Dreams and the Gentleman’s Club
After ten years of working on writing, pitching, re-writing and developing a series on the subject of dreams, I’d finally gotten a deal. It was with The Discovery Channel. Discovery was changing everything about television and I was excited to be a part of their world.
The Discovery executive in charge of my series was a long time producer of programming; a television smart and savvy guy. Also he happened to be a very nice man.
He was the reason I had moved my company out of my apartment on the Upper Westside to mid-town Manhattan. He’d informed me that the Discovery Executives wouldn’t attend meetings at my tiny apartment. He strongly suggested that I needed a “real” office. A professional production space. So I’d found one I could afford and one I liked. It was at 52nd and Broadway. An old apartment building converted to offices and surrounded by high rise mega-buildings. On the downtown side was a bodega, another office building, and across the street a huge building for the number one advertising agency in the world-at least that is how they were advertised.
Underneath my building was a gentleman’s club otherwise known as a strip club. Every day around 3 PM, when they opened, a limo would pull up and four or five scantily dressed but very beautiful and friendly girls danced from the street, across the sidewalk to the bar before disappearing down the stairs.
I was nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, as my Granddad used to say, making sure everything looked “officey” enough and business-like for our first meeting.
He said he’d be there mid-afternoon. Which was worrying me-the gentleman’s club girls were also appearing mid-afternoon.
I was standing by my office window, scanning up Broadway, waiting nervously and happened to see him being dropped off from a town car up the block at the corner – dropped off just as the limo with the girls pulled up and the skimpily clad dancers piled out of the car, dancing, blowing kisses and “flashing” their way across the sidewalk to the door.
He stood and watched the action and then walked into the building to take the elevator up to the fourth floor.
I opened the door ready to apologize and there he stood with a huge smile on his face. “Wow, what a welcome. You don’t have to do that for me every time!”
Lesson: No matter how hard you work to be what you need to be, sometimes, life intervenes and throws you a curve ball. A total change in how you see yourself and how you see others.