My husband and I sat on our Highlands balcony sipping wine in the hot twilight and discussing money. Sweat rolled down my back because it was ninety-five degrees and because our adjustable rate mortgage had just taken a turn for the worse. Nice women aren’t supposed to sweat or talk about money, so it was not the happiest cocktail hour in memory. My husband told me there were two choices. “Either we can spend less money or we can make more money,” he said. He had been extremely patient for the past ten years; he reminded me, while I had acted like a “rich woman” and devoted myself to my non-profit. But giving up the non-profit work and taking a real job was a deal breaker, so I had to figure out another way to make some dough.
The next day, I went with my husband to a lawyer party, and there I met a small, pretty, brunette with an M.B.A. from Columbia, a J.D. from Harvard, but no evidence of an actual job. When the valet delivered her new white Mercedes, at the end of the event, and then pulled up my Passat wagon with 130,000 miles on it, I decided to find out what she was doing for cash.
What she was doing, it turned out, was network marketing, or engaging in a pyramid scheme, as my husband first referred to it. She was a distributor for a line of anti-aging products. I tried them, loved them and decided to get into the business with her. She was making money. Why shouldn’t I? You’d think I was selling babies the way my family reacted like I’d descended into some dark, sad netherworld where people like us didn’t do things like that.
My plan was to ignore my family, except for the ones on my husband’s side who were more forward thinking, and ask my friends to buy the health and wellness products they were currently buying at Whole Foods from me. Since I had to tell them I was doing this to make money, I heard secret confessions from people I wouldn’t have guessed were struggling about how they might lose their house, or had declared bankruptcy or couldn’t afford to get their car repaired. It seemed like half of L.A. was hanging on by their fingernails, fingernails they couldn’t afford to get manicured. People were pretending to be prosperous because no one wanted to admit, even to their friends, that their circumstances had changed.
Everywhere I worked my business, boutiques, house parties, girls’ nights out, I met women who had also become new entrepreneurs to rustle up a cash flow. I stumbled into a secret sub economy of women who are trading services, selling merchandise, doing whatever they needed to do for money, but they weren’t talking about it because it wasn’t ladylike. Ladies are not needy. Evidently, if you have a job with a paycheck, you can talk about that, but if you need to hustle, whether it’s for food, or botox, (gasp) you dare not say a word to anyone. The thing with that, though, is it’s hard to do business when you’re embarrassed to tell people you need to make money.
Ladies. We should be proud of ourselves. We’re scrappy. Lots of folks got hurt when the economy collapsed. And another thing: Our girlfriends don’t care. They love us anyway. If we ‘fess up, they will buy our art, read our e-books, and buy our stuff. Some may even want to be our business partners. It’s okay to be a part of the financial train wreck and use our brains to figure out how to carry on without pretending nothing has happened. Let’s make some noise. Let’s park our old cars side by side, open our trunks, move our stuff, share our web sites, build our empires and get new cars. Let’s remember who we are and where we came from. It’s okay to take a step back in history and pick up where our great grandpas and grandmas left off. It’s okay to be a merchant, to have a relationship with goods, to engage in transactions that directly benefit our bank account. Truth. I sold four lipsticks today. Sue me. Whatever it takes, right? Girls gotta do. People have done far worse things to hang on to their freedom.
