Giving Up Glamour, Rolling the Dice, Part 2

Thinking About Tomorrow: Reinventing Yourself at Midlife
by Susan Crandell

(Page 10 of 11)

Ellen and Michael shut down the radio show, cut way back on their appearances, and began to envision the next chapter of their lives. "We spent a lot of time visualizing where we wanted to be in five years and then backing up into how we'd get there," Ellen recalls. Michael had always wanted to accomplish two things: write a novel and do stand-up comedy. Ellen didn't want to work as a dietitian anymore. One day she got a postcard in the mail advertising a home-study course to become a personal trainer. "It was just a little three-by-five card, but it changed my life," she says. "I'd always been a jock. I ran competitively in high school, and in college I was a dancer." Ellen got accredited as a trainer, figuring she'd have the extra thunder of advising her clients on nutrition. It proved to be a winning combination, and soon her calendar was filled with appointments. The work is fulfilling. "I'm training a forty-year-old schizophrenic who's lost thirty-five pounds and doesn't suffer from sleep apnea anymore. It's turned his life around."

Her clients appreciate not just the depth of her knowledge but the maturity of her outlook as well. "Baby boomers want someone who's educated and can talk about a variety of subjects - museums, books, raising kids. And they like my philosophy: feeding your body to be healthy, not denying it to lose weight."

A year ago, Ellen added the title of Reiki Master to her credentials. "It's a form of energy healing. When you touch someone, you're a funnel for universal life force energy. It's my spiritual practice; I tune myself up every day with Reiki."

Right now, Ellen's earnings pay the bills, and they live frugally while Michael builds his future. Most mornings, he gets up at 5 AM and heads down to the basement, which is no longer packed with cartons of Food as Foreplay, to work on a completely different kind of book. He's writing a romantic spy thriller about a down-and-out rock star who's trying to resurrect his career. Rock Spy has been two years in the making. The manuscript will go to his agent in two months. Sure, there are dark days when the work isn't going well. "After I finished the first draft, I bought a book on how to write a best-selling novel. When I realized how many problems my manuscript had, that was a black day. A black week," he says. "Then you realize the only way out of the blues is to set the alarm, make a pot of coffee, go down to the office, and get to work."

When he isn't plotting Rock Spy's future, he's plotting his own. For six months, Michael has been polishing his stand-up routine at Boston comedy clubs, putting together material for larger sets he can take to New York. "So far, the response has been excellent," Michael says. "My angle is 'bad dad' humor. My audience is people like me, boomer dads." The common wisdom may call comedy a young man's game, but Michael sees virtue in his seniority. "The club owners look down on the kids with their baseball caps on backward, doing dick jokes and gay bashing. I'm a professional. I show up on time, make their clubs look good, and attract a better class of customer.

"Why am I trying something only one in a million people succeed at? I don't know. But my new hero is Rodney Dangerfield. He started doing stand-up at forty-eight, and became one of the biggest stars in comedy," says Michael, who's now forty-seven. "Even as a child, I always believed that whatever I do, I'm going to succeed." Some of his humor draws on his mixed-race heritage. His mother was half black and worked as a bookkeeper. His father was Jewish and a union organizer in New York. "The FBI would camp outside our door, and our house was firebombed when I was eight. My father went to work in a bulletproof vest. Maybe I'm so confident because I survived that stuff."

Run for office. Or get appointed. Serving as a member of the local school board in a small town can introduce you to a whole new cast of characters, and could even fuel bigger political ambitions.

It was tough at times, straddling two races, but the sense of humor that would fuel Michael's stand-up career was already serving him well. "My freshman year of high school, the black kids were beating me up. When they walked up, I'd say, 'Why don't I just stuff myself in my locker and save you the trouble.' I'd start to do it and they'd laugh." Within a year, the guys on the football team had become friends and protectors.

These days, neither Ellen nor Michael is afraid to dream big - really big. "My goal is to be one of the best trainers and holistic health counselors in the country, the Jack La Lanne for the new millennium," Ellen says. "I want to write books and have a large enough media presence to reach a lot of people. Michael joked that I should try out for Survivor, and I'm going to." Michael's dream for stand-up is eight thousand people at Carnegie Hall, or a slot on Letterman; if Rock Spy finds a readership, it will become a series, maybe a movie. Meanwhile, Ellen and Michael don't mind living the simple life. "People who aren't satisfied fill their lives with stuff," Ellen says. "Struggling to be happy, they get into this standard of living where they need a bigger house, a second van." Ellen and Michael's idea of a hot date is a home-cooked dinner and a DVD. They're working their schedules so that they don't need a nanny; one of them is always available to take care of the kids, who are now eight and four. They are confident that their financial future will work out, and that if either of them hits it big, the kids will be older and it'll be okay to climb back on the media merry-go-round. As Ellen puts it, "You throw your kids out of the nest, then you jump out yourself."

Copyright © 2007 by Susan Crandell

About the Author

I got my first job after college not because I was the smartest applicant - I wasn't - but because I was the only one with a pilot's license. I'll be grateful forever to Bob Parke for hiring me at Flying magazine because that's where I met the love of my life, Stephan Wilkinson (the author of two wonderful books, The Gold-Plated Porsche and Man and Machine). Thirty years later, Steve and I are still working together, both freelance writers with offices in our little Hudson Valley farmhouse. Our daughter Brook, who's an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, is the only one with a real job.