Jane Curtin, one of the early cast members of Saturday Night Live, sold an apartment at 56 E. 11th Street this month, according to records filed with the city. The 1900-square-foot three-bedroom co-op was listed for $1.7 million with Betsy Magee, an independent real estate broker who doubles as a fitness trainer. Ms. Magee “is an exclusive personal trainer to CEOs of corporations, celebrities and groups of runners,” according to her Web site, extremeworkout.com.
—“Sitcom Star’s Co-op Sale,” The New York Times, October 30, 2005
It’s fairly common to find small squibs about famous people and their real estate transactions in the New York Times. But is it really relevant to this news item that the “independent real estate broker” has another job? Probably not, but it’s certainly interesting. And if you were to judge importance based on the proportion of ink dedicated to Magee, the Realtor/personal trainer, over the purported subject of the story, Jane Curtin, you’d think the news was about Magee.
So what does this story show? Simply that people are fascinated by slashes, which is probably why an editor at the New York Times thought millions of readers would want to know that the real estate broker in this transaction had an unexpected side gig. Had Magee been a typical real estate agent, she may not have even been mentioned in the paper and she wouldn’t have gotten that free bit of promotion. Garnering interest—whether from the media or the average Jane who hears about your unexpected other life—is one of the nifty little perks of having a slash.
Driving to the beach one afternoon, I was escaping from the traffic by listening to a hysterical report on NPR about sheep suffering from gastric bloat and the methods for treating them. If the story wasn’t amusing enough on its own, my ears pricked up when I heard the author credit: “Brought to you by Baxter Black, cowboy/poet . . .” Again, hearing an unexpected combination caught my interest, which is probably the reason the commentator uses that particular moniker.
Whenever I talk to slashes, they invariably tell me about the wonderful things that happen when they reveal an unexpected identity. Sometimes disclosing a slash nets a measurable result like getting a job, attention from the media, a promotion, or a client referral. In other cases, a closer personal connection is made because of the discovery of a shared passion. In still others, it just makes for a richer life. This chapter will highlight some of the synergies and interconnections—planned and unplanned— that result from slash careers and the way people manage them.
After a few too many wasted hours in empty apartments waiting for prospective buyers to tour her open houses, Realtor Ann Guttman, who is also a professional musician, realized that these little bits of time would be ideal practice sessions with her French horn. So, she decided to combine her open houses with practice sessions, bringing along her sheet music and stand and playing until people began to arrive. One day, a woman—a broker from a competing agency—walked in and was mesmerized by Guttman’s playing. Small talk ensued and the woman encouraged Guttman to come work at her firm, where one of the founders happened to play the classical guitar. They stayed in touch, and about a year later Guttman joined that firm. Once there, she found a community of people who appreciated her not just for her knack for selling apartments, but also for her life outside the firm. “They just adored me, and they never made me think I needed to quit my music career to succeed there,” Guttman explained.
During the eighteen years Guttman worked full-time in both fields, music often found its way into her day job. Whereas the French horn open house was a pivotal event, sometimes the intersections were small, warm-glow kinds of moments, like one co-op sale she told me about. Guttman was working on the sale of an apartment for a man whose wife had been a musician but had abandoned a career in music to become a doctor. “It had always upset him that she couldn’t make it as a professional musician,” said Guttman, who knew about his history since she makes a point of getting to know her clients on a personal level. “So, he was selling his apartment and I got a great offer for him but the board decided not to accept it. He then decided to rent the apartment and—I still tear up whenever I say this—he told me he wanted to rent it to a musician at whatever price they feel like paying. It’s the most beautiful story ever. I rented the apartment to my best friend and she paid $550 for an apartment that should have rented for $1,200.”
Guttman’s ability to use her connections to help a fellow musician is part of what has made her real estate career so gratifying. Being a musician is thrilling and exciting, but her position in the business world gives Guttman a way of helping people that she would never have had only as a musician.
Joe van Blunk, fifty-one, and a longshoreman/documentary filmmaker, never intended it, but the fact that he’s a big burly guy who makes his living working on the waterfront gets him a lot of attention when he starts talking about his arty life as a documentary filmmaker. That he’s a Catholic whose first film was about the withering Jewish quarter of South Philadelphia only adds to the effect.
Two days before the film’s first screening, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a large story about Van Blunk and his partner Gus Rosanio and their nostalgia for Philadelphia’s Jewish quarter. “At the time there was a big gang war in Philadelphia and a lot of the gangsters came from our high school,” Van Blunk told me. “The reporter was working on a piece about some guys about our age and then he heard we were making a film. I think he wanted some variety. Maybe he just didn’t want to write about gangsters.” Defying stereotypes has served Van Blunk well in his artistic pursuits.
Van Blunk has become a regular on the synagogue and Jewish Community Center circuit, where he tells the story of why he made the film to the old timers who usually come up to him and cry after seeing the film. Van Blunk says the idea for the film came to him when he was driving around the neighborhood with his old friend, Gus, now his partner in Longshore Films. “The neighborhood had changed so much since I was a kid and I took Gus there to show him. When we were growing up, it was a very mixed area of Irish, Jews, and Italians, but all blue-collar people. Gus grew up in the Italian section, which was about four or five blocks away from the middle of the Jewish corridor. All he knew was Seventh Street. My section was more mixed.”
Van Blunk’s father was very friendly with a lot of people in the neighborhood and frequently crossed ethnic boundaries. Said Van Blunk, “Like my father, I was a shabbos goy,* so on Saturdays I used to go around and shut off the lights and the stoves in the houses and old synagogues.”
“They’d pay me a quarter. I was a Catholic, and this was all so interesting to me. There were these old men and they were talking a different language, but it was just like when I went to church and it was in Latin. These places were just so beautiful with their vaulted ceilings. Later on I came back, riding around, and the writer in me just took it all in. Most of these people had died off and their children moved away, but there were a handful of them left. I pointed out the old synagogues to Gus and the ones I used to go to. A few of them were still active and there were a handful of old Jews in their eighties keeping them alive. As I told Gus, he thought it was an interesting story. From there, it took on a life of its own.”
The two returned with a professional photographer, took a series of black and white photographs, and brought them to the Jewish Exponent, a local newspaper. Van Blunk wrote some text to accompany the photographs. The Exponent published the article on their front page, and Van Blunk was determined to make it into a film.
When the film was shown, the media seized on the story of a self-educated dock worker who had made a sensitive documentary about a vanishing Jewish community. “I certainly didn’t design it that way,” said Van Blunk. “I just am who I am. I’m from the working class, my family is working class, and it intrigues people that this kind of film was made by someone like me and not an academic. Plus, the idea of a longshoreman is such a heavy stereotype—‘the cretin’—and all that imagery of Marlon Brando from On the Waterfront. Some people are more savvy and they’ll make comparisons to Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman who was a self-taught writer and philosopher who became somewhat of a celebrity in the 1960s. The bottom line is that I work in a closed world even though it exists right in the middle of the city.”
Curiosity about his life as a longshoreman has helped spark interest in his films both from the media and from viewers. “After every showing, people are as interested in my background as they are in the film,” he says. “People are surprised by their own stereotypes and they expect a filmmaker to come from a certain background, and not one like mine.” As long as it means more exposure for his films, that’s just fine with him.
In Guttman’s and Van Blunk’s cases, the synergies between their dual careers were happy accidents. While they didn’t intend for one career or identity to help them in another, they recognized when it happened and encouraged it when possible. In other cases, people intentionally create the synergies between their different vocations, highlighting the links for others to see. Terence Bradford is one of those.
Bradford, twenty-eight, is a financial planner by day/hip-hop artist by night, and he fully intends to capitalize on the connections between his two worlds. Bradford grew up in the projects of the Bronx. His mother, single and working two jobs (not by choice), lied about their address to get him into better schools. Throughout his education, he traveled among classmates who came from more affluent families. While his college peers from Middlebury College in New York spent summers traveling in Europe, Bradford spent his collecting tolls on the Triboro Bridge and working as a bank teller. After he graduated, he broke into the investment business by using his street smarts and powers of persuasion rather than through the family contacts used by many of his classmates.
All along he was cultivating his alter ego, Billy Shakes, who was gaining a reputation at open mike nights on the hip-hop circuit. Once Bradford got some footing in the financial sector, he realized that his knowledge about money was a way to distinguish himself musically. Now, his raps are peppered with nuggets of financial advice.
His favorite message—that making money involves the same principles, whether you do it illegally on the inner-city streets or legally on Wall Street—is clear in the lyrics to this song:
Your coke illegal ever’ day of the year.
My Coke I buy legit at $20 a share.
You a gangsta? Then go get your paper.
I’m a paper gangsta getting stock quotes on my pager.
Stocks and drugs both the same in my eyes.
More buyers than the sellers cause the market to rise.
Bradford/Shakes says he has the same focus whether he’s working with investment clients at Primerica or performing his hip-hop act at clubs or college campuses—spreading the word about financial literacy to low-income populations.
Rashid Silvera, a high school teacher/fashion model, has been making connections between two incongruous-sounding careers for more than twenty years. After collecting degrees from Bennington College and Harvard’s Divinity School, Silvera landed a teaching job at New York’s Scarsdale High School, one of the top secondary schools in the country. By contrast, his entrée into modeling was totally unplanned.
Silvera’s career in fashion began when he was in his thirties and was “discovered” on a Long Island beach one summer afternoon. Shortly after that, he got a call from one of the largest modeling agencies in New York to come into the city for a photo shoot. Next thing he knew, he was called up for a meeting at Condé Naste by the president of GQ magazine, where he saw images of his face plastered all over the office—on the magazine’s cover. When the news of his impending fame hit the high school, Silvera said it took him five seconds to find out how his new identity would play out with his most important constituents. “The students went nuts,” he said. “They just loved it.”
Bearded, dark-skinned, heterosexual, and then thirty-five, Silvera says he was unusual in the fashion industry. He was also unusual because he worked as a teacher and was up front with everyone about that from the start. Still, opportunities began to roll in, with offers to travel to exotic locales for shoots and daily pay rates from $7,000 to $10,000—about a tenth of the annual salary he was pulling in from teaching. From the start, Silvera says he made it clear—both to his modeling clients and to his school community—that his teaching came first. And he credits his maturity and commitment to education with ensuring that his head didn’t get too swelled. “It’s a good thing this didn’t happen when I was twenty-five or else my head would have been on a swivel,” he said. “And what was so beautiful is that the Scarsdale community immediately realized how my modeling could be a benefit to the children. Now these kids were seeing that someone so visible was making the choice to be a teacher. In the end, it showed them that the children were worth more to me, not less.”
On the modeling front, Silvera says that having somewhere he had to be every day was probably the best thing that could have happened, giving him a kind of cachet. “In that world, the coolest thing you can be is unavailable,” he told me. “It just instantly made me sound so special. So they did everything to get me. They sent limousines to pick me up, along with someone to give me a massage on the way from school to the city. And they worked around my schedule, arranging shoots on the weekends even though that was more expensive.”
Silvera acknowledges that modeling afforded him a jet-set lifestyle he’d never have had as a teacher; it also put him on a more equal financial footing with the affluent families of his students. Yet when he talks about his slashes, he downplays the financial aspect and instead emphasizes that modeling lets him be a different kind of role model for the students—showing kids a “real life” rather than reinforcing the “those who can’t do, teach” aphorism. He relishes sharing bits of his world with them, arranging for internships in the fashion business, and bringing in celebrity friends like Danny Glover to school.
Through modeling, Silvera says he got to feel like a student again, learning as photographers explained to him what they needed from him. “It’s just made me so much more empathetic as a teacher,” he explained. “I know what it’s like when someone takes a picture of you and claims that it’s you. But it’s just a likeness, a still photograph of a dynamic entity. And I recognized that I was seeing my students in that way. It made me instantly start asking more questions of them. Listening better. Because of my modeling, I learned to give students the time to teach me how they best learned.”
As Silvera, now fifty-nine, matured, so did his modeling profile. The glamour remained, but he also secured steady work as the distinguished man with a sly smile and a salt and pepper beard, a regular sight in Land’s End catalogs and advertisements for mutual funds, playing a doctor in a white lab coat. Without teaching as the steady anchor, modeling might have been a risky career, especially when you factor in aging. But as a teacher with tenure and a pension, Silvera was able to model when the gigs were available and when he chose.
Silvera turned what could have been a handicap—his unavailability during the school year—into an advantage. And just as his community at school was intrigued by his modeling, so were his celebrity pals impressed by his pride and passion for being an educator. “There is no more important job in the world than teaching children,” says Silvera. “If you want to see a celebrity on his best behavior, tell him there’s a teacher in his midst. They’ll try their hardest to ask an intelligent question. More often than not, it’s my teaching that makes me feel like a celebrity.”
The prior few stories highlight the ways that seemingly incongruous careers are often compatible. Angela Williams, the lawyer/minister, takes that kind of thinking a step further. She says she never thinks of her two professional identities as separate; rather they are parts of a coherent whole. “What you see is what you get, whether I’m in a pulpit, courtroom, or boardroom,” she often says.
Shortly after September 11, 2001, when Williams was working as a corporate lawyer at a firm in Washington, D.C., she sent me this e-mail as part of a running conversation we were having about leading a slash life:
Last week, I experienced what I call “marketplace ministry.” At work, I sensed the hurt, pain, grief, shock, and other emotions that my colleagues felt. These emotions affected their productivity. Many were unable to concentrate, made stupid errors, or were reluctant to come to work. Rather than ignoring their emotions, I felt that it was important to deal with it openly in a nonthreatening way. I wanted to validate their feelings of helplessness as individuals as part of the corporate community. President Bush declared Friday, September 14, 2001, the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the victims of terrorist attacks. He asked that the people of the United States and places of worship mark this National Day of Prayer and Remembrance with noontime memorial services, the ringing of bells at that hour, and evening candle-light remembrance vigils. He encouraged employers to permit their workers time off during the lunch hour to attend noontime services to pray for our land.
I felt that people should not have to leave the office in order to attend a memorial service. So that morning, I e-mailed the firm and invited them to join me in prayer in the office’s largest conference room. I then prepared a service. At twelve noon, there was standing room only. Practically the entire office showed up—from the mail clerks to the partners. Everyone came together, united by a common denominator—concern for their loved ones and for this country. The emotion was extremely high in the room as people listed the names of relatives and friends who were either dead or missing.
Williams says that incidents like that ad hoc prayer service, where her role as a minister was tapped in the secular workplace, have been common. Likewise, Williams often gets to use her legal skills in her religious community, where she is a leader in various churches and nonprofit organizations. “Churches today are like small corporations,” she explained. “A number of them own small businesses, run day care centers, have schools, restaurants, Christian bookstores. They have so much going on that they need to have a corporate mind-set; sometimes they even need to be adversarial. At Christian Service Charities, a nonprofit where I serve as president of the board (and, for a period, interim CEO), I’ve been able to put into place certain mechanisms you’d normally see on a corporate board—audit, executive, and personnel committees. When we needed to hire a new CEO, I retained a search firm and managed that process, and then trained the new CEO.”
Being bivocational, as Williams usually describes herself, even proved to be a benefit to Williams during a six-month period of job transition in her legal career. When she left a position as Deputy General Counsel of Litigation at Sears Holdings Corporation, she was not sure what she wanted to do next. She was working with headhunters and exploring job opportunities, but she also took advantage of the free time to step up her involvement in several community and public service projects. She gave more time to Christian Service Charities; she became associate pastor of a church in an economically disadvantaged community on the south side of Chicago; she served on the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, a research initiative to foster the advancement of women and minorities in organizations; and she launched a project to create a faith-based community network to meet the needs of prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families in Chicago. As a person who was technically unemployed, Williams was busier than most people with a full-time job.
Because Williams dedicated herself to her passions, her life “in between” positions did not look very different from her life when she was “working.” Not surprisingly, it was through these activities that Williams found her next position, as the Interfaith Liaison of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund which is responsible for managing a fund of $20 million allocated to rebuilding churches in communities affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Williams’s career looks a bit like that of the politician she might one day become. She follows opportunities and notes that most of the other important positions she has held—as an assistant U.S. Attorney investigating arsons at black churches, on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee staff of Senator Edward Kennedy, as a lawyer in a large firm in D.C.—have arisen through an impromptu phone call from someone in her vast network.
Williams gets those kinds of calls often because she makes a point to stay in touch with people from all corners of her life. Because she’s connecting with people about issues close to her heart, those catch-up calls don’t feel like networking; they just feel like part of the fabric of her life. Following your passions and sharing your talents are some of the best ways to cultivate a coterie of people who will think of you when appropriate opportunities arise.
Williams’s philosophy about work/life ensures that she will never have a gap on her resume. She is always immersed in something meaningful and significant, even during periods when those commitments are for the most part unpaid. With employers becoming increasingly tolerant of resumes with frequent shifts in position and gaps for childrearing or other personal pursuits, why not recognize the importance of the unpaid activities you do in building skills, experience, and a valuable network?
Almost everyone who knows Williams is quick to learn that she is both a lawyer and a minister. (She mentions both of her professions in the first sentence of the bio she typically uses for public speaking engagements. See the Appendix for her bio and resume.) This philosophy works for her as her dual careers coexist peacefully; but not all slashes blend so easily, as the next story will show.
John Barr, sixty-two, always knew he was a poet. When he graduated from high school, he announced as much to his parents, who immediately suggested that he go out and get a job. Barr did a lot more than get a job. He went to Harvard College and then on to Harvard Business School and a career in the highest echelons of corporate finance.
The career in banking was the safe thing to do, the path that would ensure he wouldn’t “turn into a beach bum,” to use his father’s words. Barr’s life in business was far from anything his father could have imagined. “My dad and all his friends just hated their jobs,” he told me. “They lived in a post-depression model where you went to work all day and then went home and did what you loved. I was more fortunate.”
All along the way, Barr wrote poetry. And not the kind of rhyming verse numbers read aloud at a colleague’s retirement dinner, as was common in the business world. His verses went on for the length of books. Several volumes’ worth. Yet in the early days of his career, talking about poetry with his colleagues was another matter. Barr told me that when he started out in the business world in 1972, things were very different. “If my associates at Morgan Stanley were talking about a ball game, I did not feel comfortable talking Yeats,” he explained, and then proceeded to give an example. “When I was a brand-new associate/bag carrier, I was traveling with two partners (demigods to me) who knew about my writing and didn’t make anything of it. We were traveling to call on the CEO of a large utility company in St. Louis. They were chatting and I was there. This CEO, a lifelong utility man, was complaining about the then-head of the public utility company in his state. He went on to say that the commissioner ‘wears an orange jumpsuit to work and is a poet.’ What he meant was that he was clearly a kook. The partners looked at me and I was thinking, ‘there goes my career.’ Just an early example of how the business world viewed poetry. You can see why I didn’t bring it up unless other people did.”
Barr’s poet side and banker side lived separate lives for much of his working life and he referred to them as the “two rivers in my life that have run parallel courses.”
In time, Barr started letting his poet side out more and more. As he published books and shared them with colleagues and clients, he received support and positive feedback. Becoming a partner made him more confident, but he says he also noticed an increasing amount of open-mindedness in the business world.
Then, in 2004, Barr’s parallel rivers converged when he accepted the post of president of the Poetry Foundation, which had recently received a $100 million gift. By tapping Barr for the job, the nonprofit found itself the ideal leader—an award-winning poet who happened to be a finance professional with more than thirty years of experience as an investment banker, entrepreneur, and advisor to public companies. Talk about a perfect fit. In its press release announcing Barr’s appointment, the Foundation quoted him as saying, “The Poetry Foundation is currently known for two things: Poetry magazine and the Lily bequest. That combination of literary distinction and financial capability has not occurred before in the history of American poetry.... My dream is to see the Foundation built and operated like a well-run company: a company whose business purpose is to provide an important home for American poetry.”
Though his own story reveals some challenges, Barr says it shouldn’t be surprising to run into a businessman/poet. “In America there is this fascination with the businessman/poet— the archetype being Wallace Stevens—and I can list other people who had full careers in the life of action and affairs,” he told me. “T.S. Eliot worked a few years as a bank clerk in London. William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician.” In interviews, Barr often mentions William Butler Yeats, one of his favorite poets and one whom many people consider to be the best poet of the twentieth century. Yeats was the founder of the Irish National Theater and he wrote a poem, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” which talks about all the aggravations of putting on a play, staying on budget, and the everyday struggles of an organization.
The merging of twin pursuits, as it happened with Barr, is another common twist on the path of a slash career. Often, a slash is the ideal hire for a job at the intersection of two fields.
Roger McNamee, forty-nine, is one of those slashes I’d known about for quite some time before getting the chance to meet him. His name turns up from time to time in magazine profiles where he’s invariably described as “investment wizard by day/rocker by night.” In the summer of 2004, McNamee was in the news again when a spate of those articles announced that he and five partners had founded Elevation Partners, a new firm that would invest in the entertainment industry. The founders also included a genuine rock star partner—someone always mentioned with a slash—musician/activist Bono.
Around that time, McNamee had just written his first book, The New Normal, about how best to thrive in an age of much risk and uncertainty when the old safety nets are gone—as are many of the restrictions that lock people into the rat race. McNamee’s book shed some light on the ways his involvement in music created some serendipitous connections in his investing career. I traveled to Silicon Valley to learn more about how his two passions affected one another.
In investing circles, McNamee is well-known; in fact, he’s something of a “rock star” in that world. In Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, he’s described as “legendary” and “visionary” in the investment and technology industries. In Wikipedia and in many people’s minds, however, his music is something he does “in his spare time.” McNamee says he does not mind that his music might look like a hobby to an outsider, but as the years have passed, he has come to take it much more seriously. “Music is way too important to me to be merely an appendage to my day job,” he told me.
McNamee says he knew the limits of his musical talents from early on. And while he may not have had the gifts to reach the heights of his musical idols, he was good enough to play in several bands. His leadership skills and business acumen helped to make those bands successful. When he was in business school, McNamee played every Tuesday night at a local restaurant. He never missed a performance, even when he had an exam the next day. Throughout his career, he made choices that allowed him to keep music in his life, like marrying someone with a similar passion. His wife, Ann, a university professor/musician, sings in their band, the Flying Other Brothers, so being on the road forty nights a year doesn’t mean being away from her. The couple has no children, which frees up a considerable amount of time.
In his early years as a financial analyst at T. Rowe Price, McNamee covered a gamut of industries including aerospace, office supplies, and telecommunications, each of which he studied with great intensity. McNamee can get just as animated talking about paper clips and hole punchers as he can about iPods and music. But once he settled into the technology industry, he found himself in an area where his passion for music was as useful as his knowledge of the industry. His mentor trained him to find an edge that would allow him to know an industry better than anyone else. In technology, McNamee discovered that music, “a little thing that ran through the computer industry,” was just the kind of edge that would set him apart.
“I’ll never forget when the CEO of one of Silicon Valley’s hottest software companies came into my office on his IPO road show,” he recalled. “He literally did a double take. He knew me from jam sessions we played in at trade conferences and didn’t even realize I was in the investment business. He thought of me as a guy he could relate to from his industry. From my perspective, this was perfect. When you’re an investor, CEOs automatically put up their guard because most investors only want to talk about future revenue and earnings. My approach was totally different. I always tried to understand the business issues that mattered to executives. The insights I gathered from these conversations enabled me to add value in a way that was very unusual for a public market investor.” Back in the ’80s, music was an icebreaker that allowed McNamee to cultivate those relationships.
Over time, success in the investment business gave McNamee both the time and freedom to get more serious about music. The Flying Other Brothers built a following at festivals and clubs throughout the west. They leveraged McNamee’s business skills to stage benefit concerts for a variety of worthy causes. The bills for those shows included many of McNamee’s favorite musicians and bands. As the Flying Other Brothers got more successful at night, McNamee found ways to bring music into his day job. In 1999, he began a three-year pro bono project for the Grateful Dead, a band that had long been known for its innovative approaches to using technology to stay in touch with its fan base. McNamee volunteered his time to help his favorite band solve a problem in which their music intersected with technology and finance. That experience gave McNamee an education in the music industry and its inefficiencies, and it put him in contact with dozens of other artists, including U2 and Bono. Two years later, Bono called McNamee out of the blue to ask for help on a project to revitalize the music industry. Bono could see that technology was transforming the music business, but he needed an investor’s help to do something about it. After several months of business planning, McNamee and Bono decided to be business partners and launched Elevation Partners.
McNamee’s dedication to his music ended up giving him a lot more than an outlet for his creativity; it completely shaped the direction of his career.
Many of the people I spoke to said that having multiple vocations makes them better at the various things they do. Through their slashes, they acquired transferable skills and made useful contacts for other parts of their life. Often, a frustration or challenge in one type of work is offset by the complementary nature of an entirely different kind of work. The particular ways that one slash feeds another are as varied as the careers one can imagine combining.
Ann Guttman, the Realtor/musician, says that each of her careers has relieved the stress of the other in some unexpected ways. “As a musician we have all this down time, waiting for the phone to ring,” she explained. “It can get you depressed, feeling worthless. I have a lot of energy, so I really needed to fill the space because I was just too depressed when I wasn’t working. It really wasn’t all about money. The music business is really harsh, so if you were getting hired and then suddenly you’re not, it’s usually because someone’s cousin came to town. It’s not really personal. . . . It’s a control-of-your-life issue. . . . As a musician you always feel like you have to say yes, so it gave me great emotional freedom to be able to say, ‘I don’t want to go to Connecticut on the Fourth of July and get stuck in traffic just for five hours of playing an outside job with my music falling all over the place and [being surrounded by] a bunch of drunk people.’ Having the other life made me appreciate the times I played much more.”
Usually, it’s about some variation of that elusive thing we call balance—between stability and excitement, between left-brain and right-brain, between being solitary and being part of a team, between working with one’s hands and working with the mind.
Nina Fine, a singer-actor/real estate investor-property manager from Philadelphia, says that her two occupations are complementary on the obvious levels—managing her rental properties provides security when her performing career has dry spells. But her combination also offers some unexpected yin and yang. “Real estate is concrete,” she explained. “I know what needs to be done and I do it. And when I do, it’s complete. Whereas performing is ambiguous and fleeting; if you missed it, it’s over. Plus, when I’m performing, I’m completely surrounded by women and gay men.” When she is working on refurbishing houses, she is suddenly in an enclave of maleness, with contractors and handymen. “It’s refreshing to be in such a male environment for a change—and it makes me feel powerful as a woman.” Fine didn’t go into real estate thinking she needed to be around more testosterone, but it is one of the little details of her dual life that she appreciates.
Alex von Bidder, whom we met in chapter 4, is well-known among New York City’s business elite. Knowing him, a coowner of the Four Seasons Restaurant, can mean the difference between the equivalent of courtside seats and nose-bleed bleachers in one of the most visible power lunch settings in the world. Von Bidder has had a certain kind of mystique for years, largely based on his proximity to the powerful people who eat at his restaurant. But these days, references to him in the social pages are as likely to be about his yoga instructing, writing, or modeling, some serious slash pursuits that have made him even more intriguing to his patrons and the media.
Followers of New York’s bold-faced names have gotten wind of von Bidder’s other life, but in the suburbs where he teaches yoga on the weekends, he says many people still have no idea who he is. In fact, if you visit the Web site of Yoga Haven, the studio where he teaches, you’ll see a bio that has no reference to his other life. The photo is of a relaxed, smiling man in a fleece sweatshirt, a far cry from the vision of buttoned-up European elegance known to the socialites and executives who see him week-in and week-out at the Four Seasons. His bio is simple and pure yoga: “Alex von Bidder joyously shares what he has learned through yoga: To stand taller, to stretch the mind and to connect with your own brilliance. He attempts to model enjoying the calm at the center of a busy life, especially when that requires inversions of some kind.”
Few people take on slashes simply to be more interesting or powerful, and that was certainly not von Bidder’s motivation. But sometimes an unexpected professional twist is all it takes to grab a bit of media attention or to distinguish yourself from someone else vying for a job. Sometimes your slash is the thing that someone remembers about you—and therefore a way to deepen a relationship. And sometimes your slash just keeps you at peace—a kind of synergy with yourself.
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* A gentile person who does work on the Sabbath that an observant Jew will not do.