Want to star on TV? Opportunity for New York and LA single women

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Oh, how funny. Got an email from a casting director for a new TV show about dating. They say they’re going to give away a great trip, place to stay, etc. in another city–and I guess film your adventures. Here’s what it says:

NEW DATING SPECIAL FOR ABC Media Productions

Are you a woman age 25 to 40 who is successful in every aspect of life except one…finding LOVE? You’re climbing your way up the corporate ladder, have your own boutique business, or manage a hip new start-up company. You play as hard as you work…from the health club to the nightclubs. You’re cute, sexy; maybe even drop dead gorgeous! Yep, you’ve got it all…everything except the RIGHT GUY to share it with.

The men in your life are everywhere. There’s that successful co-worker that’s off limits, your brother’s gorgeous friend who looks at you as if you’re his little sister, and the guy at the gym that’s just not your type. In fact, they surround you…but for whatever reason none of the guys in your very crowded pond are your MR.RIGHT.

You haven’t given up hope that he is out there…somewhere…waiting…maybe even looking for you! If you could only get out of here and go somewhere…anywhere, you know deep in your heart that a new place filled with new people could change everything.

If you believe there is love out there for you, now is the time to throw caution to the wind. A romantic holiday completely planned and organized just for you. We provide the NEW CITY, the NEW DIGS, the NEW GUYS… even the plane ticket. You just have to believe in love…and get on board!

If you want to apply or you want to nominate someone, they want women who live in New York or Los Angeles. To apply or nominate a deserving woman, please submit name, age, occupation, city/ST, and a recent photo to rrcasting@gmail.com.

We don’t normally talk about dating or finding love–there are already plenty of resources out there to help with that. But what the heck, eh? This is a chance to be “discovered” and who knows where that might lead?

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Barbara Payne, January 29th 2009 | Posted in casting director, TV star, Valentine's Day

No lust here – Book Review: The Way of All Flesh

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This book is a classic, and I have always avoided reading it because somehow the title made me feel it would be prurient–like one of the romance novels you see in the grocery store checkout lines. Boy, was I wrong.

A New York Times reviewer called The Way of All Flesh “a time bomb of literature. It lay hidden in Samuel Butler’s desk for 30 years. When it was published after he died, it blew up the Victorian family and with it the whole great edifice of the Victorian novel. George Bernard Shaw, the free thinking iconoclast, called him the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century.”

I loved the author’s observations on human nature. Butler wrote this with beautiful Charles-Dickens-type-English word choices and complex but elegant sentence structure. But it’s the incisive observations about people that make you want to turn down the corners of so many pages so you can remember the brilliant insight in this sentence or that paragraph. He thinks much more like a modern person than someone who lived in the Victorian era.

Living in a very small condo in Chicago means I have limited room for “stuff” including books. But this is one book I will buy and keep on my shelf. I look forward to letting it give me pleasure many times in the future.

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Barbara Payne, January 17th 2009 | Posted in Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, observations on human nature, Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

Bitter cold brings back a memory

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Unbelievable. It’s 15-below in my neighborhood this morning. I remember a time when I was a little kid. The temperature in Chicago that day was 16-below. We only had one car in the family and my dad took it to work, so we had to walk to school in all kinds of weather. But my mom was concerned about us little kids walking in the 16-below weather. So she made us wait until it was only 10-below.

The upshot, of course, was that I (a first grader) and my sister (then in third grade) arrived at school 90 minutes late. After I’d hung my coat up and taken my boots off, the nun who taught my grade stood me up in front of the class and loudly announced to the other students: “Look at the big baby. Everyone else got to school on time.” Ah, memories of my school career…

Anyway, we’re getting record lows all over the Midwest. Check it out: Imagine the heating bills. Two young single women I know had to move out of their apartment recently after only two months because for a small 2-bedroom, they were paying over $200 a month in heating bills–and that was before the mercury plunged into the minus-double-digit region.

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Barbara Payne, January 16th 2009 | Posted in heating bills, record low temperature, school memories

Chicago at night in 2009

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A ritual visit to the top of the John Hancock tower with two single women friends was a chance to talk about the positive energy that 2009 is already calling forth. New business and job opportunities, new and closer friendships, exciting ideas about living arrangements, and new understandings about existing relationships. And a profound shift in American leadership promises who-knows-what.

How is the new year energy manifesting in your life?

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Barbara Payne, January 3rd 2009 | Posted in Uncategorized

Reflections on changing the world

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Year-end is always a good time to think about what has happened in your life and what you’d like to have happen in the future. Was reading an article in Ode Magazine yesterday and found a story about a professor at Barnard College in New York who invites local Harlem residents to sit in for free in his philosophy classes. He got in trouble with the administration, but he told them these are his friends and they wouldn’t dare tell another professor his friends couldn’t sit in. Cool.

Anyway, he quoted Ghandi and I think it’s a perfect one for single working women, too. “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Make the choices you really want to make–not those society would have you make. The single women of today who do work they love, who pursue successful careers of all kinds, and who build caring relationships with friends and family are demsontrating that women are in charge of their own happiness.

How many children are raised by a single parent because of divorce, desertion, or death? Why should a stigma be attached to single mothers by choice? The single women of today who choose to become mothers because they have not met the right mate are courageously living out their dream. They are showing the world that healthy, happy children can come from all types of homes–as they have always done.

The single women who face medical and financial challenges and find new ways to overcome those obstacles are showing resourcefulness and courage that is an inspiration to others in this profoundly down economy.

The single women of today who live alone or caring for an elderly relative yet find joy in work, play and friendships are embodiments of hope. They personify the energy, the creativity, and the courage that are helping to make the world a better place for all.

Merry Christmas to all. May we all continue to be the change we want to see in the world.

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Barbara Payne, December 23rd 2008 | Posted in African single women/mothers, be the change, busy single working women, Ghandi, living the dream, single mothers by choice, single parents

Pre-Christmas

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What do you do when you have a ton of work to do and you just can’t motivate yourself to do it? Hey, it’s a wind-chill of 16-below outside–the wind is ridiculous. And it’s Sunday, and I’ve got Christmas lights and decorations and flickering candles and Christmas music in here. Is it right that I should have to sit at the computer and not enjoy all that?

Well, part of the joy of working at home is the ability to work at strange hours like 4 am if you want. And I did accomplish a lot of personal chores today, so at least I don’t feel lazy. That means I will plan on one of those incredibly productive Monday mornings tomorrow. I can usually get more work done in 4 hours in the early hours–providing I keep the email program closed–than I do in a whole typical day with distractions.

Are you planning a love-filled Christmas this year? I am so glad to be alive and well and blessed with a 17-month-old little pistol of a granddaughter that this Christmas feels especially joyful and emotional to me. I hope you are feeling much love for family and for the whole human race.

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Barbara Payne, December 21st 2008 | Posted in Christmas joy, Christmas lights, Christmas music, how to get work done, how to stay motivated

Play review: The Seafarer – Dark humor and soulful considerations

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I was blessed to be able to attend this wonderful play at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago last weekend. I can’t recommend it enough–a totally engaging and moving story, beautifully set and acted. Congrats to Steppenwolf and the cast, author and director of this masterpiece.

Christmas Eve morning dawns dark and dreary in a little town in Ireland. We become eavesdroppers on a story of brotherhood, devotion, failure, loss, and shame playing out between several men in a dingy flat’s basement room. We see brother Sharky taking rough but loving care of his blind brother, Richard (played with great verve by John Mahoney, the actor who played down-to-earth dad to his radio psychologist sons in the TV series Frasier). And gradually a few other men drift in.

The play’s author Conor McPherson brings quiet poignance to the matter-of-fact stories of drinking and disasters the five men have been through. The men decide to play cards that Christmas eve night. And while the others are out fighting the back-alley winos (who have the nerve to be drunk and disorderly but, unlike these men, are doing it on the street instead of in their living room), the visiting stranger who’s joined them makes ominous pronouncements to Sharky about a deal he made one day many years ago for his soul. The drinking gets heavier; the betting intensifies. Dark humor graces this tale of life’s demons, and a surprise reveals the grace of ultimate redemption.

If you can only see one play this season (and you don’t mind serious content), see this one. But there’s also a second play by the same author running in the upstairs room. Good for the folks at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.

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Barbara Payne, December 9th 2008 | Posted in Frasier's father, Irish humor, John Mahoney, play review, Steppenwolf Theater, The Seafarer

A voice for single women of UK

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Ran across this great blog today called “the F-word” and she writes a smoking article about the way society thinks of single women. Thank you editor Jess McCabe and founder Catherine Redfern for your passion and persistence in the important mission of transforming this state of affairs and letting single women come fully into their own.

May it happen in our time!

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Barbara Payne, December 3rd 2008 | Posted in busy single working women, single women UK, the f-word blog

Early holiday thoughts

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Got my fresh pine greens delivered with the groceries today. Brought up the little fake Christmas tree from storage and cleaned up the last of the plant stuff from the deck.

i'm ready now, both for winter and for the Christmas season. But being ready is more about emotional grounding in gratitude than about physical stuff. Yet tradition and symbols can be powerful incentives to having the right frame of mind.

Seems like Thanksgiving is a great groundbreaker for the rest of the holiday season. Just celebrating our bounty, welcoming those who don't have formal plans but want to share, preparing our hearts for feeling and expressing the love in our hearts perhaps a bit more openly than usual.

What do you do for Thanksgiving? Do you share with friends? Or are most of your friends busy with family? What about a single working woman (or anyone for that matter) who doesn't have family?

Having had a very challenging year this 2008, I found myself crying deeply the first few times I heard Christmas songs on the radio. Seems my heart is pretty grateful to be here and celebrating this beautiful time of year. I hope yours is, too.

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Barbara Payne, December 3rd 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized

Sensuality in the movies from a long time ago

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Paul Newman is great as the slightly dangerous outsider trying to seduce the cool-as-a-cucumber Joanne Woodward in The Long, Hot Summer. Tennessee Williams knew how to show the truth of family and intimate relationships.

<BR><BR>Amazing to see the overwhelming, rich father trying to direct people's lives–especially forcing his "spinster" daughter to marry the outsider because he wants sons. Extraordinary to think of how many women's lives were at the mercy of the societal mores.

I'm reminded of a South American movie I saw once (got it out of the library) in which the father of his single daughter says to his friend, "Single women represent chaos. They belong only in a nunnery or in a marriage."

<BR><BR>Well, society is changing. With 51% of American women single today, we have to re-examine the meaning of being single.

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Barbara Payne, November 19th 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized
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