It is impossible to list all of one’s experience on one’s resume.
For instance:
For a while I was on a dessert isle with a professor, a millionaire and his wife, and a movie star.
Key takeaway: Problem Solving Skills.I frequented a MASH unit for a few years.
Key takeaways: Focus, Crisis Management.I learned diligence in two diners (Thanks Alice & Angie), patience on a tour bus with Shirley Partridge and her family band, and customer service aboard a Princess Cruise ship.
I really loved that boat.
As a kid, every year about this time my Mom and I would go to the grocery store, same as always, but something magical would happen. After a trip through aisles filled with displays of Stove Top Stuffing and cans of jellied cranberry sauce, we’d gleefully find the Fall Preview edition of the TV Guide magazine waiting for us at the checkout line.
This was the only issue we bought all year, since a free tv schedule came in the Sunday paper every week. But the Fall Preview TV Guide was double thick, with little articles about every new show. Most importantly to us, there was a master schedule showing what was on all three networks for the entire week in the middle.
Back at home, we sat at the kitchen table and read every description, then my mother used a ballpoint pen to circle our choices to watch each night - which shows we wanted to try and the favorites that we didn’t want to miss.
It is difficult to convey how exciting a Fall TV Season was in this current age where new shows (full seasons, no less) appear each month.
I was absolutely not one of those kids allowed to just sit in front of the TV set, even on weekends. For a couple of years we didn’t even have a television; we read books and listened to music at night. So TV time was a treat - well planned in advance, and this autumn ritual set the stage for the specific stories I was allowed to follow throughout the year.
It was very important to choose which pilot to see, because often new shows would premiere at the same time, so I’d stand by the set and we’d switch from one to the other to see which we liked the best.
(I dreamed of the future, when it would be perfectly natural to rush home from work in my flying car and watch multiple shows at the same time on a TV that had three screens. Alas, technology went in a different direction.)
While it is now a teeming metropolis, 1970’s Kansas City seemed a bit isolated to me as a tween-ager, so it was incredibly exciting to see what life was like in other people’s lives. I owe much of my sense of empathy to Norman Lear, who brought authentic emotions of folks from other communities into my house, let me see the choices they made, the way they survived, the lessons they learned. His shows were little three act plays.
I understood that I would never have been invited into Archie Bunker’s house, but there I was, week after week, watching the world of a person whose opinions didn’t match our own, seeing that character interact with others, as the storyline evolved to reveal why he was the way he was.
James L. Brooks produced “Mary Tyler Moore”. She was on her own, but that wasn’t what her story was about - she had a job that she loved and a boss that believed in her and she didn’t want to be anyone else or fit in, she just wanted to do what she did with integrity.
There was “Julia”, who was a single black woman with a son: we watched that, sure, but we also watched “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”… my mother thought that if she was missing some kind of “dad” messaging she might pick it up from Bill Bixby. We watched Good Times, but we also watched “Happy Days” (like everyone else): neither show directly reflected our lives or experience, but the love these families had for one another absolutely did.
These were light hearted emotional stories about “us”- created for viewers to sympathize with, rather than today’s modern cautionary tales of “others” observed voyeristically from Above. It all seemed a bit kinder and smarter than it is today (well, at least until Ted Lasso happened). The TV of that age didn’t lead so much with deficits: it wasn’t all about fears and flaws, just the common struggles of moving forward.
Maybe that’s not exciting enough for today. Maybe my experience working on a Starfleet space vessel isn’t applicable in today’s competitive market, but I do know a lot being diplomatic with hostile warlike creatures, which may prove to be incredibly useful.
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