Taking a Risk to get a job: Happy Anniversary!

October 2nd has special meaning for me, not because it is Gandhi's Birthday (although it turned out to be a happy coincidence) but because it is the day I departed San Francisco on a Singapore Airline flight to Singapore many years ago on, get this, a one way flight with no visa (unheard of today). I simply planned to stay for as long as I wanted once I got a job. And, yes I had a sort of possible job offer. Before I became a professional writer I was an artist and illustrator. In high school I went to an art fair in Ravinia Park (near Highland Park) and met a just-out-of-college artist named Tom James. I liked his zany, colorful magic marker work and we chatted all afternoon. I told him my dad was an artist and gave him my address and phone number. He said he'd drop by the next evening. Well I never heard from him. He had kept my contacts in the glove compartment of his car and by the time he called my parents told him I was no longer living at home and was in San Francisco. He wrote me and I sent him some photos of the type of illustrations I was doing. Then one day a letter from Singapore arrived. I looked at the post mark with extreme curiosity as I didn't know anyone in Singapore. Finally I opened it. It was from an American woman named Lisa who was working at a Publishing Company in Singapore. She had gone home to Evanston, Illinois to see her family and went to a party at Tom James house. For some reason he showed her the photos of my work and she said she thought it was more original than the illustrators the company used and asked for my address. When I read her letter she said she couldn't promise anything but if I came to Singapore I could stay with her and her husband who worked for an oil company and she would set up a meeting with the publishing company. I sold most of my stuff and left what I wanted to keep, should I return, with a friend. I got a passport and bought a one way ticket and a group of friends took me to dinner the eveining of October 2nd. Their plot almost worked as at the last minute I remebered I had to catch a flight. Richard rushed me to the airport. I ran up the stairs to plane out on the tarmac just as the doors were about to close. I was the last on and made it by seconds. This was my first international flight and was about to change my life forever. I'll never forget finding my seat and calming down, thinking I could have missed it by a second. We stopped in Hong Kong for a few hours and I learned one cannot leave the airport unless it is their final destination. Then I finally arrived to Changi Airport on October 4th. Everyone on the flight went through customs. Except me. I was taken to a small room and grilled. I got the gist of where this was going when I learned they wanted to see an ongoing ticket. I quickly said I was meeting some girlfriends to go on a tour of Asia and they had the tickets. It worked but I got a 2 week tourist visa dashing my plans to stay as long as I wanted (a few years at least!). Then I made it through customs, got my luggage and found Lisa and felt the hot tropical blast of air as we stepped out of the airport doors. So I made to Singapore, but would I get the job? Thats another story to be continued....