Squeeze your Lemonade

Erik Proulx has made a thought-provoking and inspiring movie about being laid off from advertising called Lemonade. It's a fitting end to a pretty lousy year and a grinding decade when America often felt as if it had wilfully walked back into the Dark Ages. As I slither up to my 45th birthday and hope not to be called out as middle-aged, and 45 was a pretty healthy life span for the Dark Ages, it's interesting to see history repeat itself and mistakes birth new but often identical mistakes. Just look across the memescape in government, economy, leadership, management, relationships, restaurant concepts. Those people I used to call oddities for returning to small towns and shutting out much of the world often strike me as the wisest of late. Provided you have a good library, good wines, access to good hiking and neighbors who have grown beyond the Dark Ages.

But the movie. Advertising does a good job marketing itself as a career, and one you shouldn't leave once you're in it. Involuntarily tossed aside as many of these poised, bright, highly motivated people were, they gain enough insight to change career, city, and even gender. Advertising too often awards itself with $15 statuettes in contests where each entry costs $150. It's nice to see the business give itself a well-deserved kick in the ass. My favorite line is practically a cut, when the glowing, beautiful Michelle Pfennighaus is pulled aside by a colleague at her agency to be told that people are talking when she goes out at night to yoga class. At night. People outside the industry may miss that detail. She wasn't going out over lunch to yoga, she was going out in the evening and then coming back to work and it was still a problem! She works longer hours now, as a health and yoga practitioner, but she's clearly in Flow. And flowed the F right out of that nasty marketing job.

And so, 18 years later, what am I still doing in marketing? To be completely honest, it's the people where I work. Who wouldn't want to work with smart, funny, driven, talented, ethically above-board colleagues from 8:30 to 6 (and often till 8 or 9 or later)? And it pays well, but that's only a piece of it, as most people will admit in surveys.

So goodbye to a lemon of a year. Take the lemon, stick it in a chicken with some garlic, and bake at 400 until done. Happy New Year.