So Why Are So Many of My Former Friends Famous?

Yes, this is just a typical Thursday morning whine, triggered by the random googlings of a bored copyeditor.

In what appears to be my most-read post, I discovered several years ago that a drugged out anorexic bar hopping roommate that I had in 1969 became someone famous (although still drugged out and anorexic).  Who knew? By the time she became famous I was sober and long gone from that scene.

Well!  The other day, I googled two different roommates from the same era (c. 1970), and found that both of them are or were famous enough to have their own Wikipedia pages, one (who died several years ago) for things that were unsurprising (although the level of her fame was quite surprising), the other for holding public office.

And it was only a month or so ago that I saw that a woman with whom I used to socialize as part of a group on holidays (before my friends' great migration to either the afterlife or warmer climes), had not just an editorial obituary in the TIMES, but a front page obituary.

For a long time, I blew off the fame and fortune of young women I grew up with, from the family physician who became a regular TIMES columnist to the female choral conductor who became one of the first female symphony orchestra conductors in the country, to a famous essayist and a famous novelist. I don't recall being particularly envious, mostly because these women were not happy.  (I don't know about the novelist; I didn't know her very well when I was growing up, but neither the physician nor the conductor ever found a life partner despite numerous failed efforts, and both they and their mothers did a lot of complaining about this. And the essayist's writing style is a melange of sarcasm, bitterness, and wit, although I have no idea if this reflects her actual feelings, or is simply her writer's "voice".)

In any event, whether I sometimes fleetingly envied these women or not, I could rationalize that they became famous because they had worked hard: going to medical school, graduate schools, yes, studying and focusing on personal development instead of on dating and romance.  So I had made a different choice.

But the three women I began this post by referencing were not that different from me.  They had all dropped out (although the politician obviously at some point "dropped back in" with a vengeance; she has both an MD and a JD degree).  So how did their involvement in various subcultures and counter-cultures lead to their making a "name" for themselves and mine did not?

And I did an informal study once (why not? I edit manuscripts full of data) and found that approximately 50% of the people I have met in the years since I stopped working full time (at church, in my Pilates class, at women's circles) either went to prestigious colleges, have graduate degrees, or have degrees (or careers) directly or indirectly connected to the performing arts.

So where are the rest of us?

One tiny ray of hope is that I will have a "legacy project".  Right now the project is for my partner.  The senior agency we got involved with offers this option to their clients.  So I will have videos of her talking.  I desperately wanted those because I had photographs, but no audios, other than voicemail messages, which are quite ephemeral.  And bits and pieces from my recital will be interspersed.  And it will all be on the organization's web site.  And if she dies, I can become a client of that organization too.  I don't need "services" but I would sure love to participate in some group activities and have a legacy project of my own.  And if I participate in group activities there, who knows? I might actually meet some retired paper pushers who went to a city or a community college!