I just watched as PBS television special on the demise, implosion, and vanishing act of The Rocky Mountain News (or in the Denver Metro area, “My Rocky.”)  Today is February 27, 2009.  Today is the day the disappearing act took place.  I tried to purchase a final copy of The Rocky, but wasn’t able to find one in the paper box located around my apartment.  But when they held a copy up on TV, the headline read “Goodbye, Colorado.”

 I’ve heard my mother refer to Denver as The Cow Town over 60 years ago and, today, the biggest, oldest, toughest cow of all bit the dust.  We already know about Circuit City and Virgin Records.  What will be next?

Following in my dad’s footsteps, I read The Denver Post.  But still, Denver could brag on being a two paper town.  Today you had a choice, tomorrow you won’t.  And the short PBS film focused on the 200 plus people who would be leaving today.  Another handful of talented, creative jobless people, the final one closing the door forever.

I know the feeling.  My last day at a Denver-based law firm, Sherman & Howard was December 31, 1991.  I had worked there for 14 and a half years.  Why?  Downsizing.  I left behind 13 weeks of paid sick leave and walked out with one month of severance pay while those laid off three months before received a week’s pay for each year that worked at S&H.  I know how it feels.  When my mother broke her hip a little more than three months later, this one-two combo threw me from my typical chronic depression into clinical depression that caused me to lose 20 pounds in 20 days and, by the end of 1992, left me with a weight loss of 40 pounds.

 My doctor thought I had cancer.  Then he thought that I wasn’t eating.  Neither was correct.  I was in a dark hole that it took me three years to get myself out of.  I know what the spitballs of life are like from taking them on the ass from a big firm where I worked support for the likes of Senator Ken Salazar.  I have some feeling for what these people are going through.  The disbelief.  Then the reality, worst that any nightmare.

 In December of 1993, still reeling from the depression, I got a job with the Denver office of the Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.  It was a Saturday/Sunday job, no benefits like health insurance or paid vacation time.  On October 11, 2006, ten years and one month after my mother died and two months after turning 69 years old, I was called in and again let go because of obsolesce, or at least that’s what the Lakewood Work Force told me.

 I was alone this time.  No support system.  This was something I was going to have to work out for myself.

 The Lakewood Work Force is a large two million dollar building also housing WIA and Voc Rehab among other offices.  Every time I stopped in there were a lot of people running around but no one jumping up and down with joy because they had gotten a job.  For some strange reason I still get weekly emails from Career Builders who seem to have the impression I’m a lawyer.  The truth as I could see it was that the law firms were reducing support staffs, not hiring.  So are the newspapers.  And it near impossible to pay the bills by writing blogs.

 Several people who do counseling suggested I join the Boomer group, despite the fact that I’m almost 10 years older than the youngest Boomer and, as far as goals go, have nothing in common with them.  So I did the only thing I had in my meager arsenal.  I soul searched.  I had to ask myself what was everything I had ever done in life, even if it meant zipping my mind back to high school.  And there it was.

I had done a magic act.  Notice I don’t say I was a magician.  I was more a teenage dabbler.  But I knew first hand how gigging worked.  How sometimes I had to give a free performance.  How I had to get to know some of the people who made up the subculture of magicians.  I had to join the Society of American Magicians (“SAM”) and the International Brotherhood of Magicians (“IBM”).  It took several years to get started but I got a early start in the second grade, began getting paid for shows in the fifth grade, and competing with adult magicians when in high school.  Now obviously after a more than 50 year gap, magic is out, out, out.  But, using the same techniques, and already having voluntarily posed for a small painting group that met in an old friend’s kitchen, I was ready to swivel into a new job and, fortunately, the only art college in Colorado, Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (“RMCAD”) is located just over two miles from where I live.

And so I’m modeling, artist modeling, doing the majority of my work at the college while picking up gigs at a couple of other places located close to me.  The jobs pay well in my estimation but this type of work makes it tough for those trying to build a job that will handle real bills of a real family and not just the quirks of a 71 year old man.  Definitely, one has to have Social Security or some other kind of government program behind them in order to give a sense of stability when jobs run short during the summer or around Christmas.

In about another year I suspect that I’ll have made enough connections to add to my jobs by working at other colleges with art departments or art groups that come and go and look for models of various ages and appearances.  One model I posed with yesterday told me she was leaving Colorado to go back to Rhode Island, a place that was really a home to her.

The question is how many people in the coming days, weeks, months, and years will say “Goodbye, Colorado.”  This is my turf.  According to a popular song, you used to have to make it in New York.  But now, below New York, I think you need to add Denver to the list.  Just ask one of those leaving the building.

- Bob