, I turned my inexperience of the “real world” into freakish energy. I took a local hotel job for an hourly wage and reinvented myself to the detriment of my family, especially in the beginning. I became a master at managing and motivating people in hospitality. I would need a full personality transplant in order to understand hourly employees and learn some serious lessons in dealing with the general public. A sharp contrast to years of managing young people who had reserved tables at the latest trendy restaurant and AmEx cards that got paid off in full by daddy. I plowed through day-to-day hotel ops, found and trained staff, and eventually learned how to build hotels from the ground up. I navigated a bipolar owner and his overly protective assistants, dealt with staffing diversity, day-to-day guest demands, and general customer insanity. Then there was the infamous Quality Assurance Inspector who would make a reservation under an assumed name and arrive unexpectedly. Organizing day-to-day living for my children, simultaneously nurturing my marriage, religion, and farm life while managing multiple hotels, forced me to hone my organizational skills. Six acres of lawn, trees, and old barns transformed into our home. Little faces greeted me at the door each night with endless stories to tell. Dirty feet and sticky watermelon faces to kiss made the time away seem totally worthwhile because they were so happy.

I figured out how to make money, spend money, and only recently how to save and invest money. I have accepted that life can make you laugh and cry in equal measure, sometimes both at the same time. Yes, we all want it all. Careers, family, home life, an amazing sex life, plenty of cash, and oh, the shoes! Lots of them.

But it’s an uphill battle, and you can’t wear heels.

I’ve stood within a few feet of two presidents and even shaken hands with one. I watched the funeral of JFK as a small child and cheered when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. I witnessed the end of the Vietnam War and watched the space shuttle fly by attached to the back of a 747. I met and worked one-on-one with Ivana Trump and created her website from a gallery of photos she shared with me in her New York City home, stored in hat boxes.

What began as a simple life of musings has grown into War & Pieces. It’s a classic title for my collection of memories and experiences that are worth sharing. How I fought against the family norm to make my dreams come true. This time of my “retired” life sometimes seems to be without context, which made me wonder if the present-day me is still the girl in the photos or perhaps we, she and I, are still wandering the planet aimlessly. I know that I got off the merry-go-round somewhere along the way, leaving her to ride in circles alone. That explains the times that I felt totally lost, because I was.

Since the beginning of this adventure and for the first time in a long time, I feel like I and all of my past selves are all in the same place and at the same time. Page after page that I have written has made me laugh at the naivety and cry at the disap‐pointments; I’ve puffed up with pride at all the dreams that actu‐ally came true and hidden my face at the ridiculous ones that didn’t.

Dance marathons, kissing marathons, secrets kept, secrets told. All of me, and all of my choices. There I am, so determined but ignorant and trusting of the world that lies in front of me. Those moments of hesitation, fears of being alone, and the frustration of not getting what I want when I want it. Is that the me of Christmas past?

While reading some of my college journals, I realized that although my body is aging, deep inside, I’m exactly the same as I was 50 years ago, just more complex. “Age doesn’t matter unless you’re a cheese,” words cut out from a magazine and taped to the front of a spiral notebook.

A simpler me once existed.

A personal truth project brought on by a couple of photographs and the need for validation that I have sought out throughout my life. Years spent looking for the next career fix, never satisfied with where I was, needing to keep moving forward and upward financially. But what has that done to me spiritually? I’m still looking for that answer.

Thoughts and experiences that some may recognize, loves that have come and gone, ancient memories resurfacing, this has been quite the journey. Hopefully, my children will read this through and learn some unknowns about their mother. What made her happy, what dreams she had for herself as a child and for them as children, for they existed in her head way before their feet hit the planet. Perhaps they will get teary-eyed at some of the stories, smile proudly at the accomplishments, and forgive what needs to be forgiven, yelling… Yup! That’s my Mom!

Truths told in no apparent order—that is how my mind visits each of these, so they should be presented as such. The girl with the smile, living life one day at a time, but carrying an arsenal of dreams and a head full of song lyrics.

Each essay is a reminder of what was important to me. Each experience is too important for me not to share. Maybe it will spark a memory in you, something so powerful and grounding that it will cure the incessant need to seek out more.