It seems impossible that my cohort is turning 50, and yet, there it is.
I'm sliding into it myself, just three years and change to go. Truth be told, I can't wait: my 40s were so much better than my 30s, which were so much better than my 20s, which were so much better than my teens, I figure my 50s are going to rock the house.
Or, at the very least, that I'll get another decade or two of yum before I hit the point of diminishing returns.
On the other hand, it's a good thing I've some time. Half a century is a significant achievement, and calls for a marker of equal significance. I received one such tribute about a week ago, from my friend and former art director, Kevin Houlihan. He assembled 50 of the people he'd met along the way, from the godmother who held him at his baptism to a friend he met in a bar about a year ago, and asked us each to write a little something for a book he wanted to assemble about the people he'd met along the way.
Here's the beauty part, though: instead of asking us to write about him, he asked us to write about ourselves. His point? That, as his wise and no-nonsense New Hampshire-bred father used to say, "You can tell a man by the company he keeps." So Kevin sent each participant a series of questions designed to help us unearth what it was about us that had helped him learn about himself.
The result? A breathtaking compendium of musings, stories and yes, a little haranguing, that is universally appealing because of the specificity of approach. I'm forever parroting every English teacher I've ever had about the key to great writing lying in the detail of the personal truth one lays out there; maybe instead of yakking, I could just direct people to this book.
Unfortunately, it's a private publishing of 50, one for each participant. There has been a groundswell of support for a more public release, but until that happens, you'll just have to content yourself with one of my entries and imagine the rest. The question to me was what, if anything, did the various & sundry creative outlets for my expression have in common, and how did I continue to nurture my creativity.
It's a wonderful question for anyone to ask of themselves, or of their loved ones; it's a glorious question to be asked...
xxx c
***
I have called my life many things in an attempt to get across the idea of what it's been like to live it, to express the heart of my journey. One of my fave-raves, coined several years ago upon quitting my Hateful Advertising Career, was that I was “Living My Life Backwardsâ€: going from a hyper-responsible, overachieving, 401K-building, condo-and-cat-owning twentysomething to a foolhardy, largely unemployed, dream-chasing thirtysomething. (And then a sex-crazed, metaphorically-old-purple-wearing-lady fortysomething.)
Not a bad quip, you know us copywriters, always with the handy quip, but somehow too…pithy. As Einstein said, Everything as simple as possible and no simpler, please. (As an aside, that's where a lot of advertising and marketing goes off the rails: oversimplification. That, and too many objectives. But let's not go down that bad path, shall we?)
I wish I had a pithy answer for my life's work now, for what motivates me, for what the thread is. But I don't. I have a long and boring story, which I'll summarize here:
Many years ago, when The Groundlings Sunday Company pulled over and dumped my baby-actor soul by the side of the road to fend for itself, I thought I needed a theater company to call home. And so it was that I found myself standing on a stage in a tiny, back-alley theater in Santa Monica in front of an insane French woman (sorry, redundant), “auditioning†to be a paying member of her highly experimental theater company.
She let me perform my wildly inappropriate monologue, but it was clear that what she wanted to do was get to the Q&A.
“What would you do,†she called out from the dark, “eef I asked you to take off your pants, take off your shirt, take off your shoes and stand zere nakeed on ze stage?â€
“Uh…ask you why?â€
There was a long pause. Then, whether to out me as a poseur or to see if maybe, possibly she could salvage this ten minutes and put an extra $35/month in the theater's coffers I don't know, but she threw out another one:
“Why,†she called out again, “do you want to be an actress?â€
No one had asked me this; I had not even asked myself about the why. Why does one throw away everything with no promise of a something down the road? Why does a sane, smart girl with a career and a title and a condo and a cat toss it all out the window for what younger and more talented people will tell you is one of the world's worst career options?
I stood in on that dusty stage, lit from above, threw head back and my arms open wide and let whatever it was inside me that had been responsible for my irrational decision do the talking: “To tell The Truth!!!â€
It was right, that Voice. (It always is, you know.) My whole life until then had been a quest to funnel The Truth as it is writ large somewhere in the cosmos into words and pictures that made sense down here. So I did it for awhile in advertising. And then in acting. And then in design. And now, with words, both on the blog and aloud, wherever someone will let me.
If I get off track, it gets me back on. If I need inspiration, I go back to the well.
The Truth.
I mean, come on, can that ever get old?