I got my first clue things were shifting when they changed the name of the Personnel Department to Human Resources. That title brought to mind bodies wearing pressed suits and hanging from huge hooks, cycling around on a motorized rack like the one in the dry cleaners. A neat filing system, it displayed unlimited selections to replace the used-up models that had been piled into the roll-off dumpster in the alley. My second clue arrived the morning after the merger papers were signed.

moved from one end of the office building to the other, everyone jockeyed to get a desk near the windows. Not me. I chose the desk no one wanted way back in the corner. I preferred privacy to a view.

Not that I got much privacy. My micro-managing supervisor invaded my personal space daily. He peered over my shoulder watching my keystrokes, wanted to know my every move, called me into his office constantly to question my actions. Once I got dragged back to his lair from in front of the elevator at 5pm on a Friday.

“Come to my office,” he ordered. “I want to discuss next week’s objectives.” Talk about feeling like a caged wild animal. I daydreamed of escape.

Unfortunately, the career ladder I counted on climbing kept losing rungs. Government cuts reduced the number of available statistics positions and I faced a shrinking pool of jobs in a bumpy economy. I wasn’t married. No opportunities existed for me to quit and fall back on a mate’s salary until the job market picked up. Yet, I feared for my mental health if I didn’t get out of this soul-stifling environment.

a friend, fellow room mom or student to run for office with She Should Run. The project was started by the Women’s Campaign Forum after various studies showed that women don’t think to run for office unless someone asks. Women win at the same rate as men, get more in the pipeline!

I woke to the sound of puking, followed by gentle toothbrush strokes against a set of teeth. The sounds were so vivid that when I first moved into the 1970s apartment building, I often checked to make sure my two flamboyant neighbors weren’t standing over my toilet to dispose of the pepperoni pizza they had swallowed just hours before.

They had been bitten by the Hollywood bug and were starving for fame, literally. Something about living in Los Angeles gives people the right to declare the one line that I began to expect from every struggling waitress, bartender, sales associate and student I came into contact with. “I’m an actor,” they said, though many had yet to score a role in any script other than the one they called life.

I moved to L.A. with a goal of making it big in the fashion industry. I graduated from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, where I met Heidi. We discovered shortly after receiving our diplomas that our dream jobs required starting at the bottom with very little pay. So we moved into a shabby, one-bedroom apartment with broken tiles and flaking paint and began our journey.