The Long & Winding Road

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If you look at my career path (and I’ve had many careers) they would look like a winding road. In college, I had my heart set on being a lighting designer on Broadway. I worked at Marriott’s Great America for the first 4 seasons they were open and provided the lighting designs for 2 of the shows I worked on – Silver Screen and Bugs Bunny’s Wonder Circus. I also did some work in community theatre when the park was closed for the season. Due to family responsibilities, I never made it to broadway – at least not to work. I was able to work in the entertainment industry for a great number of years, which is more than many people who want to make a career in the theater business are able to say.

el-rey-extMy first full time job was as a motion picture projectionist at a small art house in Walnut Creek CA. The El Rey (yes, I know its redundant) Theatre was a gem of a venue showing great flicks from around the world. Also The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Fridays and Saturdays at midnight. I worked there until it finally closed its doors to make way for the Walnut Creek Civic Plaza construction. It still makes me sad to think of the old place being torn down.

While working as a projectionist, I made connections with other theatre managers, which allowed me to find work at the nearby Festival Cinemas (now also gone). I worked with Festival Cinemas in multiple locations, including as a secretary in their home offices, for about 10 years. The skills I built there, working in management and office support, were to be useful a few careers later.

Since non-union theatre jobs don’t pay particularly well, I needed to work multiple jobs. During my stint at the El Rey, I trained a friend to be a projectionist, so that he could use a connection to get into the union (IATSE). He returned the favor and brought me into the union, a few years later. I worked relief shifts in projection booths around the East Bay, as well as finally being able to start working as a stage hand at the Concord Pavilion. This made for some really long days, but I enjoyed getting back into the live production scene. Ultimately, my stagehand career allowed me to work on film and television productions, as well as supporting dozens of touring shows that passed through the area. During this period, the projectionist positions added an element of theatre maintenance, and I was trained to work on HVAC systems, repair seats, lighting and pretty much everything in the facility. This also turned out to be useful in a later career.

In the early 1990’s the road took a dramatic turn. I met and ultimately married my husband. When we met, I lived and worked in the east bay and he lived and worked in the south bay. When I moved in with him, the commute started to become more than difficult – especially if I had a gig that ended at 2 in the morning. I began looking for work in the south bay. I first approached the union local in that area, but found them to be disorganized. I’d also be starting from scratch on the call list. This is where we go back to the experiences I had in the main office of Festival Cinemas. I started looking into Administrative Assistant roles. My background was very different from the majority of applicants, and most hiring managers couldn’t imagine how my diversity could be applicable to an Admin position. Finally, a Biotech startup took a chance on me as an admin supporting the Director of Operations. He was interested in me because of that facility maintenance experience at the theaters. They were about to embark on a facility expansion, and I had the good fortune to learn on the job how to work with architects, general contractors, and site supervisors. I was also thrown into the world of procurement since I had to specify and purchase cubicle, scientific equipment and all the elements that go into outfitting a biotech facility.

netappNetApp039s-Video-Production-Facilities-Take-on-a-New-LookAfter a couple years there, my boss change, and I wasn’t able to find a way to work with the new guy – who like to bellow at me from inside his office. I had made more connections by that time, and upgraded my resume, so off I went to a hight tech company: Network Appliance, now known as NetApp. There I continued my work as a Facilities Specialist, and ultimately built several buildings containing office and manufacturing space as well as computer data centers. I had a great 12 year run with them. In the later years, I built and operated an HD video production facility, where we produced training and sales videos, as well as being an early pioneer of live streaming events such as company meetings.

Jumping to the present, I’ve started a consulting business developing WordPress websites for small and family businesses here in Hawaii. I don’t look for work, and am happy with purely referral business. I’m spending much of my time going back to the theatre. I have done some performance at Diamond Head Theatre, which was something I’d been wanting to do since high school. I’m also taking dance classes – another thing that I’d had to miss out on earlier in life. I’m not very good, but I love the learning and fitness that comes along with the classes, as well as the friends I’ve made.

billy-elliot

My first job….

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My parents–well, really my father — would not allow me to work, other than babysitting, before I was an adult.  ‘Adult’ was apparently something my father thought he could proclaim when the time came and not necessarily on my 21st birthday.  My babysitting money got me through adolescence.

You see, my Dad was raised during the Depression, and to him it was a sign of success and his hard work that allowed him to support a family in which HIS wife and daughters did not have to work.  It also meant that we were dependent on him. As luck would have it, Mom was one of the original Feminists, and SHE thought that women should have knowledge and self-sufficiency, so she quietly supported me and my sister in our efforts to gain some freedom from Dad’s purse strings.  She was very cool that way.

But working…having a job and a boss and having to be on time and responsible…that stuff somehow was incomprehensible to me.  I was a horrid employee when I started working.  Not because I didn’t know the work, or the score, or what I should do, but because I had never been responsible for anything, ever.  So I learned the hard way, and I learned by feeling like an idiot most of the time until I wasn’t one anymore.  I really, really hated feeling like an idiot.  I knew that I was capable of more, but I had never had to demonstrate it.

My first job ever was working the midnight shift in a plastics factory which made small molded toys and parts such as GI Joe figures, the top button covers of seatbelt buckles, and other small items.  It was Hell as far as I was concerned.  I learned two very important things:  I did not like someone assuming that I would not follow rules, and I cannot survive without human interaction.  Upon my arrival on the first day, I stood listening to a woman who shouted the rules of engagement: NO talking with coworkers, NO bathroom breaks unless I asked the foreman, NO extra breaks of any kind, NO asking anyone anything unless it was the shift foreman…..I was terrified.  What must those who worked in such jobs felt, decades before I was ever born?  I remember thinking that if they survived THAT, then I surely could survive with ….wait.  No, I could not.  Because I DID NOT HAVE TO.  It was an eye-opener, and I have never forgot it. Perspective hurts sometimes, but it’s critical to insight.,

After five days, I quit that job.  I fled.  think I may have never gone back for my meager paycheck. I don’t remember.  Then I got a job as a waitress which got me through college for the next four years.  That job involved talking with people, and the rules didn’t seem so authoritarian.  I could think and smile and talk.  And I could follow rules with which I was familiar.

I was grateful for every paycheck, every tip, I was grateful for what I learned about people, I learned to stand up for myself, and  I am STILL grateful for the independence I earned.  When I was employed in my first professional job, I was stunned that my paycheck actually paid bills.  I learned that working not only earns a living but also a life:  gratitude, gratification, pride, capability, strength, responsibility, and insight.  All things that have carried me through life.  I wish that for everyone.  I am humbled.

 

Two Hard Jobs

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After college, when I wasn’t yet ready to start doing something serious with my BA in English (that is, teach, the only option I knew of besides being a secretary), I did a few miscellaneous short-term jobs to get some experience of the working life. Two of them stand out in my memory, both of them terrible but in different ways.

For a while I worked for Manpower, which sent me to various places, all of which I’ve forgotten except for Nelson Tire, located off the freeway in Oakland. The office was at the front of the building, and at the back was a huge shop full of car tires and truck tires and tire tools and smudged and grimy guys working on tires and making a lot of noise. My job was filing. On my desk in the morning would be a stack of papers, all of them gritty with rubber dust. I was to put each one in its proper file drawer. That was it. Pick up papers, put them in drawers. It seems in my memory that I did that job for months, but it was probably only a couple of weeks. I survived it by driving over to the Oakland Airport at lunchtime and eating my cucumber and cheese sandwiches there while watching the travelers hurrying off to interesting destinations. Nelson Tire revealed to me a level of deadly boringness I had not experienced before, not even at my previous summer job in the Stanford Athletic Department, proofreading every single football ticket for the eighty-thousand-seat stadium.

The other post-college job I recall vividly was at an Oakland child care center in the Fruitvale neighborhood. I worked with the four- and five-year-olds who came before and after their brief hours of kindergarten. It was a poor neighborhood; most of the children were black. I’d had, previously, no experience with child care, no experience with children this age, and no experience with poverty. (Why did they hire me?) Everything about the job was overwhelming–the noise, the chaos, the smells, the children’s neediness, and my own deep ineptitude. I remember some adorable children (a tiny girl named April who smelled like sewage and said in a hoarse little voice with a big enchanting grin, “Tie my shoe, honey!”), some frightening children (Aaron, who jumped up on my back in the playground and toppled me to the ground), and some heartbreaking children (Angelique, in whom I sensed both a sharp intelligence and a fierce rebelliousness, a combo that probably boded ill for her future). It was an intensely interesting job (the opposite of Nelson Tire), but I could not do it. I had no idea how to manage and instruct this swirling, shrieking herd of children, how to keep them safe from each other and from the perils that threatened them, how to keep myself safe from them. One day, during the time the children weren’t there, I was sweeping the floor, and another of the teachers, a no-nonsense black woman who had been there for years, took the broom from me impatiently. “You don’t even know how to sweep a floor,” she said.

That was toward the end of my period of short-term jobs. I went back to school for my teaching credential, and ended up teaching high school English. That was hard, too, but it was not boring and it was not impossible.