I’m a leading edge baby boomer and that explains a lot. You know–  going wild in the 1960s, flirting with radical politics in the early 1970s, turning to art in the mid 1970s. I spent years scraping by on my typing skills to support more interesting activities, confused about my path in life.

Eventually I went to law school. I entered at age 33 and graduated at 36, feeling very old. I spent five years as a Wall Street lawyer in the days when you had to wear pantyhose with your suits or dresses. I spent five more years as a large-firm lawyer in Portland before reverting to my true identity as a self-employed person scraping by and indulging artistic interests. I wrote briefs for other lawyers and co-authored The Complete Guide to Contract Lawyering, which went through three editions and was relevant in the bygone days of the 1990s and early 2000s.

    I was an editor of the law review in law school (USC) and for over 15 years was editor-in-chief of another famous publication, the Oregon State Bar’s Debtor-Creditor Newsletter. Is a theme emerging here? Yup– I can spot typos and grammatical errors and stylistic infelicities at 100 yards.

    Other notable facts about me: I was born in New Hampshire and retain a bit of the stern Yankee despite having committed to life on the mellow West Coast. I majored in English literature (Reed College) and wrote my thesis on Chaucer. I went to Woodstock and hated it. (I’ll explain if you ask me.) I spent years in San Francisco working on an alternative paper called Change: A Working Woman’s Newspaper. (I can tell you more about that too.) I briefly had a boyfriend who self-identified as a Marxist-Leninist-Mao-Tse-Tung revolutionary. (You don’t need to know more about that.) My portfolio of black-and-white photographic images remains to be assembled but showed promise at one time.