Job-hunting

One year into the Great Recession, the title begs the question: is this a futile exercise in grandiose thinking? The jury's still out, since everyone I know engaged in the aforementioned quest is coming up empty. Regardless of age, gender, race, socio-economic status (rapidly changing with each failed attempt) friends and acquaintances are striking out every day. A fifty-something female with a master's degree worked at a 7-Eleven for one year, earning just enough to scrape by. About a month ago, while opening up in the early morning hours, a speeding car swerved into the parking lot, a guy in a ski mask jumped out and she found herself in a caught-on-video-cam nightmare unfolding like a Lifetime movie, the perpetrator holding the gun to her head and threatening to blow her brains out if she didn't cough up the cash. She survived and I reiterated a parental plea: Don't ever work in a convenience store.

My twenty-two-year-old nephew graduated with honors last spring from an elite university. Faced with student loan bills and raring to plunge into the job market--virtually an oxymoron in 2009--he just returned home from a two month stint in Chicago applying for scores of positions. This bright, academically-accomplished, motivated young man never got a single interview.

As for me, I'm job-hunting after a two-decade lapse. I've been gainfully employed in the theater during that time and managed a little task known as stay-at-home mothering, but I haven't collected a paycheck in the Real World since 1988. Folks with hiring power aren't exactly vacuuming the red carpet. In terms of job experience, I'm a creature of the copy machine, landline and, yes, that archaic cast-off, the typewriter. In other words, a dinosaur. In the fashion world they say the eighties are back, in which case I'm your girl. I can hover over customers in a retail environment, humming Madonna and Cyndi Lauper hits with the best of them.

This search reminds me of our tribal origins; all these years my husband has been doing the hunting while I did the gathering. Him, Tarzan. Me, Jane. Gathering is my specialty, especially in the clearance section of Marshall's or the lower shelves at the Flea Depot. I'm so good at it I qualify for the cable show "Hoarders", where hapless clutterers stare at ten-year-old magazines wondering if they'll ever need the article about how to de-claw your cat at home. Metaphorically speaking, my email inbox is full of memos I failed to get, i.e., the Transition From Housefrau and Child-Herder To Second Act. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was right and there are none of the latter in American lives, I should have paid more attention to the wiles of Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall in How To Marry A Millionaire.

So one reinvents oneself, reshuffles the deck, spruces up the promo and self-publicizes. As a song about being a successful stripper (from the Broadway show Gypsy) put it, "Ya Gotta Have a Gimmick." Thus, the birth of yet another blogger, me, itching for a following, you. And speaking of stripping, I hear the soft-core porn world actually welcomes Cougars who've hit the mid-century mark. If this economy doesn't improve soon Mommy may consider plying the trade.