Hi! I’m Betsy, and I am so glad you made it here.

I signed up for an art workshop last summer and I think it changed my life.

The class was mixed media, a combination of using ink on paper with collage elements — pictures from old magazines or newspapers or whatever you might have on hand. The instructor was challenging and encouraging, giving us prompts and sharing ideas. Around the room, participants were a range of ages and experience, some were accomplished artists, while others, like me, were taking a first step into this new world. Can I tell you that I actually felt my head was expanding, like there were new neural pathways forming in my brain? Not to mention how fun and freeing it made me feel.

Maybe you have had a similar experience? Or are you looking for an arts area to explore?

The experience can be both exhilarating and terrifying. To pick up a paint brush or an instrument for the first time in maybe decades can be hard. We’re accustomed, at our age, to be able to do everything well. To not be good at something — or to be awkward or clumsy — is not a feeling we’re used to. To lean into this new feeling, to sign up to learn something new when others around us may be very good—at drawing, painting, playing an instrument—can be hard. But it’s the only way. Isn’t that what we’ve told our kids as they struggled to learn new things?

Over the past ten years or so, I’ve also written pages of memoir, a family-history inspired unfinished novel, and taken a stab at a ghost/mystery story set at a women’s college in the 1970’s. That is also unfinished, but I’m thinking of dusting off my MS and working on it some more.

What about you?

A little about me: after I graduated from NYU’s undergraduate Film and Television program at Tisch School of the Arts, I had an adventurous few years as a radio journalist, when I went to Germany to co-anchor Deutsche Welle’s Across the Atlantic radio magazine that aired on US public radio stations.

When my kids were little, I became an early adopter of internet sales technology when I founded the website Drosselmeier’s Handcrafted Treasures from the Land of the Nutcrackers and began selling German Christmas decorations in what was “the first season people bought stuff on the internet.” One of my proudest moments included an appearance on Martha Stewart in 2003 with my collection of historic nutcrackers..

When my younger child went off to college, I felt the need for new challenges. I enrolled as an undergraduate at Columbia University, majoring in architecture, and graduated cum laude in May 2020, a week after my 60th birthday. It was the hardest, most challenging, and most rewarding experience of my life. Until that is, I launched my podcasts.