Reinvention for $1000—a Writer on Strike From Jeopardy! Considers His Options
Reinvention is a process that, from the outside, we might see as instantaneous. The played-out Before and the resurgent After sit side by side as in a dandruff shampoo ad. But from the inside it must often feel like a drawn-out, wavering thing: Do I? Should I? Must I?
Right now I can sympathize. I am on strike from my occupation of 30 years: writing questions for Jeopardy!, which I had planned on staying with until I retire. With childlike faith I continue to count on returning to the beloved job and paycheck, but it is starting to stir in my mind that I may have to step into a new part of my life instead. Naturally, I have been thinking about some self-reinventors that I might once have built a category around (and may again?). invention in the first round—don’t I have a good Thomas Edison clue in the unused bin? reinvention in the second round—still some ideas in the tank.
Anyone exasperated with how long reinvention is taking them should look into the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He begins as a wealthy, pleasure-loving youth, but an illness gives him a glimpse of eternity. Is this the moment of his conversion to a life of giving up material things for love of fellow living creatures? No, he recovers and decides on a career of military glory. Two visionary dreams and another thought-focusing illness later, he is finally ready for a life of service. But even then it takes further twists and turns, including some unfortunate confusion about whether “rebuild my church” refers to a physical building or an institution, before Francis is fully invested in his embrace of poverty and adoration of all life.
Some reinventions, especially those cushioned by comfortable circumstances, take even longer. The quick bio of Juliette Gordon Low takes her from widowed society wife in 1905 to creator of the Girl Scouts in 1912. That already feels like a long seven years; now factor in that she and Mr. Low actually separated in 1902 and that things weren’t going great for the couple before that. It was more than a decade, then, of wondering what was next before she encountered Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell and went into the history books for building a movement.
Looking through my phone for any new angle on the actors’ and writers’ strike, I come across a host of pocket history lessons going back to another great American reinvention. In 1960, the last time Hollywood actors and writers both walked out, the president of SAG was Ronald Reagan, in the middle of moving from Democratic, left-leaning star and labor activist to conservative politician who changed the balance of political power in America. Say as he might that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left him, there must have been some moments of uncertainty before he found himself with both feet on the new path.
It’s reassuring to read that the unions’ main demand in that 1960 strike, residual payments for movies shown on TV, originally ran into the same studio stone wall that some SAG-AFTRA and WGA demands are encountering now. “No payment twice for the same job!” was the companies’ position. Of course, they were finally persuaded of the reason of their employees’ demands, and we all remain hopeful that will be the outcome in 2023, too. Because who wouldn’t want to hold out for the best kind of self-reinvention: optional.
This story appears in the October 2023 issue of Town & Country.
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