Remembering Stonewall

The performance had been organized by a gay rights group called Stonewall Nation. It was taking place in the auditorium of the Berkshire Museum. I was the director of the museum, so I introduced the show, and I mentioned that I had been at Stonewall. 200 people gasped aloud.

Stonewall was forty years ago. I was living in the West Village, around the corner from the dive bar where it all began. I didn't go to jail, I didn't get beaten up by the police, but it was natural for me to show up -- to make a statement. I thought it was ridiculous that gay sex was illegal. So I joined the crowd.

A couple of months ago, my husband and I went to see Milk. Great movie. It reminded me how very far we have come. My parents were bohemian intellectuals and we always had gay friends, but when I was young, ordinary people were not openly gay. There were no gay characters in movies or television shows. Gay couples did not adopt children (Well, they still can't in some states.) No gay teachers or legislators. Magazine articles on interior design did not feature gay couples. No listings in the New York Times when gay men and lesbians got married, celebrated commitment ceremonies or civil unions. Is everything perfect for gay people? Of course not. Homophobia is very real. Gays get beaten up, even murdered. Gay teens commit suicide at a higher rate. We're still arguing "don't ask, don't tell." Gay couples can only get married in a few states.

But forty years ago, it was so much worse. Until the 1970s, homosexuality was defined as a mental illness by the American Psychological Association. One of my mother's friends was committed to a mental institution in the 1950s because she was gay. For no other reason.

I'm writing about this for two reasons. The first is that today is the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. The second is that forty years ago, as a very young woman, I knew that it was wrong-- just wrong-- to discriminate against anyone because of their sexuality. I knew that my parents' friends Brad and George were just as committed to each other as any other couple. I knew that Tina was perfectly sane. I knew that the laws were wrong, not my gay friends.

I have had six careers. I celebrate reinvention. My core values were set when I was young and they haven't changed.

Keeping a foot in the door

People grow like rings on trees. If you're reinventing yourself, you haven't left that previous self behind. What you were is still there, underneath what you are now.

I spent a lot of time with career # 5, the museum career. I truly love museums. Always have. Always will. I have a lot of friends in that world. And I still know a lot about it. So, it was important to me to retain a connection so this identity didn't just erode.

First, I tried serving on the board of a museum professional association. That didn't work very well. The organization needed people on its board who currently represent museums. After three years, although I keep up with the field, I'm not in the trenches any more and my knowledge base is getting obsolete. And yes, I do mean trenches. The persistent ivory tower image of museums was far removed from reality before the bottom dropped out of the global economy.

I've found a niche that keeps me involved with museum, or at least with museum conferences where I can see my friends and stay connected. The last two years, I've spoken at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums about change. This year, I led two sessions on resume development and one on managing career change. I got a call last week about another museum conference-- same topic. I'll probably do it too. The conference is at the Maryland shore in February, and I've always liked the ocean in the winter. I'm a walking advertisement for a skills-based resume. Living proof that you can take what you've learned in one career and apply it in another context. Proof that there's life after museums.

Change is a funny topic in a museum context. Museums are all about preserving stuff. Someone I admire very much told me once that she thought many people were drawn to museums looking for what she called "an island of stasis in a sea of change." She knows, as do I, that there is no island of stasis. There is only the sea of change.

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Do I know me?

For years, there was no line between what I did and who I was. I was a museum person. It never occurred to me that I would ever be anything else. I used to say that it either said something wonderful about how I felt about my career, or something really sad about my social life, but the annual museum conferences were among my favorite parties.

Three years ago, I took a job as Director of Development for a community and economic development agency. My husband and I had decided to return to Philadelphia and this was the best choice at the time. It turned out to be a very good choice indeed. My work benefits a neighborhood I've known and loved for years. I've always liked knowing the inside story, and I understand how the city works infinitely better than I ever have. Thinking new thoughts builds brain cells. And economic freefall has not been kind to museums.

My identity is in transition. At first, it was hard to introduce myself as Director of Development for University City District without providing a bit of the back story. Now, it's easier. Everyone doesn't need to know who I used to be. This is who I am now.

I come by this honestly

My father, Alexander Mintz, died over thirty years ago. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease when I was very young. I never really knew him. But I know something about his life.

My father was born in Russia, before the Revolution. He came from a social class most people don''t know existed. His family were rich Jews. The apartment building they lived in had the first elevator in all of Russia. Servants put polishing cloths on their feet and skated on the marble floors.

It wasn't a great idea to be either rich or Jewish in 1917, so his family left Russia after the first Bolshevik Revolution. As I understand the story-- and he didn't like to talk about it, so I could be wrong-- they went first to Poland, then to Germany, then to France. He went to college in Germany and got his Ph.D. there.

In the early 1930s, one of his favorite professors got a job in the U.S. and took my father with him. It was pure luck. The rest of the family didn't survive the war. Some died in the camps, some in the ghettos. I was named after his only sister. My father was a psychologist, famous enough that I studied him in Psych One. Given the fact that his life was overturned not once but twice by two of the greatest cataclysms of the 20th century-- the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust-- it is not surprising that his specialty was crowd psychology.

My mother was born in Minneapolis to a midwestern haute bourgeois family. A sickly child who taught herself to swim to overcome serious asthma. Her mother learned that her daughter wasn't an invalid by seeing her photograph in the newspaper, standing in a frigid lake holding a chunk of ice the size of her head. She got a Master's Degree in English Literature from the university where my grandfather taught, then moved to New York City. She started out as a writer; women's magazines from the late 1930s and 1940s have A New Story by Betsy Emmons on the cover. They were good, too. She married my father, which outraged her parents. Nice Midwestern girls did not move to New York City and marry Jews. Then, she got a Ph.D. and became a psychotherapist. In the 1950s, mothers did not have Ph.D.s

I've been known to observe that my mother was from Minneapolis, my father was from Moscow so naturally, I'm from New York City. My father had reinvention thrust upon him. My mother chose it. I come by my ability to reinvent myself honestly.

The Rule of 10

When I was dating, I realized that everyone looked for maybe ten things in a partner. You find someone who has seven of them, and after a while, the missing three start looking really important. So, you lose Mr. or Ms. Seven and find a Five. A Five with two of the three factors that the Seven didn't have. Eventually, you figure this one out and decide what are the most important things on your list. You stick with your Seven or Eight and don't obsess about the two things that might be missing. Or, if you have found yourself with a Four, maybe you decide to cut your losses and look for a Seven, unless those four are of such overwhelming importance that you can live without the other six.

This is a lot like career change. Career change is full of tradeoffs. When I was a museum director, I was passionately devoted to my work. I worked all the time-- sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week. There were years in a row-- decades-- when I never took all my vacation. I took two weeks off only once in twenty years, and that was for my honeymoon.

People go to museums on weekends and holidays, so I worked weekends and holidays. That's what museum people do. My husband's family, which I adore, gathers every Thanksgiving weekend so I traded Christmas Week for Thanksgiving Weekend. For years and years, I worked the day after Christmas. The week after Christmas. I worked New Year's Eve, 1999 until 1 a.m. The museum had opened a couple of months before, it was a new center of community in the downtown and it was important that we provide a place for people to celebrate the transition to the new millennium. I went to galas almost every weekend. It was part of the job.

I don't work in a museum any more. There's a lot I miss about museum work: I don't work with the public. I don't have the enormous joy of seeing people enjoy something I created. I don't see art every day.

But my life is my own in a way it has not been for decades. Sure, one or two things a week keep me at work in the evenings. Big deal. I've been living like this for as long as I remember. Now, I go to a couple of fundraisers a year, not one or two a week. The work I do is important; it makes a difference. This is one of the most important items on my list of ten. But it doesn't require every flicker of creativity I have. It leaves me the energy to do other things. I've wanted to write for years. Now, I can. In fact, now I do.

Rescued dogs

My husband and I rescue dogs. We've had five dogs in the 23 years we've been living together. Three came directly from the street, two from shelters. We have three dogs right now, an older female (the Queen of the House), a middle aged male, and a young male we adopted two months ago. Ceili, Tyler and Jasper.

Jasper has more energy than all the rest of us put together. He weighed 33 pounds when he followed a friend of a friend home from our local park. We feed him as much as we feed Tyler, who weighs thirty pounds more than he does. After a month, he had lost a pound. He only has one setting: supercharged. Every midlife woman wants Jasper's metabolism.

Jasper wasn't housebroken when we adopted him. He lacked the most basic skills of a housedog. As far as we can tell, he had lived in the park for at least a couple of months, and probably had lived in a yard before that. But he's sweet, and smart, and willing. We're good with dogs, and we worked hard to train Jasper. He went for a solid month without an accident in the house, then all hell broke loose. Five days in a row with pee or poop somewhere it shouldn't be. Usually somewhere we discovered by stepping in it. We're coping, and things have been back on track for a couple of days.

What, you ask, does this have to do with reinvention? Well, we're reinventing Jasper as a house dog, something he has to learn how to be. It demonstrates, rather graphically, that reinvention is not linear. You move forward, you move back.

Reinvention is all about tradeoffs. The first month we had Jasper, he would bolt whenever the door was open. He's small and thin, and very, very fast. It was tough to keep him in the house, in the car, on the leash. He may weigh only 33 pounds but he can pull a leash out of our hands. I don't think he wanted to run away, exactly. He just wanted to run. He wasn't used to being inside.

Unless you absolutely hated your previous life, giving it up requires some serious thought. And like Jasper, you will find yourself looking at the life you left behind.

Who says you can't go back?

Recently, I moved back to a city I had left 13 years before. I found a job in a neighborhood where I had lived for many years but had left almost 25 years before. My life disproves Thomas Wolfe's famous observation that you can't go home again.

In fact, I came back to Philadelphia and left a career in which I had built a significant reputation precisely for that purpose-- in order to come home. Parts of my life have closed seamlessly over the 13 years I was away, like water closing over a stone.

What's interesting is being back in the neighborhood where I went to college and graduate school and lived as a young woman. I haven't spent a lot of time here quite literally for decades. When I go to work, I step back in time. I see the world through two sets of eyes. For the most part, I navigate through the present. But sometimes, I am reminded of what used to be. It's like a palimpsest.

OK, that's a great crossword puzzle word: what does it mean? A palimpsest is a parchment that's been scraped down and written over. You can read both documents-- the newer one, and the older one that no longer exists but is still legible. When I look at the corner of 34th and Walnut, mostly I see the busy, 24 hour Starbuck's. Once in a while, I remember Cy's Penn Luncheonette, known to everyone as The Dirty Drug. If I had been here all along, the intervening years might make my memories less vivid.

Do I know you?

When you start out, no one notices when you go to an event. Then, you develop enough of an identity that people notice if you're there. "I saw you at that (reception, opening, performance, business card exchange) last night." People know your name when you introduce yourself even if they haven't met you before.

Then, people notice when you're NOT there. "We missed you at the (reception, opening, performance, business card exchange) last night." At that point, your life is no longer your own.
Then, something changes. Perhaps you change careers. Perhaps you move to a new community. After years of being recognized when you walk into a room, you're back at the beginning. No one notices you. No one knows your name.

This is somewhat liberating. You can decide whether or not to go to the event, whatever it is. You can build a new identity. You have to.

I walked away from a career (career # 5) in which I had invested 25 years, a career in which I was someone. Speaker at national conferences, author of articles, board member of the national professional organization. A couple of years later, I was having lunch with someone from the next phase of my life. Career # 6. I told him that it was new and different for me to walk into a room and have no one know who I am. That is was probably good for me spiritually to be no one when I was used to being somebody. He said, "Don't sell yourself short. Anyone who meets you can see that you are someone."

Introduction to Reinvention

Once upon a time, decisions stayed made. People decided what they wanted to do with their lives, and that's what they did. Maybe they were happy. maybe not. But once they set foot on a path, they stayed on it.

Now, not so much. We're restless. We change jobs, change careers, a lot of us move every couple of years.

We reinvent ourselves.