After leaving W-L, I attended Duke for two years, took a year off and then transferred to Columbia from which I graduated in 1965. Meanwhile I married a bad boy whose credentials I had been programmed to value (Princeton, Columbia MBA, fast car, cool apartment...everything but character) and after two sons and eight years, finally got out of the marriage once the kids were in school all day and I could work again. At that point I got a job writing jingles in New York City, where I met my second and final husband, Tom Picardo, the "West" of the pop music performing, writing, and production team Cashman and West. This got me into the big time music business by association (only), and resulted in many years of the roller coaster life defined by the industry....which has actually been very kind to Tom (and consequently to me).
Along the way, I worked for The Washington Post, Roll Call and Marvel Comics where I was Marketing Director and wrote many special comics featuring Spiderman and the other characters. (If you want your 6 and 7 year old sons to take out the trash the first time you ask, I'm here to tell you that being on a first name basis with Spidey goes a long way). Also during those years, I began 25 years of psychotherapy every minute of which I needed.
In the early seventies, Tom and I moved to a farm in rural New Jersey where we reared my sons and our daughter, now 31and living in New York where she does Roller Derby (see photo at a recent bout), which in addition to her work in film post production is her main passion in a potpourri of other oddball pursuits. Over the years we also raised all manner of farm animals including sheep (which had no will to live and at first sneeze bleated for Kevorkian), beef cattle (which kept defecting to neighboring herds never to be seen again) and horses (which turned out to be our safest bet because they tended to stay put.... it's beyond me how they can jump 5 feet at The Hampton Classic and can't clear 2 feet of post and rail in their own back yard!).
After six years of grad school (four of psychoanalytic training in NYC and a Masters in Social Work) I started a private psychotherapy practice 24 years ago and am still working fifty-five hours a week doing something I truly love. I would be less than truthful if I said that it was all about helping people....it is certainly that, but also about my penchant for eating expensive French food, preferably in France. For both reasons, retirement is not in my immediate future.
I am so excited at the prospect of catching up on what has been going on with everyone and want to express my admiration for all the effort that Mary Ann, Lynne and the others on the front lines have put into making this happen. Until October 9! Ann