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The 4th Quarter Queens

One of my dearest friends, Angela, calls us the 4th quarter queens. Sounds good to me.

Sure, I loved the politics but I also love the figuring out the government. You remember that Luther Hicks taught me everything I needed to know about the personnel system of the State Department/USIA. In addition to many other tricks, when someone told me I couldn’t do something, I could reply “yes I can and this is how you do it. Did I mention in part 3 that I built my office at International Visitors from 35 people to 90 people with foreign service officers who were over complement. Its too complicated. In my new and what I thought was temporary position as Chief of Staff at what was now USIA. It was not temporary so after three years I told the Director that I wanted the job of Chairman of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which was a Senate confirmed position. At the same time I met Kay Koplovitiz who founded USA and Syfy Television Networks and she asked me if I would like to work with her as Senior VP for Public Affairs, Public and Media Relations. Sounded good and since I wasn’t getting my Senate Confirmed job I left the government to pursue new challenges with a big budget.

It is wonderful to have a big budget and be able to buy tables at events run by my friends. They were usually somehow related to women and children. Erase the hate was the public affairs platform we used to change the image of a “Women in Jeopardy” network to viable good programing. Everyone who created the women in jeopardy programming hated me. But I was doing the job of changing the perception of USA as a sleazy place to a network with solid good shows. When our rating in the summer weren’t great we changed to definition of summer. It was great fun but too soon Barry Diller bought the Networks and he didn’t care about anything but the bottom line. So eventually I left the network and started the first on-line Women’s small business loan fund.
 
Not all sweet smelling move. When I discovered that my business partner was firing perfectly competent people and hiring her own family members to administer the loans I left. But I had raised a great deal of money money and made all kinds on national business connections. It was painful but it was also 19 and there was another Presidential Campaign lurking in my futureit was not without challenges but the process of fundraising and building it was well with all the trouble. And I learned a great deal bout business, women, and loaning money. More than I ever wanted to know. Unfortunately, my business partner was not without a gigantic ego and mostly no moral center. She did things that were not legal and not good for my health. It’s too painful to remember but after all my hard work in getting the fund up and running, she took my name off the founders list and presented to do it all by herself. Not very nice.
It was reinvention time. Time to polish up the political credentials. Gore was running against Bush. Gore lost. And we made the documentary “The Gefilte Fish Chronicles”. And now I Was a documentary producer and I wrote a companion cookbook. But of course it should be a musical, so I produced “Gefilte Chronicles the Musical”


Gefilte fish the musical in Chicago


This takes us to a difficult time in my personal life. We had to move Mom out to Seattle.
She couldn’t live on her own, I couldn’t keep driving from DC to NJ and my brother, the golden child lived on an island off Seattle. We flew out first class and she moved into a retirement home. The difference between assisted living a retirement home is significant in terms of treatment and attitude.

I tried to become part of the theater world. I took classes and studied and helped produced a number of small shows for the theater festival. We found help and sponsors and we signed with a company that sells shows. But our person left the company and we were back in the struggle category.

While I did that, we relocated to LA to teach Political communication for a semester. Yes, we lived in the dorm and just had a great time with my LA friends and the students. Which was great fun, but not theater. The next year I taught political communications and polling at Emerson College. Hillary was running for President and I worked on that campaign, but the senior staff wasn’t listening, so I focused on learning and teaching. You may remember Hillary lost that election and we were all devastated, I’ll short cut this rambling account of reinvention. 

Gefilte Fish Chronicles was still a part of my life. So we wrote “Gefilte Fish Chronicles the Musical”

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