It Ain't Over (28 page)

And it’s all worth it. Most of my life, I didn’t know who I was beyond being my parents’ daughter, my husband’s wife, my kids’ mother. But even when I was five years old watching Totie Fields, I knew who I was
supposed
to be. I always wanted to be able to say, “My name is Robin Fox, and I’m a comedian.” And now I can.”

Lee Gale Gruen, 71

Los Angeles, California

A
young doctor is meeting a patient to tell her the results of her tests. She is elderly, frail, and stooped in her chair. The doctor takes a deep breath, holds her hand, and says:

“Your cancer is inoperable.”

The patient’s eyes widen. “What did you say?”

“The cancer has spread. It’s inoperable.”

“Am I . . . going to die?”

“I’m afraid so.”

With that, the elderly patient loses her stoop, sits up straight, and smiles—and everyone applauds.

Welcome to a scene from the life of Lee Gale Gruen, working actress, whose portrayals have ranged from elderly patient to Puritan midwife to sexy
senior to gun-toting granny. She has appeared in commercials, on soaps, in plays—and yes, occasionally, in final exams in med schools, where faculties judge students on their bedside manner.

Not bad for someone who is 71 years old but has been acting for only 11 of them, years she calls the most rewarding of her working life.

“Living in Santa Monica, I’ve met a lot of actors over the years,” Lee Gale says, “and I’ve always found them so tiresome. They were always talking about jobs, auditions, craft, technique. And now I’m an actress, and guess who’s always talking about acting? I can’t help myself—I love it!”

Lee Gale’s first career was as a probation officer in Los Angeles County. She took the job right out of college and spent the next 37 years visiting prisons, investigating crimes, interviewing convicted criminals, and reporting to judges.

“I found it fascinating,” Lee Gale says. “I had a fairly sheltered upbringing and had never known any criminals. Having that job was like getting permission to peek through a keyhole, to see how other people lived their lives.”

“But when I turned 60,” she says, “I had reached the maximum pension benefit. I knew it was time to move on, I just had no idea what I was going to do.”

One day a friend told her about a program of courses for seniors at Santa Monica Community College. Paging through the school’s catalog, Lee Gale noticed the Theater Arts section.

Lee Gale wasn’t interested in performing; indeed, whenever the probation department had asked her to speak in classrooms and meetings, she always had extreme anxiety. But there was a class called Scene Study that piqued her interest. “I assumed the class read scenes from plays and discussed them,” she says. “I like literature. I like the theater. I thought it might be fun.”

But Lee Gale quickly figured out that the course wasn’t designed to help
students dissect literature when a fellow student handed her some pages and asked if she would read with him. She easily agreed, then was shocked to realize that “reading” the pages meant doing so out loud, while standing in front of the class. She had actually signed up for an acting class.

“I briefly thought of bolting,” she recalls. “Throughout my career, I had dealt with murderers, robbers, rapists, some of the most dangerous people in society, but I had never conquered my fear of speaking in front of a group. I felt naked and vulnerable.” But she stood up and, for the first time, looked at the pages she had been given to read. It was the opening scene of
Death of a Salesman.

“As I started reading the part of Willy’s wife, Linda Loman,” Lee Gale recalls, “a totally unexpected thing happened. I became so immersed in the character and the story that I forgot that a roomful of strangers was watching me.”

When the scene ended, the class broke into applause. “I’d never felt so uplifted. What a high!”

From that moment, Lee Gale was hooked. And very quickly, she hooked somebody else: her 85-year-old father, Marvin. Her dad had always been the life-of-the-party type, but since the recent death of his wife, Rose, he had grown withdrawn. Lee Gale thought attending the class might help him come out of his sad state. It took some coaxing, but once he succumbed, he became an enthusiastic attendee during the three remaining years of his life.

“He was so joyful about the classes,” Lee Gale recalls. “After each one he’d ask me when I was picking him up for the next one.” Before long, father and daughter became sort of an act, with Lee Gale writing comic skits for them to perform together, at first just in class, but later at family gatherings. Marvin would play the cranky father and Lee Gale the beleaguered daughter who was taking him somewhere. Here they are on a camping trip:

Dad:
Where are we going to sleep?

Daughter
(pointing to sleeping bags): There.

Dad:
Are you crazy?

Daughter:
That’s what Native Americans did. That’s what Early Man did.

Dad:
Well, I’m not a Native American and I’m definitely Late Man.

And on it went: Dad and daughter at the movies, Dad and daughter discuss his new earring.

“During those three magical years, I bonded more with my father than I had in the previous sixty,” Lee Gale says.

One day in class a friend exclaimed, “Lee Gale, you are an actress!” And for the first time, she felt confident enough to explore the next steps. She enrolled in a seniors course in commercial acting; and more important, she began acquiring the practical knowledge needed to pursue jobs. A friend helped her write her résumé—there was an alarming amount of white space at first, but with each subsequent job she was gradually able to fill up the page. Another friend helped her line up a photographer to get her first head shots—the eight-by-ten glossy photos used by casting agents. She also learned which newspapers and websites published listings for auditions.

Soon Lee Gale got results: She landed a job in a commercial for a legal services company. Unfortunately, the part called for her to roller-skate, something she hadn’t done in half a century.

“During the audition, I managed to stay upright but couldn’t get myself to stop,” she recalls, “so I had to deliberately roll into things.” That was fine at the audition, but when it came time to shoot the ad outdoors, she was forced to confess to the director that she had a “stopping problem.” Thankfully, he assigned the on-set makeup artist to catch her.

The commercial paid $400, Lee Gale landed an agent, and she was on her way.

“I’ve played a trash-talking gangster granny holding a machine gun, I’ve been a granny rapper, I’ve played a homeless woman three times—it really is fun,” she says.

And in a strange way, the work is connected to her first career. “Being a probation officer taught me a lot about people’s vulnerabilities and frailties, and that there is more to a person than meets the eye.”

Although Lee Gale’s acting income isn’t enough to sustain her (for that she relies on her pension), the work has become an essential part of her life.

“Sometimes I have to drop everything to go on an audition in a moment’s notice,” she says, “but I do it because I adore it. I feel like I’ve blossomed, like I’m walking in a dream.”

Paula MacMann, 61

St. Louis, Missouri

W
hen the last of her six kids was, as she says, “off the wallet,” through college and out of the house, Paula MacMann embraced her new reality: She no longer had to buy six gallons of milk at a time. She could read a magazine cover to cover in one sitting, with no interruptions. And when she opened the refrigerator the day after going to the grocery, the food was actually still there.

This called for a celebration.

“We were done paying tuition and deserved a reward,” Paula recalls. So six months after their youngest got her diploma in June of 2008, Paula and her husband, Bill, frolicked for three weeks in Fiji and New Zealand—hiking over volcanoes, kayaking offshore—a trip they never would have been able to afford while raising the kids.

Life with six children had been nothing short of crazy. When Paula and Bill had said
I do
nearly 30 years earlier, they each brought two kids into the
marriage, and then had two more together. To help pay the bills, Paula threw into that hectic mix a demanding career in website development, so when her youngest daughter announced shortly after graduation that she’d landed her first job, Paula felt liberated enough to declare, “I’m done working!”

But she found it hard to wind down. “It took me a year to realize that I didn’t have to cook dinner every night since it was just the two of us,” she says.

So Paula developed a new schedule. She would wake up at five a.m. to “get a million things done,” from a morning fitness class to all of the projects she’d put on the back burner, like cleaning out closets or making a genealogy book for her mother. Then she rode her bike. A lot. Paula had discovered cycling back in 1991 as a way to decompress, and she’d been doing monthly 100-mile rides (called centuries) from April through October ever since.

To call Paula an “avid cyclist” was an understatement: In her first two years of retirement, she logged more than 4,000 miles. But that didn’t mean she knew a whole lot about the mechanics of bikes. So in October 2010, when a friend was fixing his bike chain and removed one of the links, it was the first time she’d ever really looked at one close up.

When she picked up the link, a small metal figure eight with a hole on either end, her first thought was:
This looks like an earring!
And when her friend said he was going to throw out the chain, Paula asked if she could keep it. “Sure,” he said, wondering what in God’s name she was going to do with it.

With the help of her sister, who made jewelry as a hobby, Paula attached an earring back to each link and put them on. “It made perfect sense to me to wear an earring that was part of a bike chain,” she laughs.

To give the earrings more pizzazz, her sister suggested adding “jump rings,” which are used to connect beads in jewelry and come in dozens of colors. Mixing and matching the rings with the four pieces of a bike chain—the
outer link, inner link, roller, and pin—Paula was able to come up with a wide variety of looks.

Which got her to thinking: Could she sell them? She loved them, but would other people wear pieces of bike chains on their ears, too?

To find out, Paula brought a sampling to her morning fitness class, where three of her friends asked, “Can I buy that?” Her husband got the same reaction when he showed some of Paula’s jewelry to his friends at work.

Not long afterward, a local hospital honored Paula as Healthy Woman of the Year; her friends had quietly nominated her because she was such an inspiration, motivating them to be fit by taking them along on bike rides. Being celebrated in front of the crowd of 1,000 people made the wheels in Paula’s brain turn.
What if she sold jewelry made out of bike chains to inspire others to get up and move, the way she had inspired her own friends?
“My inner self was talking—and I listened.”

So Paula, using colorful used bike chains she got for free from local bike shops, began experimenting with even more designs, including bracelets and necklaces. And wherever Paula wore her creations—at the mall, in the grocery store, on a group bike ride—people loved them.

“I thought, gosh, if people who don’t
have
to say ‘This is cool’ say ‘This is cool,’ maybe it
is
cool!”

She and Bill put up $5,000 as seed money, converted one of the kids’ bedrooms into an office, and Paula started working 40 to 50 hours a week to get her business off the ground. Having never been an entrepreneur, she understood that she was faced with three different types of challenges: “There was what I
knew
, what I didn’t know, and what I
didn’t know
I didn’t know!”

First, she took on the nitty-gritty: talking with bank officers and credit card companies to figure out the best way to process charges, researching shipping options so customers could receive automated emails with
tracking information, and investigating how to handle sales taxes that varied from state to state. She felt like she’d just taken a business course. And she had.