RSVP: info@ashbyvillage.org
When: Wednesday, May 20th at 1 PM
Where: Zoom - https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84249851300
Open to: Members and volunteers
You’re Doing What? Older Women’s Tales of Achievement and Adventure
Book reading - Compiled and Edited by Marjorie Penn Lasky
You’re Doing What? is an inspirational and insightful call to action to its readers. These stories are certain to encourage women – and men – of all ages to view aging as an opportunity to act on long-deferred or never-before-imagined dreams.
Contributors Christie Batterman-Jordan, Betsy Chafcouloff, Effie Hall Dilworth, and Helen Isaacson join compiler/editor Marjorie Lasky to read from their narratives included in the anthology, You’re Doing What? Older Women’s Tales of Achievement and Adventure – which is bursting with 62 memorable first-person tales and photos.
During this reading, you can meet daring older women, hear about women of different races, classes, and sexual orientations facing various challenges and choices as they age, and the women who refuse to succumb to disabilities. They are all embracing new adventures and changing what it means to be an “older woman.” Celebrate them! And let them inspire you despite those voices that still might challenge, “You’re Doing What!”
PARTICIPANTS:
Compiler/Editor Marjorie Lasky
A professor in the Contra Costa Community College District from 1973-2008, Marjorie Lasky taught Women’s, United States, and Latin American History. As an older woman, she finished a PhD dissertation, “Off Camera: A History of the Screen Actors Guild” and a degree in Labor History at UC Davis, served as chief negotiator and president of her faculty union, founded Grandmothers Against War (Bay Area), and, upon retiring, took up the saxophone.
Contributors:
Christie Batterman-Jordan – “My Life as an Aging Mermaid Sex Goddess”
Christie Batterman-Jordan is an art historian and glass artist who founded a company that became one of the largest international suppliers of decorative glass. She balances her love for the arts with a passion for nature and tries to spend as much time outdoors as possible, hiking, gardening, birding and scuba diving.
Betsy Chafcouloff – “Speech Therapy Cambodia”
A Speech and Language Pathologist, Betsy Chafcouloff has been traveling on and off for almost 50 years, and is particularly drawn to working with people in Asia. When she was 68 years-old, she started a non-profit corporation, Speech Therapy Cambodia, that began by training neurologists in Cambodia. For more information on the project: www.speechtherapycambodia.org.
Effie Hall Dilworth – “Lost Family Found”
Effie Hall Dilworth graduated from UC Berkeley in English literature. She worked for the university for 30 years with the campus’s natural history collections as a computer programmer and the administrator of a database system. In June 2013, the Chinese Historical Society of America published a booklet her cousin, Connie Young Yu, and she wrote about the family soy sauce enterprise, “Wing Nien Brand, A Story of Longevity.”
Helen Isaacson – “Tapping, Teaching, and Fiddling”
Helen Isaacson was born and brought up in Brooklyn, New York. She met her husband when they were both reporters for the student newspaper at Brooklyn College. They have lived in Washington D.C., London, England, Oberlin, Ohio, Ann Arbor, Michigan and Berkeley where they moved after both retired from teaching at the University of Michigan.