Dress Rehearsal: Done. Life Redo at 61.
I have always believed that if you want to change your life, even a little, you need two things:
- Faith. Not religion, per se, but a sense of belief that the Universe has your back.
AND
- You have to do things that make you uncomfortable. Especially when nothing around you feels comfy anymore.
Like the state of our world right now. Disasters have a powerful way of getting us to refocus on the things that really matter.
And while so much of it feels beyond frightening and out of our control, we only have two choices at the moment:
A) Stay put.
OR
B) Make moves to help make things better, and walk the talk to be the change you want to see in the world.
I pick B.
Because deep in my soul, I believe we are all still just first drafts of the people we are supposed to become.
Two weeks from now, as we’re entering phase two of this global pandemic, I’m changing everything. and moving from LA to Philadelphia. As a senior citizen.
To start my life over.
In a brand new city I don’t know very well. To high-rise living, which I haven’t experienced in 40 years, in a fancy neighborhood that’s been challenged by frustration and looting and violence. I will be the new girl, the pariah from Flori-DUH, the now highly infectious epicenter of COVID-19. With no car and two torn ligaments in my knee. In a place where public transportation is shut down right now.
At a time when humanity is on fire.
Because growth and comfort are not synonyms on thesaurus.com.
And, because a flamingo helped me understand that change, and action, is exactly what my life needs right now.
This ought to be fun.
Since March 6, I’ve been living with and caring for my 91 year, newly widowed and grieving dad in South Florida.
Through lots of hand washing and months of quarantining, with only absolutely necessary face-masked and gloved trips outside the gates that shield us, my sister, my nephew and I have managed to steer my father clear of this deadly virus.
Yesterday, when I reminded my Pops I’m leaving soon, he asked me, “So how long ya been here?” I challenged him to take a guess. “Three weeks?”, he asked, and shook his head in disbelief when I told him it’s actually been 4 months. “Wow,” he said almost pathetically, across the dinner table. “You need to get a life.”
Tell me about it.
I take huge leaps of faith like these about once a decade, and somehow, I always land on my feet, though often on a 180 degree detour from where I thought I was heading. Staying in forward motion requires constant movement, even when it feels frightening. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty darn good at rolling with the punches.
That’s why I’m jumping. Again. Because although my life is not yet exactly where I want it to be, I’m proud of my resilience. And my courage to shake up my world, just because. I believe I’ve got one more big chapter left in me (I know, I said that last time), and I have a hunch this is the one I’ve been waiting for. So I’m leaping, with no net in sight. Because the world is shifting. And so am I. (Aren’t we all?)
I’m scared shitless, and over the moon excited about it. All at the same time.
I figured out how to downsize and move, without ever going back to California. Hired a friend’s daughter to toss half my stuff away via Facetime and pack up all that was left into 600 cubic feet. Crazy that’s what my life has boiled down to, now in the back corner of an 18 wheeler, headed east.
I left my oceanside paradise that is Manhattan Beach in late December, after yet another surgery, two months after my mother’s unexpected passing, just before the ball dropped in Time’s Square. With one bag, on what was supposed to be a six month hiatus. To write that book/screenplay that’s been living in my head. With no clue my time there was about to be up.
It was eleven years ago last month, on the day Michael Jackson died, that I said goodbye to Miami, and to my 40s and took what I believed at the time to be my last giant spring forward. At 50.
After losing a fortune in the recession of 2008, I was off to Hollywood for a big TV job with Warner Brothers. Needing some stability, I went enthusiastically, ready to embrace a whole new life on the West Coast.
I loved California so much, I thought they’d bury me there. What has transpired, inside, outside, and all around me as an Angeleno over the last decade, has been the stuff of which dreams are made.
I spent four years at Warner Brothers, then left TV after 30 plus years as a Producer, to create Campowerment: a transformational playground where women connect, learn, and grow in an environment infused with fun and games, a deep sense of connection, and the spirit of the campfire.
I designed Campowerment with my late mom, around my happiest childhood place: summer camp…and since 2013, it has become an incubator for agents of change who, together, become unstoppable.
Since then, thousands of women have come thru our cabins to find comfort in the discomfort that comes with making change happen for themselves. More than half continue to come back year after year, because, they tell us, there is no other place on Earth like it.
What started as a little sociological experiment to see what gives when you wrap life’s dynamic learning tools around the power of playtime, has blossomed into a beautiful movement, shifting lots of people towards the direction of their dreams. To take the steps to create the action they didn’t even know they needed to propel their lives forward, and live the joyful existence they always just assumed happened to (and for) other people.
And though I’m in the business of helping people change up their lives, mine has endured a few big challenges these past couple years, leaving this shoemaker barefoot.
That’s why I’m moving to Philly, hoping to find happiness (and maybe some Love and Sex?) in the City where my favorite childhood camp friends live…the ones with whom I shared many fabulous summers, way back in the 70’s.
Memories of those eight glorious weeks at camp are what motivated me to leave my successful career: to take grown-ups back in time, to feel the essence of camp as we once did. To re-kindle the warm fuzzies I had as a kid who rediscovered her best self at my home away from home every June-August.
Camp Akiba was the only place I ever remember being truly, authentically me as a kid, adolescent and finally, a teenager, with the freedom and confidence I had never felt before. I am who I am today, because of that place, and those people.
I reunited with my Akiba sisters, eventually 8 of them, when they converged on Campowerment in 2014, to relive our childhoods as grown-ups, and support me in my new business. They eventually fell in love with Campowerment and especially my mom, who bonded with them deeply, because she knew what they meant to me.
These incredible women, my people, just kept coming back, year after year. Almost every one flew down to Miami last November for my mom’s funeral.
The sign that still hangs at the entrance of what was once Camp Akiba reads “There are no strangers here. Only friends you have not yet met.”
That’s the premise on which we built Campowerment, and the secret sauce that brings half our “campers” back for s’more, wherever we are, year after year after year.
That’s why, in mid-March, as the lockdown began, many in our community, quarantining alone and already feeling isolated, asked us to digitally connect them to each other. Back then, in no one’s worst nightmare could we have imagined the horrific impact of the Coronavirus, or that we’d spend so many months hiding out, living in fear of this nasty infection. Or that unemployment would rise higher in the three months of COVID-19 than it did in two years of the Great Recession. Or that implicit racism would be the one real thing that still keeps us all so divided.
But before we knew any of these things, we threw together a few interactive, digital circles to connect our people, asking only for donations to help support those in our community who’d been struggling to pay their bills.
And just as the economy came crashing down, our digital experiment started to take off.
Four months and a few thousand new users later, Campowerment has offered 170 interactive, expert-led workshops and circles and panels and some fun camp-y playtime sessions. Live, online. Recently, we’ve added anti-racism Listening and Interactive Sessions too. And the more programs we’re creating, the greater the demand for more.
Who even knew our magic could translate over the Internet? We used to think our secret sauce could only be delivered IRL. But when live, in person is no longer an option, we are humans, and we’ll choose connection, and some guidance, however we can get it. Reinvention is top of mind for so many of us right now.
And we’ve got some big plans coming down the pike, to help women continue to raise the bar for themselves during these unsettling times.
Stay tuned for exciting info on our new community-based initiative, created to spark joy and expansion and connection, through some innovative programs, led by an unbelievable array of experts we have put together. To help women like you rediscover who you are and go deeper to find the best you right now, even at a time when it’s hard to figure out which way the world is spinning.
Many of us are wide awake in this nightmare that is starting to become our new normal. Others, not so much. That’s why it’s up to us to step up and into the ambivalence that’s been keeping our power hidden.
It’s time to get to work. To take risks and finally heal whatever it is you need to heal. To give yourself permission to make that impact you always looked to others for. Even if you’d rather stay in bed with the covers over your head, pack on another COVID “19”, or drink one more bottle of lousy wine.
We don’t have time for that anymore.
Shut off the news and start marching. In the streets with the long overdue protesters or to the beat of your own drum, in whatever way feels right to you. Start with one baby step in the right direction. Even if it feels awkward.
Make some noise. And make it hurt a little. By making yourself uncomfortable, you can be that change. The world has never needed you, or the collective “us”, more.
Before she passed away, my mom made me a promise. That no matter what happened, her spirit would always be with me. I didn’t believe her. She kept talking about flamingoes, and how every time I see one, I will know that it’s her guiding me. To take action. On a platform she helped me create. Because movement from within, my wise mama always taught me, is how our wisdom and healing gets awakened.
I’m not sure if this is flamingo season or what, but everywhere I look now, I see one. I never even knew my mom liked birds.
Interestingly, about ten years ago, she started to call all us girls “Chick” (which ultimately morphed to Chickee and eventually Chickapoozie) and it’s the nickname we came to lovingly called her back. For an entire decade.
So when this video of the Dixie Chicks’ kickass new song recently landed in my inbox, with a note that the band just dropped the “Dixie” from their name, I had to click on it. If you’re ready to change your life, I recommend you do too:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xwBjF_VVFvE
This pandemic, and the huge pickle our society is in just keeps growing in stupidity, with seemingly no one in charge. Except us.
I’m now taking cues from as my idealistically empowered daughters, who march peacefully in the streets of NY, getting shoved by police, because they do believe we can be the change.
But as I’m creeping towards Medicare and uprooting my life as if I’m still in my prime, I can’t help but worry about tomorrow. Still, I’m keeping the faith that everything is gonna eventually be OK, for our world. And for my new one too.
I’m also keeping my eye out for flamingoes. Just yesterday, I saw two little girls in the neighborhood wearing them on their shirts. And their dad had on a Phillies hat. Thanks Chick. I feel you.
We all do. Dress rehearsal: Done.
