After writing about my twins’ experiences making movies—Sarah as leading lady in Keep the Change and Max as co-author of Being Charlie—you’d expect me to change
my focus back to real life dramas, right? Not so fast, as it turns out. Coming back to earth from watching my 24 year
old son and daughter live their dreams at such a young age, turns out to be a
bumpy landing. I tried to immerse myself
in global news headlines: the pope… Trump… Putin… the pope… (Snooze). As the family nest manager, I was also busy
solving minor problems: the drugs CVS failed to deliver, two broken tea kettles, a
clogged toilet, ink for the printer (more snoozing). With such a paucity of inspiration, I was
really hoping that the autism program I attended at Pace would inspire me to
write about a new approach to transitioning out of college, job leads for
Sarah, anything encouraging or exciting. The panel was an impressive group, but
I didn’t learn anything new. I tried calling GRASP, hoping they might help
Sarah find a job or provide information that would be useful to aspiring empty-nesters—parents of 20-something kids on
the spectrum. An electronic voice told
me “no one is here to answer your call,” so I left a message. What was my next idea?
Improbable as it sounds, my next idea was to write about reconnecting with an old friend at—you guessed it —ANOTHER movie premiere. A year ago Carrie Schoenfeld and I had bumped into each other randomly at the gym and recognized each other instantly. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t seen each other since the two of us were friends in the second grade at Lenox more than 50 years ago. Lenox may have merged with Birch-Wathen, and the uniforms might have changed, but Carrie still looked amazingly like the slim, straight haired, blue eyed girl who sported navy knee socks, white Peter Pan blouse and a pleated skirt at age seven. Unlike me, Carrie had always been athletic and musical, sharing a love of piano with her father. So it wasn’t surprising to learn that she loved dance classes (though her favorites were different than mine) and had ended up in the arts.
