Menopause an ENCORE Career?

By Gwen

Putting Menopause Center Stage

Jeanie Linders wrote a musical about hot  flashes that took America by storm.  She’s using the profits to help other women.

Jeanie’s Lesson:  No matter how many people tell you no, if you have an idea you believe in, keep going.  And never look down the road too far.  Instead, make sure what you’re doing today is important.

“It’s taken over my life,” Jeanie Linders says, laughing.  Did this former Florida-based ad agency owner have any inkling that the lyrics she wrote poking fun at hot flashes would generate a theatrical empire?  “Not a clue.”  Yet now, four years after it opened on a small stage in central Florida, more than a hundred thousand people — mostly women in their 40′s and 50′s — are seeing Menopause The Musical every month, worldwide.  And it’s changed women’s lives on both sides of the footlights.

It all started one evening ten years ago when Jeanie was about to attend an NAACP ball in Orlando.  “There I was in my gown, ready to leave, when I had a ferocious hot flash.  I was standing in front of the refrigerator, fanning myself with both doors, singing Rod Stewart’s “Hot Legs,” only I was singing “hot flashes.”  Though she’d never written a play, the idea of creating a musical based on menopause just clicked.  Jeanie pinned cards listing menopause symptoms on a bulletin board, bought a pawnshop record player for $10, got out her old 45′s and started writing new lyrics for old favorites.  “Chain, Chain, Chain. Chain of Fools: became “Change, Change, Change. Change of Life.”  “Staying Alive” became an insomnia lament, “Staying Awake.”  “I would email the lyrics to friends, and they’d write back, “That’s funny, send more.”"  When she had enough material, she sent her play, featuring four women shopping at Bloomingdale’s and singing about hot flashes, mood swings, and weight gain, to a theatrical lawyer, who told her that nobody would produce it.

But she couldn’t let go of the idea.  “I just knew it would work,” she says, and so she produced the play herself.  It opened on March 28, 2001, in a 76 seat theatre she built in a former Orlando perfume shop.  “The actors had to climb thorough a hole in the wall to their dressing rooms in the show store next door.”  The show is lovably dorky, with the four actors wearing goofy outfits and doing 1970′s disco moves; critics sneered but audiences ate it up. Women flocked to the show, they brought their friends, and everybody howled.  The musical moved to West Palm Beach, then opened off-Broadway, where it’s still running 3 years later.  The cast members are all over forty, all over size 10. This brand of reality theater really strikes a chord with midlife women.  “Walk down any street in America and you will not find four desperate housewives who look like those women on TV,” Jeanie notes.  “Hollywood says you’re young, you’re thin, you’re hip.  My audience is not.  I always say, there are five girlfriends at the show — four on stage and one in the audience.  If she gets up and dances at the end, we’ve done our job.”

Jeanie receives a constant flow of emails from women thanking her for taking menopause out of the closet.  “Most of our parents went through the change, retired from their jobs, had grandkids, and waited to die.  It’s not like they started whole new lives.”  Not so for us boomers.  “Our generation had a president killed, a war in which the guys we were engaged to were dying, our parents were divorcing — all of a sudden, things were upside down.  With nothing to hold on to, we’ve been reinventing our lives all along.

“Menopause is not just a physical change,” she continues, “Not only can we not longer reproduce, but our parents are passing away and suddenly there’s this reality that we’re not going to live forever.  What happens then is that all the people we’ve paid attention to our whole lives — husbands, children, bosses — take a backseat.  Our inner voice is saying, Excuse me, it’s my turn.”

As she rode the crest of seemingly unstoppable success, and her ad agency morphed into a single-show theater production company, Jeanie’s inner voice told her to take thte money and do some good. She launched a nonprofit called Women For Women Foundation that makes grants to women over forty.  W4W provides mentoring and financial support to women’s service organizations, grants scholarships in the arts, and serves as a clearing house for information on issues that affect women at midlife.  She’s also launched the If Only Award.  “I call it the Make a Wish Foundation for living women with dying dreams.” Jeanie says.  “This is not, ‘I want to meet Brad Pitt,’”  These wishes are the stuff of life reinvention — going back to school, starting businesses, seeing the world.

Jeanie may have a soft spot for struggling women because she’s known failure herself.  “In 1986, I tanked totally,” she says, with typical candor.  “It rained and nobody came to a jazz festival I created.”  She was on the line financially, and when she lost her business, she lost her identity, too.  Suddenly, she was not loner “Jeanie Ad Agency”‘ as just plain Jeanie Linders, “I spent 5 years trying to figure out who the hell that was.”  She had produced events her whole life, from a fine arts mall in a derelict shopping center to multistage music festivals.  “I’ve done all these bizarre things — worked for Michael Jackson, ran Francis Ford Coppola’s resort in Belize, taught high school in Jamaica.”  But now she wanted to do work that was truly meaningful.

 When she saw three hundred women in an off-Broadway theater standing and clapping, shouting, “That’s me, that’s me,” she knew she’d found the vehicle to change people’s lives.  She’ s grown her company by extending opportunities to the women around her.  “At first, I was running this whole production out of my back bedroom,” she says.  “the phone would ring at two in the morning with people reserving tickets.  Menopausal women don’t sleep.”  Now she has twenty people working at an office in Orlando, and additional staffers in each of the thirteen cities with long-running productions.  One is her former cleaning lady.  “She’s my production manager and she’s fabulous.  She just needed that hand up.”  Another is a friend of 25 years, who advised Jeanie to forget about producing this show.  “She’s now my advertising director,” Jeanie says.

Getting rich isn’t the plan; adding richness to life is.  “Somebody wrote a newspaper article saying that Jeanie Linders is making a mint.  That’s not true.  I finance all my own shows, and when we make enough money, we open in another city.  Souvenir sales benefit the foundation.”  Jeanie, who is single, adds, “I can only spend so much money. For the first 50 years of my life, I lived on $35,000 a year.”

When she went through those tough times, her friends told her, “You’re a survivor, you’ll make it.” And despite raging arthritis that has already meant multiple operations, including two knee replacements, Jeanie is optimistic.  “Sometimes I feel like C-3PO.  But no matter how much metal they put in your body, you have to choose life.  When I was sixteen, I wrote Jeanie’s Beatitude:  Cursed are they who live to exist but fail to live while existing.  I never want to just take up space.”

Where will she be in five years?  “No idea,” Jeanie, who’s now fifty-six , says.  “I never look down the road that far.  My biggest concerns are taking care of my employees, and getting the show in front of as many women as I can.”

 Susan Crandell

Thinking About Tomorrow:

Reinventing Yourself at Midlife

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This story helps me to remember that we all have our own unique dharma and our own unique ways of bringing our dharma to the world, while being touched and inspired at the same time every time I read it!  Are you interested in discovering what’ wonderful gift is laying dormant inside of you?  Contact me, I’d LOVE to help you find it!

Gwen