How I am discriminated against. (Ageism and Employment)

Member Name: Cammij

Product:	Ageism and Employment
Date:	08/02/02 (78 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: i would work cheap, I have the skills

Disadvantages: Nobosy needs anybody my age

I don't want to come off as a whiner but I honestly believe my professional career is suffering due to ageism and age discrimination. And this isn't like all the other Opinions on dooyoo, with some vague concept of potential and longevity with a firm as I am a contract entertainer.

I better explain how I got to where i am today. I was born in West Texas to a roughneck oil well hand and my mother who was a homemaker who would take in sewing now and then and sell a few spare vegetables from our patch. When I was growing up Texas was not a kind state to people who weren't Anglo looking and people couldn't get cheap and reliable paternity tests. Pa flew the coop when some rich little brat looked at my little brother Owen in his pram the one day and said "look ma' it's a baby gardener". All of a sudden my mom had to raise the four of us on her own as pa couldn't deal with the lingering questions of Owen's paternity. He had been gone to Louisiana around the time Owen was born and we did think that it was strange that he weighed 10 pounds even though he was two months pre-mature.

This is germane to the subject, so anyways my mom couldn't afford a sitter for us so she took the only job she could get, a night clerk at a convenience mart where us kids could sleep in the back on the pallets of pepsi while she worked. My bed for several years were those pallets. But it was hard to sleep at night and I would lie awake and listen to the music that they played in there. Bluegrass, Dixieland and that sort of stuff. All night long I would listen to the music and I knew someday I would be involved in music.

I did not do so good at school. I guess you could say I was not book smart. But I had common sense, that's horse sense. I didn't do so good with Algebraometry, of biotany, or English (how come we would study some language from somewhere's else if we talked American?) I was always in a fix
at school and hated to go until gym class in the fourth grade when we learned how to square dance. We would get out that old record player and start a dancing, "Alla-man Left to your corner, turn her two hands around, doesee doe your partner, dip her to the ground" Old Mr Spiegelmeyer would call and have us dance until one day, it was when he was sick and fixin to die he asked me to call for him. That was the big break of my life, I'd probaly be in prison today if it wasn't for that, or planting trees at the CCC. But I called and they danced. And Mr Spiegelmeyer cried. He says to me, "terrence, where did you learn to call? You read that floor like a book and know what to call when". I had no answer. It was just natural.

So Mr Speiegelmeyer would take me to the dances on the weekend and have me do a song or two at the weddings and Bar-B-Qs he did. He bought me a nice get up and everybody loved me. I even had my own record. But then one of the men who helped make the record put his hand in my pants and my dad heard about it and came back from Oklahoma and shot him. Which was really Ok, since when my dad was gone he didn't send no money for us but when he got sent to Prison we got extra social security for him being in prison so we didn't have to sleep at the Dairy Mart no more and I even got my own bed.

I was pretty popular in High School because I could call all the dances. And I even got to go to Japan where they have funny looking money and show them how it was done. But by the time I graduated in 1993 I wasn't so popular anymore, I guess I wasn't a cute little kid who could call no more so nobody liked me. I was calling at a wedding one time and some guy named Darrel from a band called something like Panther was there because it was his cousins wedding and he heard me call and said he was famous and asked me to come to Houston for a show and they played all this unholy music that hurt my ears about
"Walk" and "Cowboys from Hell" and I was supposed to call in the mike and the kids would smash each other and dance like how I said but they acted all crazy and didn't do stuff right. I would say "Stable Circle to a wave" and they would just keep smashing each other as if I had said "Step and Fold wind the bobbin" I was frustrated but Darrel thought it was funny. I would have done another show because I liked how the girls there dressed without so many extra clothes but all them guys smoked that witchweed.

All I am saying is if I was 10 years younger or 30 years older I could get all sorts of work. I do the best dances and calls. I learned how to use the internet at the public library to make new dances and talk to other callers. I even got to chat with some famous musicians and asked their opinions on what dances should go with their songs but nobody needs a 26 year old caller and it hurts. So now I am a caller for the phone company. I call up people to tell them about the new 7 cents per minute state to state rates. But it just isn't the same. I know in a few more years if anyone still square dances I will do all right but for now it is hard knowing that I am at the top of my game and nobody wants me.

thank you, terrance

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