Molly Magill
She has the kind of eye that can turn a blank wall or an empty shelf into something stunning. Companies like The Container Store and Pier 1 saw that talent in L Streets resident Molly Magill and put it to use in their visual merchandising departments.
“They sort of like me initially,” Magill says of her former employers. “I get passionate about things and it’s exciting, but in the end, it’s a hard thing for all of us to balance because I’m outside the box too much.
“That makes me sound romantic, but at the end of the day, you’re at the mercy of the bosses — maybe it’s not even your boss; it’s the boss gods. You can’t get outside of that.”
The only way to get outside of it, Magill finally realized, was to leave the corporate world and branch out on her own. As friends of the 31-year-old started having babies and began asking her to funnel her creative energy into their nursery décor, Magill found that it could be more than just a side hobby, and Momo Fandango was born.
“I needed to have some focus to bust out into the scary independent world,” Magill says. “These ideas are swirling — I feel like I can make a go of this.”
She still has one foot dipped into the security of JC Penney, but her new clients continue to reassure her that she’s making the right decision. They love Magill’s butterfly wall murals, her non-Mother Goose bedding choices and her handmade baby crests. And the new mommies trust her taste so much that they have begun asking Magill to pick something out of their closets to wear to a dinner party. It inspired her to add another arm to her venture; she calls it “lifestyling.”
Her hope is to one day have her own line of bedding and baby products with a motif of screen prints over vintage fabrics, where “the whole idea is people are coming to you; they know what you do and they want that kind of look,” Magill says. Right now, however, she’s busy nurturing her baby enterprise through its infancy.
“If you’re used to a paycheck, going to something that ebbs and flows a little more is always going to be scary,” Magill says. But for herself, she says, “in the grand scheme of things, it’s the right thing to do.”
Jennifer Posner
Just a few months after being recruited to her new job, Jennifer Posner’s technology company announced that it was being acquired. She had worked in marketing one way or another for the last 20 years, climbing the corporate ladder since she graduated from college, but suddenly found herself without a job.
And, for the first time, with no desire to find another one.
“With a hatchet, they just schlobbed off half of the workforce,” Posner says. “Being a recipient of the ugliness of corporate America helped me to get off my duff and realize this is just not meaningful.”
Not long afterward, Posner found a note in her mailbox from someone interested in buying her mid-century modern home in Old Lake Highlands, and she realized this could be her ticket.
She and her partner, Montana Walsh, began talking to Realtors, and before long stuck a “for sale” sign in their yard with the decision that, as soon as the house sold, they would move to the cobblestone streets of San Miguel, Mexico. Walsh, who teaches both conversational Spanish and English as a second language, will continue her work there, but Posner is starting from scratch.
“People are asking, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and my answer is, ‘Why the hell not?’” Posner says. “Normally, I would just take another corporate job, and after six or 12 months be miserable, asking, ‘Why am I doing this? What do I really want to do?’ But no motivation to do it.
“I’ve talked to so many people who are like, ‘Oh my god, you’re living the dream that I’ve never had the courage to follow,’ and that encourages me. The adventure is exciting. I don’t know what I’m going for, but I’m going for it.”
Posner will have plenty of time to figure out what she wants to do next; the process of obtaining a work visa takes roughly two years. No matter what she decides, “I’m going to work as little as I have to,” Posner says. “It just does not have to be so hard. Our cost of living could be half of what it is here, and that’s not skimping.”
Posner has socked away enough money over the last few years that she and Walsh can live comfortably in the mountain village, an artists’ enclave with modern conveniences such as high-speed Internet but no modern eyesores like the golden arches. By the time Lake Highlanders read this, she says she’ll be strolling from her home to the neighborhood market, canvas bag on her arm ready to pick that day’s produce, the nine to five grind the furthest thing from her mind.
Mark Danielson
After 16 years as a prosecutor, Mark Danielson was weary of the system. Not necessarily the legal system itself, in terms of justice being served, but weary of the adversity.
“When you’re practicing law, especially when you’re doing trial work, somebody’s on one side, and somebody’s on the other side,” Danielson says.
“Some people thrive on that. I don’t, and I never really did … Sometimes what I did involved putting people in jail. We need to people to do that, but I became increasingly less happy doing it.”
Danielson says he enjoyed law in the beginning, but he reached a point at which he wanted to make a positive impact. He had that opportunity as a Dallas County district attorney, he says, but the impact was often punitive, too. So Danielson began pursing an interest in teaching and soon found himself at home with special education students.
“I wanted to be able to look back and say I really did something that could be of benefit to other people,” he says.
While earning his alternative teaching certificate, Danielson was a substitute at Lake Highlands High School. Instead of interrogating criminals and objecting to defense attorneys, he was working with students who were wheelchair-bound or needed help eating or using the restroom. When a position opened up, the high school hired Danielson, and he’s now in his 13th year.
Special education teaching positions are notoriously hard to fill, and perhaps that’s because most people feel uncomfortable around people with severe disabilities, Danielson says.
“People say, ‘I don’t know how you have all the patience to be able to do that,’ or, ‘It would be so depressing.’ Maybe at first impression, but once you get to know the students, each child has his or her own gifts and abilities. It’s just very gratifying to see them learning and advancing,” Danielson says.
When he switched careers, Danielson took a pay cut, and he’s still not making the salary he earned 13 years ago as a district attorney, he says. But even in that first year, Danielson’s wife commented on how much happier he seemed.
Parents come back to visit him 10 years after their children graduated to let Danielson know how they’re doing. He hears reports about former students who work at Presbyterian Hospital, and he runs into them at Kroger or Target.
Danielson is happier, he says, because he’s now working with a team of teachers who are on the same page, striving toward the same goal — to give their students hope for their futures.
Donna Robinson
Her job as an exploration geologist for Mobil Oil allowed Donna Robinson to live in exotic places such as Vienna a
nd London. The latter is where she was living when she turned 40, had a baby, and quit her job.
“I couldn’t picture myself being a mom and a geologist at my age,” Robinson says. “I had a feeling in my heart that I needed to search out and do what was unique to me. I was a good geologist, but I felt like I was going to be great at something else.”
That something else turned out to be photography, a longtime hobby that Robinson had honed while living alone in Vienna. The isolation, compounded by the language barrier, gave her ample time to just sit and observe the culture around her.
So Robinson began pulling out her camera and photographing her observations. Her professors in London later encouraged her to pursue this career path, so when Robinson moved to Lake Highlands with her husband and son 15 years ago, she continued studying the mechanics of photography.
It wasn’t long, however, before she needed to move past the mechanics and get to the emotion.
A trip to Oaxaca, Mexico during the Day of the Dead was pivotal. Robinson says she felt empty photographing people participating in such sacred rituals without their permission.
“So I got involved in what they were doing and showed them who I was, and they showed me who they were. That felt satisfying, and without that it felt like an intrusion,” Robinson says. “What I found is I have to give quite a bit of myself to get back an image that’s important to me.”
She does this whether taking portraits of sixth-graders at Merriman Park Elementary School or the homeless residents of Austin Street Centre. When she’s behind the camera, Robinson says she’s in the zone.
“I never felt that with geology. I liked it, but it wasn’t love,” she says. “When I made the switch, one of the things I was saying to myself is, I want something that when I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s what I’m thinking about.”
Still, that didn’t make the switch easy. Robinson says she had let her career and the “fat paycheck” that came with it define her. She began asking questions like: “Is this really right for me?” and “What am I doing in the grocery stores at 11 o’clock in the morning?” But over the years she learned to embrace her passion.
“Of course, you can turn it into a j-o-b, but it doesn’t take me very long to get back on track,” Robinson says. “Going into work early in the morning and coming home at 7, that’s not what I’m here for on earth. It just doesn’t matter to me that much.”
Susan Barnett
She spent the ’80s in New York City advancing the cause of working women, campaigning to place them on corporate boards and advocating for childcare.
“I graduated from Harvard in 1973, at a time when I felt it was my duty as a woman to do some serious career, which probably meant a career a man would do, and I just felt like I needed to prove myself,” Susan Barnett says. “But I had this idealism. I didn’t want to climb the career ladder in a major corporation; I wanted to do it someplace where I felt it was going to make a difference.”
After moving to Dallas and creating another childcare advocacy group, Barnett decided she wanted to learn from one of the best. She took a job with the American Heart Association and spent 14 years in administration. Her final role was executive vice president for science operations, which meant Barnett oversaw all five scientific journals, a major annual conference, and staff scientists and scientific councils that decided how to allocate millions of dollars for heart and stroke research.
“I loved my job,” Barnett says. “I felt the work I was doing was important, but there was some kind of personal connection or passion that really just wasn’t there.”
In 2000, she spent her vacation time taking a painting course in California. Barnett loved to paint as a girl and sporadically took courses as an adult, but for years she had been putting off attempts to “seriously paint.” When she finally did, Barnett says she “was on fire.”
She immediately enrolled in undergraduate art courses at Southern Methodist University. Her professors probably didn’t take her seriously at first, Barnett says, assuming that her interest would flag after a couple of courses. But she proved that she was serious about art, so much so that the university accepted her into its Master of Fine Arts program.
Barnett quit her job with the American Heart Association almost three years ago, at a time when her two sons were finishing college, and she and her husband could downsize and change their lifestyle, “which really enabled me to go back to school and take on a career that will not necessarily be lucrative,” Barnett says.
But now that she’s preparing to graduate in May with a master’s degree, Barnett defies anyone who wants to call her newfound passion “playing.”
“People would say: ‘Oh, it’s so nice you’re able to retire and pursue your little art.’ I didn’t look at it that way at all,” Barnett says. “This is serious business to me. This is not, I’m going to become a Sunday painter.”
