Buying Levitra
My good friend, Lee, who is re-entering the job market at age 60, said ‘I, Peasant’ is a fitting title for this chapter in her life. She has 2 degrees, is an award winning playwright (such a marketable skill) and, yet, the only job nibbles have come with a salary that would be really cool for a 16 year old. She’s not quite ready to don a barista cap and make frappuccinos; a horrifying prospect not only for Lee but also for her college aged children. This reminds me of an episode on the old Loretta Young Show. In that episode Loretta played a widow forced to take a waitress job at the after-school hangout. Her shows always taught a moral lesson; undoubtedly this one was that honest work was nothing to be ashamed of. But, oh the suffering her daughter felt when she bounced into the malt shop with her friends and stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of her mother in a waitress uniform! Presumably Loretta was hired that day and since cell phones weren’t invented, couldn’t warn her daughter not to come to the malt shop. I saw this episode some 50 years ago but can still remember cringing on the couch watching Loretta’s humble smile as she brought fountain drinks to the booth where her sulking daughter sat with her friends. I shuttered imagining my mother, Lucile, as a waitress at Augie’s, taking orders for fries as I sunk into my Del Mares club jacket to avoid the shocked looks of my friends. The fear of having a job that would humiliate your family made a big impression on me. I remember thinking right after college I’d get a glamorous job and high-tail it out of my blue collar Chicago neighborhood. In reality, my first job after getting my M.A.was as a waitress at a Rush Street bar.
Any day I could be joining my friend Lee in the job search. If you’re like me, you feel happy to be able to pay your bills each month and each year, you look forward to your free birthday dinner at Sizzler. (I was crushed when Denny’s cut their birthday freebie.) I hyperventilate when I read the statistics about how much you should have socked away for a comfortable retirement. I wonder if I can save a million dollars in two years?! I assume I’ll have to do some kind of work till I drop in the fields. Yes, ‘I, Peasant’, is me, too. The stats to be considered middle class in Los Angeles keep drifting farther out of my reach. I worry that the Social Security fund will go bust when I need it. People say that will never happen – yeah, right, like we’d never again bail out a bank. Deregulation is a slippery slope, especially for the new peasant class. Who’s going to protect us from sliding down into some kind of financial “Inferno” spun out by the free market policies of Milton Friedman?
I don’t mean to sound gloomy but I had a birthday this week. My mother called with her usual uplifting remark, “Remember, Jan, you have more yesterdays than tomorrows. Happy birthday, honey!” I try to be positive but these days it seems like a cloud of doom has settled over the entire country. Maybe it’s because more and more of us feel like we are slipping into the peasant class. On the flip side, John McCain doesn’t know how many homes he has or what kind of a car he drives. We should all be so lucky as to have that kind of senior moment. Oh boy, I know all too well the corners of my one domicile and have imagined that living in my Prius (should it come to that) might not be too bad. In the meantime, I’ve put The Loretta Young Show on my Netflix list so I can happily drift back to a time when financial happiness meant having $20 for a designer Easter hat from Marshall Field’s.
Jan Bina, blogger for In The Trenches Productions, The First Entertainment Website for Women Over 40