I started working when I was 15 as a checker at the downtown Kroger in South Bend, Indiana. My Dad, who would never give me a ride to school, never offered to take me to dances on Friday nights, never gave me an allowance, never said, “Good job, Sarla,” took me to work. I worked nights after school from 3:00 – 11:00. He picked me up. The keys on the cash register were stubborn and stuck more often than they gave way to my fingers. The numbers were hard to read and there was no calculator to let you know how much change to give the customer.
Many items were not priced or mispriced. The shoppers were poor, under-employed laborers who tried to distract me so I would make the wrong change. The manager told me about them the first day, “Stay calm. They will be mean to you. They will yell at you and tell you that you made a mistake. Ignore them. They will try to shake you up because that is when they can slip something through the line without you seeing it.” I lasted two weeks. I could never balance my drawer, my legs hurt, I got into fight with a customer, and I hated the f _ _king job. The night the manager let me go, I called my Dad. “Dad, come get me. I got fired.” He was pissed but he did come.
My next job was at a Taco Bell on Poplar in Memphis, TN. I needed to save money for college. Again, I worked nights after school and weekends. It was the first Taco Bell in Memphis and I was on the crew that set it up and ran it for the first year. Cannot even remember what minimum wage was then, but I can promise you it was not enough. The smell of the grease hung in the air and permeated my clothes. When left at night, I had a thick film of grease over every inch of my body. I could not get the smell of refried beans out of my hair. I kept that job until I left for the University of Tennessee.
When I dropped out of college in 1970, I came home to Memphis and worked as an insurance clerk at St Joseph Hospital. Hated the job, but I made enough money to support myself. I worked there for two years. I left to go back to Indiana and work for my father. That was a joke. I went to work every morning in an office on Lincoln Way in South Bend. No heat, no work, no Dad. He never came into the office. So I quit.
When I married my first husband, Jeff, who came to Indiana and rescued me from my own Shameless Showtime life, I got a job at Forty Carrots. I worked with Francis and Doug Averitt for almost eight years. I loved my job selling kitchen ware, fine china, Italian pottery, and silver ware. I apprenticed under one of the cooking school teacher and eventually taught classes on my own. I learned so much.
I left forty Carrots to go back to college during which time I worked three jobs waiting tables at three different establishments one of which was Solomon Alfred’s, now the Blue Monkey. I was a terrible waitress, the kind that cannot remember your order, could not balance a tray, could not make change and who stayed after closing to do cocaine with the waiters. I quite because I knew I would never graduate staying up drugging into the wee hours of the morning.
I met my second husband around this time and eventually worked many years for him at Playhouse on the Square. But I am getting ahead of myself. First I worked for Thomason, Crawford and Hendrix as a subrogation clerk. I only hated one job more than working a the law firm and that was the first job I had a Kroger.
Left there to return to work at Squash Blossom Natural Foods. I worked with Jimmy and Allen and others for over eight years. After Jimmy and I had an affair that ended his marriage, I went back to my husband, Jackie, and worked for him. I made props. I was the box office manager, and the editor of what was then Playhouse Profile, a monthly magazine for subscribers. I did children’s shows on weekends. I ushered, painted, washed plastic cups in the bar, hosted parties, went to galas and played the role of Mrs. Playhouse on the Square.
My theatre career ended when I finally applied for and landed a job as the assistant to Rita Halpern at the Idlewild Children’s Center. I worked with an amazing group of women, Rita, Tansy and Sandra and others for over five years. When I left that job I thought I would n ever make as much money as I did working there. I was wrong.
I finally bit the bullet, rented the rehearsal studio space above Theatre Works for $8.00 an hour and opened Midtown Yoga. That was in 1997. In 2001, I opened what is now Midtown Yoga at 524 South Cooper. I sold the business in January, 2013. I still teach public classes, a portion of the Midtown Yoga teacher training program, which I started with Cyndi Lee in 2001, and workshops in weight management and meditation at the studio. I have several long time private students whom I see weekly, bi weekly and some three times a week. I also have many clients who come to me as a part of my new business, Being and Becoming, a whole life counseling service. I am grateful every day for the opportunity to teach and offer the tools of yoga to others.
What I really want is to be a writer. I have written since I was a child. It is late in life to start a new career but I am going to make a go of it. Tomorrow I leave for Santa Fe where I will take my first writing workshop with Natalie Goldberg. I am starting from scratch. At 62, I am blazing a new trail, one I hope will lead to a published story or novel. I will not give up. And best part about it is…..no one can ever fire me and I do not have any employees of contract workers for whom I am responsible.
So I plug away. A post a day, a few lines in a book that now eludes me, a workshop, a writing class and whatever else it takes to learn how to be really damn good at this.
Writing into the Light 