In 1993, struggling to find something to write about, I decided that since I was so interested in women I’d write about them and their daily work in jobs that interested me. The resulting profiles are in the posts that follow. I showed them to several people in publishing, thinking I might have the start of a book that would appeal to parents looking for something vocational to inspire their daughters. The publishing people said, “Gee, interesting. I wonder who’d publish it.”
I thank the women who permitted me to interview them: a victim's advocate, a foreign correspondent, a high school English teacher, a performing arts administrator, and a movie translator. I gave each woman a copy of her profile. One said she and her colleagues didn't recognize themselves. Another said she didn't have the color (orange) clothes I described. I hope that if any reads her profile now, she is glad to have an image, however imperfect, from her past.
Had the book been published, I planned to put as epigraph what the dead Mrs. Gibbs says to the dead Emily, who wants to revisit her life, in the third act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town: "Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough."
