What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

"What do you want to be when you grow up?” is one of the oldest and most iconic questions adults ask children. If you were a member of the silent generation growing up in the Eisenhower era, you probably answered, "fireman" or "president" if you were a boy or “housewife” or “Miss America” if you were a girl. Now the answer might very well be “gay.” If you're talking to a young woman, she might embellish her response by going on to state, “I want to be a lesbian.” Now obviously you can be a gay fireman or president and lesbian housewives and Miss America wannabes are everywhere. In general, fields that were previously closed to minorities are opening up. If you're one of the minority of billionaires among Fortune’s 100 richest people, you can still get a $10 or $15 dollar an hour job behind the counter at Popeye’s or McDonald’s, a position for which you might previously have been deemed to be over qualified. No one is going to stop you from working on the assembly line at GM just because you’re the chairman of the board. That's precisely the plot of Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1941). Let’s say you want to grow up to be someone who “counts their chickens before their hatched.” God bless.

read "The Real Thing" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Big Girls Don't Cry" by Frankie Vallie and The Four Seasons