Author: sandrashart

Welcome to my world! I have always loved to write, but I have spent most of my adult life in front of either a television or film camera. First as a Romper Room Teacher, then in television series and movies where writing took a backstage place in my life. I am now over 50 and have the freedom to get back to expressing myself through writing. I muse about my life and thoughts and just about everything under the sun. The only order to it is life itself as lived. Natural chaos! I am married and have three grown children who are interested in breeding horses, flying and creating. My youngest is the lead singer/songwriter of the Grammy nominated band, Tonic, Emerson Hart. So here I am, wanting to read about you and at the same time bringing you along with me to mine. I hope you will find me just as interesting as I do you! Hop aboard for the ride.

Start Living With Things That Matter

At the end of next month we will begin packing up for the summer and traveling North for the snowbird flight we have been making for the last ten years. My wings are getting rather weary of leaving one nest for the other. I am longing to simplify my life and roost in only one nest and start living with the things that really matter.

Earlier this year we flew to Los Angeles to visit with a male friend of my husband’s whose wife has decorated their home in museum-quality style. Now I really love this woman. She is kind and intelligent and very generous with her time in helping others. But when it comes to her house, she becomes a different sort all together.

So it was no surprise as we all showered that evening to go out when I heard a scream that rang from her cathedral ceilings and back again as she ran down the hall. “What! How could he! Arthur is using the guest bathroom!? Nobody uses the guest bathroom!”

As I opened the door, draped in an ordinary towel I found in the under-guest-guest bathroom, I saw my husband standing there like a sheep-faced child, caught in a dastardly deed.

Our hostess quickly went into the coveted-never-used guest bathroom and proceeded to wipe the faucets spotless and clean up the chaos my husband made of her perfect-to-look-at room.

That experience started me thinking about what type of person I am and forced me to look in the mirror at my own idiosyncrasies.

I learned valuable lessons in Los Angeles. Mainly, the most important was to be a more forgiving wife. And better yet, how to be a more compassionate wife. I had forgotten in my quest to be Martha Stewart, that hugging a mop is not as much fun as hugging a husband.

When I came home I threw out all of our old ratty towels with strings fraying at the ends and bought big fluffy premiere guest towels for Arthur. Who cares if our bathroom floor becomes the Nile River when he showers, or if I slip into the commode in the middle of the night because he forgets to put down the lid.

Now, instead of having a post-menopausal fit if I can’t find the new ten dollar herbal soap I just put at the basin, I forgivingly retrieve it in the shower from a cache of soap he constantly steals, because he forgets what he did yesterday.

This morning I found on our foyer floor a crumpled baggie carrying a bar he had stolen for the beach. I know Karma slipped it from his bag just for me.

I have even learned not to straighten up and fluff the couch pillows each time he or the dogs have rearranged them. I leave my grandchild’s handprints for a bit longer than usual on my mirrors. And now and then, when I am really feeling frisky, I tilt a candle in the candelabra just a bit to remind myself life isn’t perfect and human feeling and comfort are worth more than material things with esthetic balance.

10 Reasons Why It’s Not Over At Fifty

Sadly, the down economy has put a lot of workers over age 50 in the unenviable position of needing to find a new profession. Don’t believe that old cliché about middle-aged dogs and new tricks, though; lots of wildly successful people found big success in careers they began after their fiftieth birthdays. Here are just a few examples.

1. Carole Gardner – Zelda Wisdom products.

2. Grandma Moses- Artist

3. Col. Saunders – Kentucky Fried Chicken

4. Frank McCourt – Angela’s Ashes

5. Martha Stewart – Lifestyle

6. Laura Ingles Wilder – Little House On The Prairie

7. Tim and Nina Zagat – Zagat

8. Takichiro Mori – Architect

9. Ray Kroc – McDonalds

10. Rodney Dangerfield – Comedian

Although Rodney Dangerfield suffered from getting ‘no respect’ he had self-compassion in common with the many late bloomers who opened another chapter in their lives in their 40s, 50s and beyond.

Late bloomers. I love that title and have been wearing it since I was 21. I wear it proudly knowing that I can bloom again and again and again. I never thought I had to wait until I was 40 or 50. Some of us are annual bloomers, or else have so many creative arms that we are perennial and can open new chapters in our lives continuously. We all are only limited by how many years we have on this earth.

I think it’s getting better, but there still is a stigma associated with aging. We still live in a closed- minded culture, but there is nothing more fulfilling than taking a negative event in your life and turning it into a positive life-changing situation.

For instance let’s take Carol Gardner. Carol is the creator of Zelda Wisdoms. At The age of 52 Carol was facing divorce that left her with huge debt, a bleak future with no income, and depression.

It was suggested that she get a dog to keep her company. She did. A bulldog that she named Zelda and she entered a local contest that was giving away 40 pounds of dog food a month free for the winner. So Carol took pictures of Zelda in the bathtub, with hats on and designed a card with a message that said, “For Christmas I got a dog for my husband….Good Trade, huh?” She won the contest, Zelda had plenty of food and starting with 24 Zelda Greeting Cards, Carol has now created a multi-million dollar worldwide Zelda Wisdom empire. Talk about making lemonade out of lemons!

Personally, in my 20’s I started a career in television working for others, then in my 30’s overcame the loss of my husband by taking my television skills into marketing while raising my small children. I sent resumes out for a full year before anyone would hire an anchorwoman with small children in a private sector job. But I never gave up. In my 40’s I remarried and became a television producer and entrepreneur. I woke up one morning just before my 50th birthday and realized how fast life was moving for me and I had yet to do what I always had dreamed as a child – to act on the stage. So at 50 I embarked on one of the most exciting journeys in my life doing theater, television and film in New York City.

Nothing was ever handed to me and I had to work very hard opening new doors for each of these chapters in my life, but I persevered and I had self-compassion and I believed in the impossible dream – just the same as the 10 above ‘second chapter’ successes.

When I was 61 I opened yet another chapter in my life by writing my memoir, Behind The Magic Mirror. I discovered the process so fulfilling that I continue to write my thoughts in books, articles, and on a weekly basis through this blog.

In the end, I hope that I will be open to other journeys in my life. It is not over until it’s over. As I wrote earlier, only time here on this planet can limit us. Nothing else. It is never too late to rediscover and reinvent your life. It is never to late to make lemonade!

http://www.sandrahart.net/sandrahart.net/Home.html

THREDS ARE LIKE COMFORT FOODS

I love clothes. Whether it’s from Anthropology, Sundance, Walmart, or the thrift shop, it doesn’t matter. I enjoy mixing styles and choosing colors that suit me. I’m not so interested in what anybody else is wearing out there, but I have to admit I’m not as courageous as my daughter Brett. She wins the prize for giving her mother most of her gray hair. Her creative fashion genius was always in high gear and over the top.

For instance, in high school Brett once cut a neck-hole in a black plastic bag, belted it and wore it to high school one day.

First good thing. They must not have had any dress code because I don’t ever remember getting a call from the principal to come and get her.

Second good thing. My main worry was that if anyone lit a match near her she would go up in flames. They didn’t.

Whether it is a positive thing or not, I have always allowed my children to follow their own fashion feelings. I have tongue scars to prove it, silently watching my children morph into and out of teenage clothing trends. I hyperventilated for years watching them go out the door wanting to get a large hook or straight jacket and pull them back in. Especially the girls. Brett loved crazy hairdos and outfits. Alison loved crazy hats. The things she put on her head, were remarkable. Hats of every shape and size and color that sometimes made her look like a female version of Bob Denver on Gilligan’s Island.

My son escaped the male ‘fashionitis’ because he was always in either a school or Boy Scout uniform. His craze was rock icon T-shirts. Jeans and T-shirts. His obsession was his guitar.

All of these memories came about as today I am wearing a pair of linen pants that I got at the GAP – maybe 17 years ago. They are my favorite pants and they are in a style that wouldn’t be caught dead in a GAP store today. They are beige and the linen is worn so thin that by now it’s like fine Egyptian linen and the wide pant legs are frayed from being tortured for years by ground-sliding at the hem. But I absolutely love these pants. The older I get the shorter I get and the more punishment these poor hems go through. Whenever I want to feel comfortable or I can’t think of anything else to wear, I throw on these pants and I’m a happy woman. Every time I throw them into the laundry I pray that they don’t die. These pants are my security blanket and a link to my younger days.

I remember the last time I saw my son he was wearing a pair of jeans with holes everywhere. I don’t know how they were staying on his torso.

“Emerson,” I said, “those things are falling apart!”

“But, Mother, they’re my favorite pair of jeans.”

And again, I had to bite my tongue, but I also had to laugh at myself thinking about my raggedy linen pants from the GAP waiting for me at home. Those thread-bore pants that are such a part of my “chicken-soup-for-the-soul comfort threds”.

What Is Your ‘What If’?

Steve Tilston. Does anyone out there with 1970′-80’s Steve Tilston folk music ears remember the British folk singer? His songs have been recorded by Fairport Convention, Dolores Keane, Peter Bellamy, and so many others. His instrumental style crosses classical music with Irish and English folk. He also plays an early 19th-century instrument called an arpeggione (bowed guitar).

Steve’s Story

With all of his commercial success, Tilston at the age of 21 was plagued with the thought that he just might be selling out and corrupting his artistry.

In August 2010, it was reported that John Lennon had penned a letter of support to Tilston in 1971, though it was never delivered. Lennon had been inspired to write to the then 21 year-oldt folk singer after having read an interview in ZigZag magazine in which Tilston admitted he feared wealth and fame might negatively affect his songwriting. In a ‘as-fate-would-have-it-event’ Tilson did not become aware of the letter’s existence until a collector contacted him in 2005 to verify its authenticity. “Being rich doesn’t change your experience in the way you think,” Lennon wrote. It was signed “Love John and Yoko”.

I’m wondering if Steve Tilston would have changed his feelings about his work, or would have taken his music in a different direction had he received that letter from John Lennon as a 21-year-old. I doubt it, because great musicians put their unique and individual stamp into the musical history books. It’s in their DNA.

With all the albums and accomplishment Steve Tilston has had since that letter was written, it doesn’t seem he has lived with many creative regrets. In February 2012 the title track from The Reckoning was awarded Best Original Song at the BBC 2 Radio Awards.

Well, Steve is now being immortalized in a new movie starring Al Pacino. Pacino with his tufts of gravity-defying, shoe-polish hair and burnt-orange tan, who for awhile now has been sporting the look of a famous-than-thou aging rock star, has finally gotten around to playing one – which he does, exceedingly well, in “Danny Collins, a familiar late-in-life redemption narrative, based on the life of Steve Tilston.

So, famous or not, life for all of us is full of ‘what if’s’. What if I hadn’t moved? What if I hadn’t gone out that night? What if I had only driven another road? What if I hadn’t gone to that audition? (my true ‘what if’) If we constantly allow ourselves to live in the past instead of the future, we easily could ‘what if’ ourselves to death with regret.

The moral of this story is: Throw salt over your shoulder and keep walking forward!

The Reason I Love The Arts

I am one who really appreciates the arts in all of its many forms and I’m especially very sad to see the exhibit The Chosen: Selected Works from Jewish Florida Art Collectors to end here in South Beach. The collection was comprised of many gifted and well-known artists across the spectrum and curated by a wonderful art patron and former owner of New York City and Wynwood Art Galleries here in Florida, Bernice Steinbaum.

Bernice is quite a character and equally quite brilliant in finding and nurturing artistic talent.

So this piece today is an homage to Bernice Steinbaum, the artists who thrived under her wings and to us, who have benefited from her discoveries.

Suarez De Jesus

On a recent weekday morning, Bernice Steinbaum welcomes a delegation of University of Virginia graduates for a tour of her eponymous Wynwood gallery. Outside flutters a giant banner with her picture. The caption: “Know BS.”

Dressed in a lavish red, green, and gold skirt and jacket created from a wedding kimono and smiling widely behind enormous eyeglasses, Steinbaum walks the group through her current exhibit, “The Three Dimensional Gods and Goddesses Meet Their Cousins the Trees,” which features mixed-media-on-aluminum works by local Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié.

As she passionately describes the paintings’ vodou inspiration, Steinbaum, who earned a doctorate in arts education from Columbia University, holds her audience rapt.

Since opening her two-story space on the corner of 36th Street and North Miami Avenue a decade ago, she has hosted hundreds of such tours. “For me,” she says, “it’s always been more about educating the public about art than about sales.”

Next month, the 68-year-old Steinbaum will close her gallery permanently after 38 years in the business. Her departure comes at a time when local artists such as FriendsWithYou, Jen Stark, and Alvaro Ilizarbe (AKA Freegums) have announced they are relocating to Los Angeles. Unchecked gentrification in Wynwood and the Design District has raised fears that creative types and smaller galleries might soon be priced out of the area.

“She is one of the serious galleries in town and will leave a void when she’s gone,” observes Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, a local artist and one of the founders of the Design District space Dimensions Variable. “Not only was she a pioneer here and represented pretty good talent, but early on she embraced local artists and showed their work.”

Prior to her career as a dealer, Steinbaum worked in the Iowa public school system and was an associate professor at Drake University. While living in Iowa, she had her own TV program, Art Time With Mrs. Steinbaum. Later she was a professor at New York’s Hofstra University before opening a gallery in NYC.

Early in her career, while still in New York, Steinbaum chose to represent artists outside the mainstream and built her stable to include about “50 percent women and 35 percent artists of color,” she says.

“As I visited the galleries and museums in New York several times a week, it occurred to me that many of the women and artists of color —Asians, Latinos, African-Americans, and Native Americans — who were graduating with MFAs were not being shown at these places. And if dealers weren’t exhibiting their works, and critics weren’t writing about them, the museum curators were not going to discover them,” Steinbaum says.

“As a feminist, I realized that the art world would benefit from this plethora of voices, and it became my calling… [Of course] I showed the work of white guys too,” she adds with a chuckle.

Since opening her gallery in Wynwood in 2000, Steinbaum has been a catalyst for the development of the arts scene. She bought her building in 1998 after selling her 23-year-old gallery in New York and moving here to be closer to her children — Carrie, Sarah, and Jeremy — who had been living in the Miami area for 15 years.

“Carrie is 40 years old and a landscape architect who went to Harvard,” Steinbaum beams. “Sarah is 42 and Jeremy 47. They both graduated from the University of Miami. Sarah is an attorney and teaches at UM during evenings. Jeremy is a surgeon and lives in Orlando,” she says. Steinbaum’s husband Harold was also a physician. He passed away two years ago.

After relocating to Wynwood, the dealer dreamed of converting the blighted area into the base of a thriving arts scene. “When I purchased the building, my daughters were furious,” Steinbaum recalls. “The neighborhood was unsavory, and the lot across the street was dotted with rusting shipping containers. My building was being used as a crack house, and people were sleeping behind the walls.

“But they forgot that I’m from New York and had a New Yorker’s savvy. I felt that this could really grow to become a great arts community. Today there are about 70 galleries in the district. Some will remain open and others won’t.”

Steinbaum won’t reveal the amount she paid for the property. “That’s relative. But I can tell you I invested a small fortune repairing cracked windows and clearing the cokeheads and drug paraphernalia and needles that littered the space to turn it into a respectable cultural institution,” she says.

It took Steinbaum two years to convert the space into one of Wynwood’s premier showcases. Today her gallery represents three MacArthur “genius grant” recipients — Pepon Osorio, Amalia Mesa-Bains, and Deborah Willis — five Guggenheim fellows, multiple National Endowment for the Arts award winners, two Annenberg fellows, and other lauded artists.

“They include Ken Aptekar, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Hung Liu, Miriam Schapiro, Faith Ringgold. There are so many I can’t honestly remember all their names now,” she says.

Back in the summer of 2000, Miami artist Karen Rifas caught Steinbaum’s eye. Rifas’s installation consisting of 24 mirrors arranged on the gallery’s walls and floor was on display as part of “Levity and Gravity,” a group show curated by Amy Cappellazzo and Tiffany Huot at Steinbaum’s gallery.

Photos Sandra Hart

NEIGHBORS FROM HELL

“

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall….he only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Robert Frost

Throughout centuries history has proven that wars seem to have the same issues over and over again. Borders, power and religion. No matter how evolved we as people feel we are the cycle seems to repeat itself century after century. Which brings me back to a blog I wrote but didn’t publish last summer about my own border war.

The best neighbor I have ever had was Fred Rogers. Really. He was in my neighborhood, the television one, of course, when I was on Romper Room. He was the best and I guess I am really spoiled by that good neighbor. As my friends and readers know, my home has almost 2 acres on a cul-de-sac with unparalleled views. But because I’m not an island I do in reality have two neighbors- one to the left and one to the right off the cul de sac.

Luckily, the house was built on the ocean cliff far away from those neighbors to the left and to the right, giving me privacy, but they are still there. On the right there are 60 year old tall evergreens that give me a natural fence and a wonderful neighbor. On the left I had a beautiful white lattice fence following my circle beach stone drive that was repainted white every other year to match the trim on the house. No that is not a typo. “Had” is the key word here. Had.

I am sad to admit I am a big loser. I lost the Good Neighbor Lottery. I have inherited by just being, in my opinion, The Neighbors From Hell to the left of me. If there was a trophy given, they would win the award, hands down. They reallllllyyyy know how to work it.

In the past and during years that he and his partner have lived on my left flank (please take note of the military term), during my Florida annual absence they have turned my home into theirs by parking their boat and trailer in my driveway, hitting and damaging part of my fence, cutting down trees on my property to accommodate their view, and more or less, making themselves at home on my land.

Then last summer, my consistent ‘turning of my cheek’ giving me whiplash, I was blindsided by the Code Officer upon my return from Florida saying my neighbor complained that I had to paint their side of my fence (because they think my house is also theirs..I guess). They are both in their 50’s-I am, well…..much older. Besides they had so much shrubbery along the property line those little mischief monkeys would have needed a machete to reach my fence. They couldn’t even see it from their yard.

When the Code officer came to look at my legal fence, he noticed my neighbor had so many violations he made them take down all of his violations on his property ( poetic justice, finally).

By this time, my husband had gotten so angry about the whole thing he had the fence torn down before I knew it. Goodbye fence that I loved. Hello easy access to my property. Thank you Husband.

Cause and effect.

These guys really missed my (their) fence and were real pros in the deepest state of mourning. In retaliation, one night after a few too many cocktails trying to drown their sorrows over the loss of my (their) fence, I suspect, my glass door was smashed out in our cottage, just twenty feet from my old fence line. Hummm…wonder who did that? I beefed up property security cameras inside and out.

Fast forward to this summer. After a quiet winter away, forgetting all about the “Fence War” and knowing the good surveillance I now have, figured it was peace…at last. I had hoped they had matured, gotten a life and moved on. Oh, why I am so cursed to be such a Pollyanna!

Three days ago during an open house I was having, they put an almost naked mannequin on the ex-fence property line looking right at me and my company as they drove in. The wives were appalled and the husbands couldn’t take their eyes off of her! The sleeping tiger had awakened. The kids were at it again.

The other day they put up a new art instillation (I wish) smack dab on the property line – a row of white plastic chairs, two wooden benches with recycled metal grates of some kind leaning between them. I guess, as my daughter Alison suggested, it is their contribution to Red Neck art!

Like the Energizer Bunny they just don’t stop. Yesterday they posted two signs facing my property. KEEP OFF and POSTED NO TRESPASSING.

Since it has been probably more than six years since I have been invited onto their property, I find those signs rather sad and bizarre, wondering if those two are ever going to get over missing my fence and start acting like good neighbors.

So, the moral of this story for me is, “treat kids like kids”. I have taken the attitude that I always had with my children. If I don’t respond, their glee at knowing it bothers me will eventually be abated. And to be honest, I really am amazed to understand that what I think is so important to them. If they were mine, boy, would they have a big ‘time out’!

(Author’s note: written in July of 2014…All is now quiet on the Western Front…I think they have given up on ‘elder abuse’ and property envy….at least until they think of something else. And I have new respect for the meaning of ‘borders without fences.’)

Where To Begin When Writing

Except for my children’s books, all of my previous published works have been non-fiction. Giving myself a challenge this year, my daughter suggested that I should try my hand at fiction.

“Write a novel,” she said. “Do something different.”

That thought kind of frightens me, because it is really out of the box in which I have been living, out of my comfort zone. There are so many great novelists out there, I am somewhat intimidated to jump into their pool.

Recently, for my SAG (Screen Actors Guild) voting duties, I watched Frances McDormand in the series, Olive Kitteridge.” I enjoyed the series so much, I ordered the book the series was based upon.

Elizabeth Strout, the author, has such a way with words. From the very first paragraph I was drawn in and couldn’t put it down. It is this kind of writing that really makes it challenging for me to think I could be as talented to paint pictures with words as she does in Olive Kitteridge.

PESTO’S UBER TALE

On Monday after his morning walk our sweet rescued Pesto became paralyzed in an instant. After our vet recommended a neurologist within an hour he was headed to the MRI and resulting disc surgery.

During all this drama our car was in the shop so I had to rely on the car service Uber to get us back and forth the veterinary office.

The trip we made to pick up Pesto after his operation, Uber sent us a very interesting Egyptian driver, an accountant by trade, who had been in this country about two years. He met online and married a woman living in Miami from Honduras.

Before coming to America he said he never could understand how Americans could feel so strongly about their dogs. In Egypt dogs wander the streets and they are never incorporated into the family unit, but he added that his wife has a little Yorky and he has fallen in love with her. She greets him with all of her wiggles as soon as he opens the door and makes him feel loved. It has taken this experience with the little dog to change his whole life’s mindset about the relationship between animals and human beings. He said that indeed they do have souls and they can love. An admitted revelation he never would’ve experienced had he not come to America.

To me this has been a learning experience, or lesson in cultural understanding, that if we could take this on to a bigger picture and walk in each other shoes, then maybe, we could understand one another much better. The curious custom of loving a pet and regarding them as a part of the family could only be understood by him until he experienced it.

As we arrived home my husband told Ahmed how much Pesto’s treatment cost. He threw up his hands in dismay. “Do you know in Egypt I could get married, have a big wedding and buy a house equal to that!”

Pesto do you really know how lucky you are to live in America ?!

FIFTY SHADES OF GREYISH

(MORE magazine just announced that I am finally trending. Gray hair is in for 2015. Well, actually, I’m not grey, I’m platinum, but it’s all the same-all natural and it’s all me. I am not too sure I would’ve wound up letting my true self be exposed if I had not had a very negative thing happened to me in my late 40s that forced me to be who I am.)

Hair Today-Gone Tomorrow and Trending!

They were the most beautiful roses I had ever seen. Their perfumed fragrance drew me toward them and instantly my face caught fire. Masses of giant red ants with glowing eyes enveloped my face injecting their poison into every available inch of my face.

I woke up with my heart racing. Only a dream, I thought, but in a millisecond I realized that in my subconscious nocturnal state I was living what was happening to me in reality. I could hardly open my eyes with the heaviness of what felt like hundreds of Lilliputians weighing down my eyelids. My face burned, mimicking the toxins of swarming bees stinging my face. I got up and looked in the mirror. Everything above my neck was red, swollen and was oozing with tiny blisters. My scalp was an inferno.

It took many doctors and two weeks of sleeping upright in pain until I finally got the proper diagnosis. The culprit behind my suffering? An acute allergic reaction to paraphenylenediamine used in hair dye.

How did I know, I was never tested. With the exception of one time in New York when I had my hair dyed Swiss chocolate, I have always had natural blonde hair. Right after that I experienced what seemed to be a slight facial eczema, but didn’t connect the dots to hair dye.

My acute episode happened in my late 40s when my blonde hair began to look very monotone and faded. I decided to have my hair reverse frosted. That is a process of placing dark blonde streaks going through my colorless hair to brighten it. (Of course my hairdresser never patch tested me for PPD allergy. In addition, that reaction, for years gave me cross reactions to other substances. A real nightmare sorting out to what I was newly allergic and not.)

For awhile my agent suggested I use the vegetable based red henna so that I wouldn’t be put into an ‘aging’ category and could get more acting jobs. But eight years ago, finally getting tired of the process, I said enough is enough and decided to just be me and see what was under all that henna.

And there it was, my white hair hiding under that red mop all those years. “Free at last!”

So I guess in a weird way I can be ever grateful to PPD for forcing me to be me and appropriately age with no pretenses of being other then I am.

Be Careful What you Wish

ArchieArchie

Be Careful What You Wish

Harvey Weinstein, Oscar producer/distributor and the longtime defender of human rights and political freedoms, in reference to the murders in Paris of the cartoonists at France’s satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo by terrorists wrote yesterday, “This preamble hopefully illustrates the humanity and the affection that I think people have for cartoons. From the Sunday funnies like Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie that helped us through the Depression, to Peanuts and Doonesbury, they sometimes provide better wisdom than known philosophers. I’ll take Charlie Brown over Rene Descartes, and put Linus in Socrates’ class, any day of the week. Although it’s Lucy who has the voice of a cartoonist — ironic, funny and eye-opening.”

How very much I relate to his thoughts. When I was a little girl in the late 1940’s living on a farm in Ohio, one of the popular radio shows was called “Archie Andrews” from a comic strip of the day, “Archie”.

Growing up in a farmhouse surrounded by cornfields and livestock, far away from the nearest neighbors down the dusty road, the concept of living in a place like Riverdale with best friends in the same building or next door fascinated me. When my brother clicked on the radio on Saturday mornings so we could eavesdrop on what adventure Archie and his friends were having that week, for that small moment in time, my brother and I lost our isolation and became part of Archie’s family.

Archie’s parents, Mary and Fred Andrews became our parents. His high school, Riverdale High, not the one-room schoolhouse that my brother attended, became ours. Everything about this teenager and his friends Veronica and best buddy, Jughead, were interesting to two kids living a less-than-exciting life on their grandpa’s farm. We longed to live in Riverdale and go to a school just like Archie’s.

Well, as my story unfolds, a few years later, it would be that life threw us a piece of that emancipation pie. We were headed toward Archie’s teenage dream life. I clearly remember looking back, the dust beneath the tires of Daddy’s shiny new Ford slowly obliterating the view of the house as it got smaller and smaller going away from Grandpa’s farm. We were traveling eighteen miles east to live in a real house and in a real town close to Daddy’s work.

My brother and I soon found out that life on Archie’s radio show was much more exciting than it was in our smog filled industrial town. It wasn’t the Riverdale my brother and I had dreamed about. We got our wish alright and we couldn’t wait to graduate from our high school so that we could leave. We would be free to follow our Archie dream once again.

From the time we eagerly drove away from life on Grandpa’s farm those many years ago, I have lived in exactly six places. Several were big city apartments, several suburban houses near big cities and the one that means the most to me is the house on an ocean cliff with the view that fills my heart every day I look out it’s windows. I can stretch my arms wide without touching anything, see and hear no neighbors and have the silence of only what nature brings to me. This house gifts, yes, gifts me peace from all the static in the world around me. Freedom to live where and how I want.

Now in every writer’s toolbox is a thread that ties everything together. It contains the embryo, or idea of the story you want to tell and how it sews neatly together the message you want share with your reader. A quilt of words.

This particular quilt I’m sewing today is, ‘be careful what you wish for in this life’ and be sure to be ready to protect it.

I have been able to live in what I believe to be the greatest country in the world with the best choices in life available. For me, FREEDOM is one of the most important words in the English language. Freedom of Religion. Freedom of Speech. Freedom to be me.

So little Archie girl beware of what you wish. Your dream life in your imagination from the radio or Archie comics may never come true if you and humanity are not careful to honor, appreciate and protect the right to dream.

I don’t ever want to feel stifled. I don’t ever want to feel, as a writer, that I am in a box knocking on the lid crying, “get me out of here!”

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Suarez De Jesus

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: