Producer (4 page)

FREAKING OUT IS NOT AN OPTION

When you have to make an important decision and there are a variety of ways to go, the only clear path is to channel your
intuition. Check in with your gut. We all have that intuitive gift to some degree. My psychic friends assure me of this, and
I know it’s true. Some people just have it honed better than others.

So, when the stress-o-meter hits ten, remember that losing your cool is not going to help or change the situation. When things
get confusing and you feel frazzled and upset, try taking a deep breath and calming yourself down. Do whatever it takes to
accomplish this. You may need to leave the room, sit in a quiet place with no music where you can’t be disturbed, and take
a moment to go inside yourself. Then ask yourself,
What do I really want here? What feels right?

When you lose your temper and freak out, that behavior negatively impacts others and can throw them off their game. Clearly,
we all need to learn from our
mistakes, and that includes reviewing the things that did not work, but it doesn’t make sense to upset the apple cart when
you’re standing in the middle of it. You can’t stop in the midst of a situation to figure out what happened in the past, because
you have to be present and look forward. Once it’s over, you can take the time to figure out what went wrong so it won’t happen
again. But screaming and freaking out will only take you further away from your goal of working things out. Losing it will
intimidate people and push them away, which is counterproductive to what you are trying to achieve. The truth is that no one
wants to work with a screamer, and that kind of negative energy never does any good for anyone.

When you take some time to get in touch with your feelings and you can hear yourself think, consider both the short-term and
the long-term repercussions of any decision you might make. Ask yourself, What will this decision mean to me tomorrow, five
days from now, five weeks from now, or five years from now? No matter the nature of the decision you need to make, go with
your intuition. If it feels right, go with it. If it doesn’t, walk away.

I once knew a woman who had five psychics at the ready whenever she needed advice. If the first one didn’t tell her what she
wanted to hear, she called the second one, and so on. At the end, she was still confused and she had no ability to make her
own decisions.

Not that you should be isolated and never check with anyone else. Sometimes after you make a decision
that feels right, you might want to clarify by checking with a smart friend who really knows you, understands your situation,
and absolutely will tell you the truth. For the most part, however, when you go inside and trust yourself, you’ll be amazed
at how much easier decisions become. When you stay calm and take all the elements into consideration, a confusing situation
will generally turn out a lot better than you might expect!

W
hen I graduated from Hollins University in 1975, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, and neither did most of my friends.
Back then, we really didn’t plan our careers like college students do now. In fact, when I think back about my childhood,
we didn’t plan much. It was a sign of the times for girls to think more in terms of jobs than careers, and it all followed
a somewhat logical plan, with marriage and children usually being the end goal.

But I was a little different. When I graduated from college, I wanted to leave home and work. My mom would have preferred
for me to settle down in Jackson, Michigan, where she and Dad were living. But that didn’t appeal to me. I had already lived
in Paris and I wanted to move away and live on my own—despite a terrifying experience.

It was during my junior year when I joined a program called Hollins Abroad, an opportunity to spend a year in Paris and study
art, which was my passion. I went to Paris with two friends, Torrey and Cynthia, and we all lived in the home of
a lovely French family. I got pretty fluent in the language and I felt very grown-up, being on my own for the first time and
traveling all around the city on the metro.

One afternoon, I was thrilled to meet Thomas, a cool American guy who suggested he and I meet at
La
Madeleine, a famous Roman Catholic church, to hear some music. I should have asked him to pick me up or meet me at my place
so I wouldn’t have to travel alone through the streets of Paris. Our dean at Hollins had warned us to be careful about being
tricked and abducted, and he suggested we always travel with someone else.

Still, I threw caution to the wind. I hailed a cab by myself and got in.
“L’église Madeleine, s’il vous plaît,”
I said in French, feeling very cosmopolitan. As the cabdriver began to ask me questions in French, I felt proud of myself
that I could answer him—until the nature of his questions began to concern me.

“What are you doing here in Paris?” he started quite innocently.

“I’m going to school,” I answered him in French.

“Do you live in a dorm?” he asked. What business was that of his?

“No,” I answered quickly. “I live with a family.”

“Do they wait up for you?” he wanted to know.

Now I was beginning to feel anxious. “Yes,” I said, “they wait up for me. Could you hurry, because my friend is waiting for
me right now and he’s probably getting worried and making some phone calls.”

The cabdriver picked up speed as I had requested, but that only made me more anxious. Then, all of a sudden, he pulled over
to the side of the road two blocks away from the church. I grabbed the door handle to jump out of the car but he turned, reached
into the backseat, and placed his hand firmly over the lock. A small car pulled up behind us and stopped. A man
jumped out of the car behind us and opened my door from the outside. He reached for me as if he were about to pull me out
of the car when the driver stopped him.
“Ce n’est pas bon. On ne peux pas faire ça,”
he said. “This isn’t good. We can’t do this.”

In an instant, the man who was trying to pull me toward him let go of me and slammed my car door shut. My driver took off,
sped forward for two blocks, pulled up in front of the Madeleine, and I dashed out, slamming the cab door behind me. No one
followed me as he sped away and I was breathless, standing in front of the church, scared to death. I had just come so close
to being abducted I could hardly breathe, and I was grateful to be alive.

Despite my near abduction, I decided to leave the security of my family in Michigan and go to Washington DC, anyway, rent
a cheap place with some friends, and find a job. I had lots of interests and I wanted to experience life and the workplace
so I wouldn’t end up being bored or boring. My father understood my desire to break away and he gave me the grand sum of forty
dollars to get started on my new life. “Go to Washington,” he told me. “If you don’t find a job in two weeks, write yourself
a check for a plane ticket and come back home.”

When my five friends and I arrived in Washington, we found an inexpensive apartment to share in Georgetown, just outside of
DC. That took care of my forty dollars, so I headed straight over to a popular clothing store called Brooks Brothers (it was
very posh at the time) to apply for a job in sales. I needed some money coming in right away so I could eat. I wanted to continue
at school to get my master’s degree in art. But if I did, I would have to pay for it myself.

The job interview was my first real one, and I tried to present myself in a good light. I knew the position was competitive,
so during my interview I made sure to be friendly, positive,
and to look like I had something on the ball. After all, I had lived in Paris! I must have done okay because I was hired on
the spot as a salesperson for Brooks Brothers. Although I knew this job would be temporary, at least I had a paycheck coming
in. I had bigger goals than sales, but this was exactly what I needed to do right now.

I concentrated on being the best salesperson I could be. In the midseventies, there were very few women on the floor at a
primarily men’s store, not because men were considered better than women at sales. There was no way to know, because in the
posh clothing stores back then, it was considered improper for a woman to ask a man, “What side do you dress on?” when he
was buying pants that needed to be hemmed. I actually didn’t know what that meant until a fellow salesperson told me. It seemed
that any reference to a man’s genitals was out of the question for a woman at the time, so we could not fit the men in suits.

Of course, that was where the money was. While a suit might cost a couple hundred dollars and in many cases, up from there,
a shirt cost about $18.50. Ties, undershirts, and handkerchiefs were inexpensive and we worked on commission. I did the math
and realized that I would need to sell a load of stuff to make any money at all, so that was exactly what I set out to do.

I served many a VIP during the time I worked at Brooks Brothers in Washington, including Ethel Kennedy, Nancy Kissinger, and
Eunice Shriver. I always made sure I approached them with a good attitude. I was a popular saleswoman because of that, and
I remember my very first customer, a distinguished man named Clark Clifford, former US Secretary of Defense. When I approached
him on the floor to say, “Can I help you?” with a nice smile, it turned out that he wanted a
large number of custom-made shirts with monograms. They were quite expensive, and my very first sale totaled a couple thousand
dollars.

When a veteran salesman saw me serving ex-Secretary Clifford, he sized me up as a “just out of college chick,” and he came
over to rescue my sale that did not need rescuing. I
did
need him, however, to help me ring up the order since I was unfamiliar with the system as yet, but the commission was mine.
Buoyed by making such a strong first sale, I continued my efforts and I swiftly became the highest earning salesperson on
the staff, man or woman, without ever selling a suit.

One afternoon at about 4 p.m., after the manager of the store, Bob Mallon, had finished an afternoon cocktail, he called me
to his office. “Okay, Wendy,” he said, “how are you doing this? I want to know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Well,” I said, “I walk up to a customer. I smile, and I say, ‘If you need anything, I’ll be right over there.’ And I walk
away.”

“Why do you do that?” Bob wanted to know.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I don’t like to be bugged when I’m shopping at a store. I hate it when someone starts
following me around. If I greet them with a smile and tell them where I’ll be if they have any questions, they find me and
ask. And they don’t feel bugged or pressured.”

“That can’t be all,” he said. “What else do you do?”

I thought for a moment. “Some of the sales staff don’t go out of their way to make a sale for just a tie or a scarf that costs
only about ten dollars. They prefer to talk with one another instead of waiting around. But in my mind, ten times ten equals
a hundred dollars. I see each sale as important, and I make the customer’s experience a good one. I don’t care how many times
I ring up a ten-dollar sale. I just know it adds up.”

Excited, Bob went to a sales meeting in New York and told
his bosses about this interesting saleswoman who was making more than most of the men. I ended up working at Brooks Brothers
for the next two years, earning annually about thirty-four thousand dollars in commissions, an unheard of amount at the time,
especially for a woman who was not allowed to sell suits. I was thrilled, able to go out to dinner when I wanted, and I did
my artwork, my first love, on the side. I had no idea how long it would be before I ever matched that salary again, and at
the time, I took it in my stride. My dad, however, hoped I would stay on at Brooks Brothers for a good long time because he
got tons of new shirts every month!

The trouble was that I got tired of being a sales clerk. True, I was earning a really good living and I was meeting interesting
people. But there was only so far a salesperson could go. I wanted more. I wasn’t sure what that looked like until one of
my customers told me he wanted to open an art gallery. He and I had discussed art and he knew it was my first love. So he
asked me if I was interested in leaving my present job to run the art gallery he was about to open. I did it. I left Brooks
Brothers to manage a small new operation called the Huber Art Gallery for five thousand dollars a year, a fraction of the
salary I’d been making. Looking back, it seems like an impulsive move and not the smartest thing to do, but I couldn’t remain
a sales clerk forever. I had started my master’s degree work at George Washington University, but I stopped when I left Brooks
Brothers. I just couldn’t afford it anymore.

When I began working in the gallery, I did as much outreach as I could, but very few people wandered in. When they did, they
usually walked back out pretty quickly since we really didn’t have much interesting art to speak of. I spent most days alone,
answering the few phone calls I received and keeping the place tidy, an easy job since we had so little foot traffic.

I was sweeping the floor one morning (again) for lack of anything else to do, when the telephone rang. I ran to answer it
and I was caught off guard by the voice on the other end of the line.

“Is this Wendy?” asked a female voice.

“Yes, it is,” I answered.

“This is Ethel Kennedy,” she said.

I paused. There was simply no way Ethel Kennedy would be calling me. But I
had
served her at the store and we had carried on lively conversations. In fact, I was so stunned that at first I thought someone
was playing a trick on me. Now, when I think back, I should have suspected it was Ethel herself, considering the way my life
has played out. It seems like fate has had a way of placing me in circumstances that are unexpected and extremely foretelling.