Beginning the Reinvention

At the age of 65 or so, with an assumption that I would retire at 70, I started thinking about the facts of retirement as I believed them to be.  I entered the work force at approximately the age of 11 assisting my cousin with his paper route.  Girls weren't allowed to have routes.  Don't ask, that's an entirely different blog subject.  lol.  From that point I was working at something, babysitting, lunch clerk, bar maid, go go dancer, nurse, computer programmer, mother.  I knew that retirement was a word and condition made up by the rest of world, not by me.  I also knew way before retiring that I would not actually retire. I would just do something else besides go to a job every day.  And that something else would not be sitting in a corner watching the world go by.

I've always lived with the philosophy of not regretting something that I had done, but regretting something that I had not done.  I have more issues with the latter than the former.  I was in the final years of my second adult career outside of single parenting (yes, parenting is a definite career, in truth the most difficult of my careers) at retirement time.  So I asked myself what one thing, if I were sitting on a porch reminiscing with friends and family at the age of 80 or so, would I have to say I regretted not doing in my life.  Being ready to write a list that I'd have to narrow down I was very surprised that the one answer came quite quickly.  It was to never continue what I had started in high school and pursued occasionally in college and then dropped totally as work, becoming a mother, scrabbling to exist took precedence - acting.  I never totally abandoned  it and my mind always created new fantasies and vivid dreams for all of my life.  My stage became a place in my mind that I could go to and play on whenever I was able.  Once I realized that seeing what I could do in acting was the ONLY thing I would regret not doing I started on my road to today.  I knew that I needed to get into the world itself , but I still had a full time job, so preparation had to revolve around that.  I found the perfect answer at the local Barbizon School of Modeling and Acting.  I enrolled in their next adult session which met once a week in the evening.  I was actually following in the footsteps of my daughter who had graduated from a Barbizon school 25 years prior to my enrollment.