personal essay
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Turn Starting Over into Celebration: Create Your Own Holiday
A few years ago, I became somewhat befuddled about what to do with my life.
Okay, I was completely befuddled.
The cause was (as I put it) losing my job—being displaced, severanced and bridged to an early retirement. My 15-year-old daughter put it this way: fired, broke, preparing to sell the house. Don’t you hate it when your kids get it right?
Anyway, I did what anyone else would have done in my situation: I created a new holiday.
On my calendar, Arrival Day falls on any day in the week before Thanksgiving—though you can slot it anywhere during the year. On this day, the celebrant takes a round-trip on the Staten Island Ferry, across New York Harbor going out, and more importantly, coming back. Coming back past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, you imagine yourself as a new immigrant, with all of your belongings in a bag and your life savings—maybe $50 or $1,000—in your pocket…
Off the Page…and Into the Real World
I couldn’t help but laugh when, right as we were approaching the final stretch of the presidential campaign, the economy went off the deep end. I laughed because I sure as hell didn’t need the 24-hour news cycle to tell me how bad things were.
I’m a screenwriter, a card-carrying member of the Writers Guild of America, and though I have had nine movies made (credited and uncredited), business has been abysmal from about six months before the November ’07 writers strike to…oh, say, today. Tomorrow. Next week. The foreseeable future.
I weathered the strike, as I had weathered a previous career dry spell. But the weathering, ladies and gentlemen, is over. I’m looking for a real job. But as I awaken to the lifeless moonscape that is the present economy, I have to wonder: what was wrong with me that I didn’t start looking for one sooner?
I know most of the answer to that. I had it in my head from a young age that being “talent” was an end in and of itself – if you can make 100 percent of your living off said talent, you win. That’s how my grandfather did it as a commercial artist. That’s how my cousin Molly Picon, legend of the Yiddish stage, did it. That’s how my TV producer cousin Bruce has been doing it since the ‘80s.
A very short time ago, I wasn’t certain whether this notion of purely being a screenwriter was more important to me than my marriage. Two things changed that in a hurry. The first was news that a paying gig I had been counting on wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. The second was our checking account balance…
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