I fell backwards into politics. My degree is in theatre, mostly because it was really fun. I bounced around for a few years after college, looking for work that felt meaningful. It wasn’t until I showed up in a Howard Dean campaign office in New Hampshire, though, an idealistic volunteer intern ready to change the world, that I really understood what that meant. I planned on staying two weeks, but the work felt vital and important, and I’d never met a smarter or more passionate group of people. When I told them I should be getting back to real life, they offered to pay me $825 a month, and the rest was history.
For the next twenty years, I worked on one campaign or another essentially non-stop. I worked for candidates of all types, for the full alphabet soup of Democratic party committees, and for ten years co-owned and ran a very successful analytics consulting company. My speciality became interpreting sophisticated data and analytic tools for political people, and interpreting political people for very smart data scientists. I did a lot of work that I was, and still am, very proud of. I accomplished pretty much everything I set out to accomplish in my career.
The thing about getting what you think you want, though, is that sometimes you didn’t really want it. I knew that consulting life in DC wasn’t working for me. The pandemic year locked up in my house, trying to convince people to listen to my ideas over the sea of other people shouting at them on Zoom calls, made that clear. I knew I needed a change, and when a great friend decided she would run for Governor, I thought it was a sign. I could go back to my roots, back to on-the-ground campaigning, and recapture the sense of meaning that changed my life in 2003. I had an amazing candidate, a great team, and…. it didn’t work. From the jump, it was wrong. I was miserable, and because I was miserable I didn’t do my job as well as I needed to. I thought I was burnt out on DC, but the reality is I was burnt out on politics completely, and denying it was hurting me, hurting the campaign, and hurting the movement and the ideas that we were fighting for. I hated the idea of leaving halfway through the fight, but if I couldn’t give it everything, it was better to get out of the way of people who could.
So I found myself 42, unemployed, single, homeless, and not interested in the thing I’d spent 20 years learning how to do. There was something that had been bringing me joy, however. About 4 years ago, I started getting serious about baking. I was two years early on the sourdough train (my starter, First Lady Rosalyn Starter, had a lot of pandemic-era children), but ever since I was a kid going to high school in Switzerland I have loved pastries. I used my time locked inside my house during the pre-vaccination part of the pandemic to teach myself how to make croissants, pain au chocolat, tarts, pastry cream. I had a bunch of Tartine cookbooks and a lot of friends who were happy to get boxes of whatever I made left on their front door, and I was unstoppable.
I’m not going to lie: I got pretty good at them! I had time, patience, and access to good butter, and I learned a lot very quickly. Like a lot of people having mid-life crises who picked up new hobbies, I spent a lot of time idly wondering if I could make a living at it. I had romantic ideas of a little bakery in a small town someplace, maybe a bed and breakfast someplace, but they were basically just glorified retirement planning commercial daydreams.
Until, maybe, they weren’t. As I started realizing the enormity of leaving the campaign, and figuring out what that meant for the rest of my career, I kept thinking about how the thing that made made me happy - that made me feel useful and connected to the people I love - was right there. It’s just my hobby, though. I have no idea what it’s like to do day in and day out, to do when I have to and not just when I want to. But why not find out? What I love is French pastry, and the only French pastry school I had ever heard of was Le Cordon Bleu, and they had an Intensive Basic Pastry class starting in July with one space left in it. Some emails, some forms, some pictures of pastries, and a bunch of Euros later, it was a done deal.
So here I am, about to go start pastry school with a bunch of French teenagers. I have no idea how this is going to go. It might be terrible! I might be really bad at it. I might hate it. But I might not! What I’m determined to do, though, is throw myself into it fully. I’m going to get every possible centime out of this summer, this city, and these new possibilities, and part of that is this blog. I’m going to write about what I’m learning, how I’m feeling, what I’m eating and making. Expect lots of pictures, writing about food, writing about burn-out, and multiple love letters to butter. Thanks for coming along for the ride.