Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Chapter Three-Serenpidity

In Newport Beach, California, from May until late November, nearly every day is balmy and filled with possibilities. The tinge of salt in the air carried on a gentle breeze seems ever present. Life is softened—and one can’t help but feel grateful, if for nothing else than the wonderful weather.
It was May of 2000. I had been divorced for four years but still felt a bit like the society wife I had once been. You know, raising children, trying to make a living, absorbed in one charitable cause after another—and let’s face it—to fill some void where once there had been a whole family.
Since I couldn’t afford to donate money to the charities, I gave my time, although I really didn’t have much of that, either. My offi¬cial occupation was freelance photographer.
Frankly, I wasn’t destitute, though I was in debt up to my faux gold belt buckle. My ex-husband was paying child support, but the divorce had worn me out emotionally and financially—yes, financially.
The scenario most people envision, particularly for a California society wife, is as follows: Wife and her attorney feast on soon-to-be-ex-husband’s bank accounts and other assets, pil¬laging like a band of marauding Huns.
Husband is left penniless with no cash and no country club memberships and is now driving around Newport in a faded 1978 Subaru using a pay as you go 7-Eleven cell phone, while ex-wife is getting a $100 pedicure in anticipation of a full day’s work visiting Saks Fifth Avenue.
The truth is my divorce cost me $100,000 in legal fees and an additional $15,000 in accounting costs. When the dust settled, I had no home, no money, my credit trashed, but I wanted desper¬ately to stay in Newport Beach because all three of my children were in wonderful schools and I wanted them to be close to their father.
Our divorce was neither amicable nor horrible—it just fell in the same category as most breakups—painful for everyone involved. And I never dreamed I would end up with so much debt. I think that scared me more than anything. I worried incessantly about how I would provide for my children and, of course, how they would be affected in the long term by the new single-parent way of life.
However, it wasn’t too long before, thanks to two beautiful women—and I mean that from the inside out—I was able to buy a very modest condo. One of these angels was my buying agent, the other was the seller’s agent—both returned their commissions, tem¬porarily at least, in the form of loans after escrow closed, so I could qualify and afford the purchase.
I am so relieved to be able to say that I eventually paid them both back, with interest.
Suddenly I had a monthly home payment, all the typical and seemingly endless responsibilities of raising three children, and now on top of owing the $115,000 from the divorce, I owed the two real estate agents. I admit, we could have rented an apartment, but in Southern California, that’s nearly the same cost as buying and, though I knew it would be a struggle, I had faith in myself. More importantly, however I wanted us to start to rebuild, not only our emotional, but our financial lives.
Yes, I lived in paradise, but there are two sides of the railroad tracks in every city. The four of us basically lived from child sup¬port check to support check. The only thing I had to fall back on was my photography skills. While still married, I had taken pho¬tography classes at night at a nearby junior college. As a hobby in those days, I took photographs of my friends and their families. Now that I needed the work, my hobby became a way to make a living, so overnight, I added “professional” photographer to my resume.
“Can’t we PhotoShop that?” Ron would always ask me. Ron was my assistant almost from the day I started shooting friends and family.
Now that I’m not doing it anymore, shooting friends and family sounds funny, because sometimes that’s just what I wanted to do.
My garage and part of my home constituted my studio, and Ron was referring to how we might avoid the agony of re-shooting a family portrait. Ron was good at retouching with the PhotoShop program. He could put an alligator’s head on a mom and make it look like it belonged there—and sometimes it did.
I would often stand incredulous as mothers would let their chil¬dren run through my condo with melting ice cream cones dripping all over the furniture and carpet, or chasing one another from room to room knocking over lamps, while their parents stood oblivious, chatting with me.
The problem with photographing an entire family—mom, dad and two or three kids—is that the mother often felt that one of the kids didn’t look right, wasn’t smiling, or closed his or her eyes. In the event that all the children looked wonderful, the mother would feel we didn’t capture the right side of her face, or she looked too tired, or whatever.
If you’re photographing just one person, and you shoot enough film, you’re bound to get one good shot. With four or five people, it’s nearly impossible. That’s why Ron always asked if he could just retouch it rather than pull the entire clan back into the studio— which the family felt at least as frustrated about as we did. In fact, they considered coming back a failure on my part, one they shouldn’t have to pay for.
Imagine that you, your husband, and your three kids have gotten all dressed up in your Sunday best, coifed everyone’s hair just so, shined your shoes, put on your makeup, piled into the SUV and driven ten miles to a woman’s small garage to have your por¬trait taken. On the opposite side of the garage, away from the set, hanging on the wall are rakes, brooms, a few assorted tools, an empty gas can that still smells a bit, and several U-Haul boxes.
After you’ve combed the kid’s hair, checked yourself in the mirror, and adjusted your husband’s tie for the umpteenth time, you’re ready to be plopped into position like mannequins.
“Good. Good. Now hold that,” I’d tell them. Everyone would be beaming, with the exception of that one child, the one who looked like he’d just sucked the fiber out of a lemon.
“Tickle, tickle, tickle,” I’d say and giggle as if I had to mouth the words in addition to torturing the child with my four-foot-long feather duster—anything to get a smile.
Looking back, I can see why so many of the children yelled and screamed—they were terrified. Think how it would feel if you were two years old, were made to sit on a velvet cushioned chair in a very unfamiliar room with a couple of strangers gawking at you and cajoling you to smile, and then some grinning, hyperactive woman thrusts a feather duster in your face? To the kids, it must have looked like the back end of a crazed rooster coming at them.
Ron and I tried every trick in the book to get the children to smile. My ingenious idea was to tape the feather duster to the end of a long pole and then surprise the toddler by pulling it out from behind the couch and jamming it in his or her face. Inevitably, however, the child would cry or start to scream.
By the time I came up with the duster idea, we’d already given up on the surprise factor. That’s when you set the aperture on the camera, point it at the child and just when he least expects it, your assistant jumps out from behind a curtain and says “boo.”
Candy or cookies worked sometimes, but the only nearly fail¬safe trick was to bring Cheyenne, our golden retriever, into the room unexpectedly. There’s something about a big, soft, loveable dog that just brings out the smiles in most everyone, particularly children.
Don’t get me wrong; there were some rewarding experiences, and I became a pretty darn good photographer, but after seven years of taking baby and family photos, I was burned out. It was time to move on and so I spent the final weeks of that year looking for a real job, not necessarily in photography.
Within two weeks, I got lucky and was hired for an entry level sales position by the high-end furniture company, Herman Miller.
That’s when I discovered I had a talent for sales. Working very hard, by the end of the first year, I was making a good living. My modest success was great for my morale and provided some sorely needed breathing room. My base salary was next to nothing; most of my income came from my own initiative in the form of commissions.
Seemingly overnight, I went from waiting for the postman to arrive every fourth Friday, to an occasional dinner out for the four of us, with a movie to boot.
Even though I was doing pretty well, I was amazed at how fast it all went away; a house payment here and a property tax bill there, the kids dentists and clothes, food—even at Costco, food bills add up for four people, especially when three of them eat like rescued Gilligans.
Then there were the payments to my lawyer and the real estate agents…well, you get the picture. And please, I’m not complaining. I thanked God every single night for everything we were fortunate enough to have—mostly each other.
I was blessed to have a great childhood guided by loving par¬ents who instilled many of life’s most valuable lessons in me. The one piece of advice my father gave me that always stuck with me was, “Whatever your lot in life—build on it.”
To me, that always meant that whether you were poor, or well off, it didn’t matter—you had a duty to yourself to be the best you could be. And as a mother of three beautiful children—Colt, Kendall, and Ruby I had to create the blueprints for their futures, too.
The tough part came when I had to make the decision to leave Herman Miller. I was making enough to support my family; but it was killing me, and it was starting to be hard on my children.
Every morning during the week, I had to be in downtown Los Angeles at 7:00 a.m., nearly a two-hour drive, so I was getting up before sunrise. At night, when I should have been home helping my children with their homework, I was often required to attend par¬ties and other functions to schmooze clients, as all good salespeople must do.
Eventually, it wasn’t even the work or the commute that did me in; it was the guilt. Yes, I had a woman helping me with the chil¬dren, but I was spending a fair amount of my income to pay someone to take care of my children so I could make enough money to pay her salary.
This was my rationale for quitting: If my job was costing me 12 hours a day away from my children, and I was paying someone nearly 20% of my income for the privilege, then what was the point? Why not work locally at a job where I would only have to earn half the amount, but would have a great deal more freedom to be with my family?
That’s when I discovered home jewelry parties.
I had always had an interest in jewelry design and had even done a lot of creative sketching as a sort of hobby, so this seemed a natural. Home jewelry parties are akin to those Tupperware par¬ties of the ‘60s and ‘70s where you would gather a group of women in your home, have refreshments, talk about your kids and hus¬bands, and then sell your wares.
As a result of these parties, I met a woman named Rachael, who had similar interests. Eventually, we started a rudimentary jewelry business. However, there was no designing involved. We purchased various items wholesale that we thought would be pop¬ular, or that we liked, and then we would resell them. In other words—we were retailers.
I jumped into it with both feet, without a business plan or even documentation for the partnership. It was strictly a hand-shake deal and off we ran. We opened a business, which could actually be better described as a box on a table, and rented space from a local store that carried all kinds of knickknacks. Essentially, it was one small glass counter displaying our line of jewelry.
The woman who leased the storefront used up nearly half the space herself. The rest of the area contained antiques, clothing, dishes, books, and the general type of things you’d find at a yard sale. But we were happy to call ourselves retailers and there was always good foot traffic out in front, mostly from people shopping in the other stores or eating lunch.
Our cash register was a tin box, which we stocked each morning with change—three tens, five fives, and 20 ones—a grand total of $75. We called the business Got Rocks?, which we thought was extremely clever. Thankfully, our rent was a portion of our monthly sales, not fixed. When we did well, we paid a little more; and when we didn’t do so well, we paid next to nothing.
OF COURSE, we had no health benefits, or a 401k, but I was having fun and the best part of that was that Rachael and I could share sales responsibilities. Since the store was fairly close to home, I could run back and forth during the day and see the kids when they weren’t in school.
We purchased our pieces from designers and manufacturers, but our buying criteria was always the same: it had to be unique, affordable, and most importantly, it had to be fun.
After a while, as our clientele grew and became more loyal. Some of our customers even asked me to design something myself, something special just for them. That’s when I got the idea of maybe, just maybe, one day starting my own line of jewelry.
That thought had been a distant dream when I was sketching ideas for bracelets, earrings and pendants years before; but now, the reality of it seemed more plausible, though I didn’t think I had the courage to take such a big leap alone.
It would mean I’d need a lot of start-up cash; would have to find manufacturers, then have to play the multiple roles of designer, sales and marketing person, plus operations officer; find stores to buy my line; and my God, I’d actually have to learn the business. And, there was always that risk of falling right back into the schedule I’d lived with while at Herman Miller.
For the time being, however, I satisfied myself with the daily routines at Got Rocks?, and designed the occasional special piece for a customer. Though we weren’t making much money, it did offer the freedom I needed, and I was whittling away at my debts, albeit slowly.
That’s when I met Frances.
It was a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, crisp blue skies, big bil¬lowy clouds, temperature just right, and I was in charge of putting on an enormous yard sale for a local charity. I had to gather up everything from used skis and bowling balls, to rusty dinner set¬tings and old dog eared copies of Danielle Steele novels—anything we could sell.
All of the women donated something and I drove around to each of their homes to pick up the items.
Another woman involved with the same charity was donating her yard because it was so large and her home sat on a street with a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, at the last minute, the woman became ill and I had to scramble to find another spot.
At that point, Frances and I knew each other only in passing because our children attended the same school. Mostly, our conver¬sations consisted of small talk about the kids; but after one PTA meeting, while we were discussing what we would be doing over the upcoming weekend, I told her about my charity yard sale and the fact that I was scrambling to find a yard. Without hesitation, she volunteered her home. I say home instead of yard because the entire affair became much more than a yard sale; it turned into an event, thanks to her pumpkin idea.
It was late October, shortly after the 9-11 tragedy, so we decided to combine our efforts and donate part of the money to my cause and part to the 9-11 relief effort.
I had placed ads in the local papers and stapled what seemed like hundreds of signs on telephone poles or on stakes jammed into the lawns of those who would let us.
The Friday evening prior to the sale, I must have made 20 trips hauling over all the donated items to put in Frances’ driveway. I started by placing the simple and inexpensive things just inside the gate, planning on moving those out to the curb in the morning to help lure people up into the driveway and subse¬quently into the yard.
The thing that made the event even more fun was the fact that Frances had come up with the idea to use pumpkins to decorate her entire front yard for Halloween. In fact, she’d ordered more than 150 of the bright orange squash.
I don’t know where you buy 150 pumpkins, who you would get to deliver them, or even what you would do with them, but Frances had a vision—one she fulfilled single-handedly. Because there was no one to help, she carried each of the pumpkins one by one into the yard and arranged them all by herself—certainly, a back-breaking experience.
At the end of the day, the sale was a huge success and we man¬aged to raise nearly $1,000 for the two charities.
But that’s not the end of the story—at least not the pumpkin story. After the sale and the trick or treating that weekend, it was obviously time to have the pumpkins picked up by someone. The problem was, none of the trash haulers that Frances called, were interested, citing potential health problems or problems with the local dump.
In Frances’ always-imaginative way, she decided she should raise even more money by selling the pumpkins as well.
“I’ve got an idea,” she told me one afternoon. “I’ll sell the pumpkins. Everyone will be making pumpkin pies for the holidays. It’ll be perfect. I’ll put out a large sign down on Capistrano Road that reads, ‘Beautiful pumpkins for sale. Perfect for pies. All pro¬ceeds go to the 9-11 victims families.’”
The only problem was getting all 150 pumpkins out of the yard and down to Capistrano Road, a busy street nearly half a mile away. However, with her Just go for it attitude, she simply started loading them into the trunk of her car, managing to stuff about 15 in at a time. Then, she drove them down to the corner, unloaded them into neat piles, and repeated the exercise for several hours until she’d successfully arranged all 150 of them along the side¬walk, a feat I’m sure was the subject of many curious looks by passing drivers.
For the rest of the afternoon, she sat with a sign, a beach chair, and a large umbrella ready to sell. By the end of the day, with her children’s help, she’d sold all of the pumpkins and managed to raise another $400 for the victims of 9-11.
The other upside to the entire episode was that she didn’t have to go to the gym for the next two weeks.