My Three Minutes of Fame

Dear Cool Insighters,

This is a between-the-posts share about how my six-word memoir led to a local TV interview. Last year, I wrote the following micro-memoir on Smith Magazine’s six-word memoir site:


First love lost, 14; married, 50.

It’s Tim’s and my love story in a nutshell. (Want 200 more words? Click “show backstory” under these six words and the picture of Tim and me at my 8th grade graduation on my Smith link.) This summer, Smith partnered with AARP Magazine to do a regular column for the 50+ audience. Ours was chosen as one of the tiny memoirs on the theme of love (Less Is L’amour …) in the September/October 2009 issue.


This tiny blurb turns out to be six of the most evocative words I have ever written! Old friends saw the entry in the AARP column, and I got calls from people I hadn’t spoken with in decades. Soon I had an e-mail from a local reporter who wanted to feature us on “Good Day Sacramento” on a show they were doing with a “lost loves” theme.

Since the clip is from a copyrighted TV show, I can’t link to it directly, but if you’d like to see it, here are the directions:

Go to Good Day Sacramento.: . Once you’re on the GDS website, on the right there’s a Good Day Videos screen. Under the screen, the far right button says Menu. To the left of Menu is a spyglass. Click the spyglass, which activates a search window. Plug in the words “lost loves,” and you’ll find our video.

We hope our story inspires others who always wondered about their lost loves. While not all stories have our happy ending, it’s healing to complete that circle of “unfinished business” and “always wondering,” regardless of the outcome.

And about that 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol said we all get? I’ve still got 12 left! I hope I can cash them in on a book or two—or ten.

Here’s to those flashes back to the past,

--Joyce

~~~

Photo: My favorite of the booth photos Tim and I took in Dallas on February 14, 1997, our first Valentine’s Day together since 1961.