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I got my start in newspapers,
working at several small- and mid-sized
dailies in New York, New Jersey and Michigan.
I spent many a lovely Sunday afternoon chasing
cops, covering street fairs and writing
obits. It wasn’t exactly the Lois
Lane-like fantasy career I had envisioned,
but it did help me find my Superman. (More
about that later.)
Eventually I graduated from covering late-night
municipal meetings and Memorial Day parades
and was entrusted with the real hard-hitting
stuff, like the opening of a “bottomless”
strip club. Once I mastered the finer points
of interviewing a completely naked person,
my editors deemed me worthy to handle my
own beat: education. Now why I never won
an award for my strip club coverage I’ll
never know, but I did manage to snag a first-place
award in 1997 from the New Jersey Press
Association for my statewide education stories.
Go figure.
My first love was and always will be newspapers.
But there were only so many times that I
could write about contract negotiations,
school elections and how much more taxpayers
would have to spend per $100 of assessed
value of their homes so that the board of
education could build new headquarters.
So what did I do? I went to work for a school,
of course—a Jesuit university, no
less! It didn’t take long to figure
out that if I wanted to stretch my writing
muscles, that wasn’t going to be the
best place for a workout. While I was there,
however, I edited an internal newspaper
and an alumni magazine, which prepared me
for my next move.
Being only half Cuban, and having been raised
in an Irish/Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn,
I was a shoo-in for an editing job that
opened up at Latina magazine. I
knew enough Spanish to pepper my copy with
words like caliente, chica
and papí, so they promoted
me to senior associate editor. It was a
great gig. Finally, I had a relatively glamorous
journalism job working as an editor at a
national consumer magazine.
All the while, I was dating Superman. At
my last newspaper job the unassuming local
columnist behind the bottle-rim glasses
just happened to sweep me off my feet. I
fell hard for my Clark Kent look-a-like,
so I married him. We had a baby, then another.
It wasn’t too long into my drool-soaked
existence that I realized my Manolo-wearing
days as a New York magazine editor were
over. (Truth is, they went by so fast that
I never did get the Manolos. Darn!)
So here I am living out my big dreams in
a little, suburban New Jersey town. Just
me, my two kids and Superman (who often
must be reminded to use his super powers
to make the laundry disappear). If Lois
Lane had decided to become a mom, this is
the life she’d be living: glamorous
writer by day, boo-boo kisser by night.
The fact is I’ve got the best of both
worlds. And it’s a better reality
than I could have imagined.
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