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	Photo: Kenneth L. Wright II

WHEN HUGH MCDONALD WAS A BOY, HE WANTED TO PLAY THE TRUMPET. BUT HIS PARENTS NIXED THE IDEA, BECAUSE THEY WORRIED THAT OTHER APARTMENT TENANTS WOULD COMPLAIN ABOUT THE NOISE. HE NEVER ASKED FOR MUSIC LESSONS AGAIN.
    One day, at age 54, McDonald heard a street musician playing Bach on the cello. “The sound, the feeling, the intensity, the emotion of it—it was like a wave that came over me,” he recalls. “I had never felt that before.”
    What’s more, a new desire to play the cello overwhelmed him, despite concerns that he was too old to learn. Finally, he plucked the name of a music school from the phone book and signed up for weekly lessons. During work breaks, he parks in a bus lot. Then he strolls to the back of his empty bus, props his cello in the aisle, spreads sheet music across a seat and practices making beautiful sounds.
    The story of this New Jersey man’s midlife cello lessons ran in The New York Times. It resonates with a generation of Baby Boomers who are constantly reinventing themselves. Learning and expression have always been bedrock Boomer values. As a result, the midlife passage, once viewed as a time of loss and decline, has become infused with a sense of freedom, possibility and change. Thanks to an average life expectancy of more than 70 years, the nation’s 77 million Baby Boomers have more time to pursue artistic passions, whether they are newfound or ones that echo from the recesses of childhood.
    After all, creativity knows no age. McDonald would find good company here in Alameda, where men and women in their 40s, 50s and beyond still dare to chase their artistic dreams. In spite of self-doubts, rejection and other obstacles, they have penned a first book, taken to the stage and parlayed beginner’s guitar lessons into a steady club gig—all in the second half of life.
    A wise soul once said, “It’s never too late to become what you might have been.”

 

Alice Wilson-Freid, Writer  

   When Alice Wilson-Fried sank into a menopausal funk at age 50, the self-described bookworm and crossword puzzle junkie found salvation in an unlikely place: the tennis court. It wasn’t her idea; her husband, Frank, bought the racket and lessons with a pro to shake her out of her doldrums. “When I started to play the game, I was a menopause vegetable,” says Wilson-Fried, now 58.  “I had the energy of a gnat, couldn’t think and couldn’t sleep.”
    Wilson-Fried likes to joke that she would have flunked high school physical education had it not been for the written exam. She’s just as self-deprecating in describing her struggle to learn tennis. She practiced backhands, forehands and “bending the knees to scoop up a low shot without needing a crane to straighten up,” she says. She spent so much time swatting her way to tennis proficiency that her 4-year-old granddaughter gave her a nickname: “Tennis Grammy.”
    When Tennis Grammy was good enough to play in local tournaments, she gained a ton of confidence—and her journey didn’t stop there. Wilson-Fried’s next goal: to become an author. In 2003, she published the tale of her late-life addiction to tennis—and the close female friendships that she formed—in her first book, Menopause, Sisterhood, and Tennis.
    “That whole competitive, self-confident, will-to-do attitude—all of that comes from participating in a sport,” Wilson-Fried says. “I wanted to share how it had helped me get through menopause.”
    Tennis gave her another gift, too: the chance for midlife introspection. “It helped me to reflect on myself and to grow as an individual. To figure out who Alice really was—not mama Alice, not wife Alice, not grandmother Alice, but Alice herself.”
    Wilson-Fried’s love for the game caught her by surprise. She spent her childhood in a New Orleans housing project, where she lived with her mother and grandmother. “I grew up where nonwhites weren’t allowed on public tennis courts,” Wilson-Fried writes in her book. “So I had attitude with a capital A about this elite sport. I wasn’t white, and I hadn’t worn a size 6 since 10th grade. I was the least likely to hit the courts.”
    Instead, she lavished her time on books and considered majoring in English someday. “I didn’t expect to be a famous writer,” she laughs. “But I thought I’d be a great English teacher. I’ve always been interested in reading and writing.”
    But that early love of language didn’t lead to an English degree. Instead, Wilson-Fried married, divorced and spent 13 years as a single mother. “I had to make a living. I had to be practical about how I was going to take care of my two kids,” she says. “Most of my life, I have done what I had to do, with little thought to what I wanted or liked to do.”
    She took a day job at Tulane University, which enabled her to attend classes tuition-free at night to earn a bachelor’s degree in business. Later, she became the public relations director for a New Orleans paddlewheel steamboat company before marrying her second husband, Frank, and moving to California.
    Although she had done some writing in her former public relations job, Wilson-Fried quickly realized that she wasn’t equipped to write a book. “I put these words on a page, and it was hor-rible,” she says. She started enrolling “everywhere I could find any kind of writing class,” she says. “I joined writing groups. I did it all.”
    She sent her book proposal on tennis and menopause to 130 literary agents and watched the rejection letters roll in. At one point, she considered giving up on the whole idea.
    Then one agent picked up the proposal, liked it, and eventually found a publisher, Basic Health Publications in New Jersey.
    Wilson-Fried is glad she didn’t give up, not during the efforts to learn tennis and not during the vagaries of the writing life. “When I decided that I needed to get this message out to women about engaging themselves and developing a passion for something, I also told myself the same thing: ‘You have a passion for reading and writing. Don’t let anyone else’s negative remarks stop you from being positive.’ ”
    “My grandmother used to tell me all the time, ‘You are the only person who can say what you can and cannot do.’ ”

Tom Farris, Actor

    The neighborhood Elks Lodge may seem like an unlikely place for a man in his 50s to jump-start an acting career, but then again, Tom Farris isn’t your average midlife guy.
    He’s a 54-year-old supermarket food broker who decided at age 51 to realize his dream of acting on stage—even if it meant taking singing and dancing lessons to hone his talents.
    Farris is living proof that dedication pays off. He has beaten the competition to win coveted dramatic roles—from the angel Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life to Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof—with the Alameda Civic Light Opera, Pleasanton Playhouse, Piedmont Light Opera and Douglas Morrisson Theatre in Hayward.
    How did a congenial family man who serves as secretary of the Elks Lodge No. 1015 become a stage actor, seemingly overnight?
    For Farris, the epiphany came during the holidays. In 2002, the local drama group StageMasters put on its Christmas show, A Tall Winter’s Tale, at the Elks Lodge and invited Farris to join the fun.
    “I got on stage and sang,” he says fondly. The experience was exhilarating, and it reawakened a long dormant love. During high school in New Mexico, Farris had sung in the concert choir and acted in Once Upon a Mattress and other plays. In college, he took some voice training. But ultimately, he settled into a thoroughly practical business major.
    With sheepskin in hand, he hit the corporate world. He worked 16 years for Safeway before moving on to jobs in the snack manufacturing, accounting and high-tech industries. “I bought the dream,” he says. When he married and had children, he shelved his creative en-ergies, except for singing baritone in his church choir. “I was busy. I was traveling. I was flying. I just didn’t have the time.”
    Now that his children are grown,
he has both time and freedom. Emboldened by his Tall Winter’s Tale performance, he auditioned for the 2003 production of Oklahoma! at Hayward’s Douglas Morrisson Theatre and landed a chorus part.
    Though he never lacked for passion, those early stage productions brought into glaring view his technical limitations. “I found out I was in deep trouble when it came to dancing on stage,” he says. “I’m as klutzy as an elephant.”
    And there’s no place to hide. “When you’re on stage, it’s all you.”
    Faint-hearted souls might have given up, but not Farris. He threw himself into dance lessons, concentrating on movement and routines, ballet and tap.
    Signing up with a voice coach helped, too. “I learned how to throw my voice forward,” he says. “It’s helped me to sing louder, sharper and clearer. I can hear flats and sharps now, and I never did before.”
    Despite his success at pulling off an unusual midlife dream, Farris has run head-on into the same hurdles confronting other middle-aged actors, namely, a scarcity of roles. “You take a
54-year-old guy trying to break into it and there aren’t a lot of parts. It’s a real competitive situation. Some parts I can’t do because I’m too old. They want the hard-body 25-to-30-year-old.”
    So where does he want to go with acting? “I don’t have delusions of grandeur of becoming a movie star or getting onto a Broadway stage,” he says. “I’m just having fun. It’s very challenging, and it’s gratifying. And it’s different being somebody else.”
    Farris’ next role: the knight Castor in the Pleasanton Playhouse production of Camelot. Any truth to the rumor that he’ll be wearing tights? The Elks Lodge stalwart laughs heartily. “I don’t have any trouble with tights.”

Tom Myers, Jazz Guitarist

    When Tom Myers was growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he had a younger brother who flirted briefly with playing the guitar. “He thought it was good to have a guitar when girls were involved,” says Myers, who now lives in Alameda. But when Myers took up guitar for the first time at 38, his pursuit was devoid of youthful pretensions. “I wasn’t doing it to be cool,” he says. “It’s not like taking up smoking when you’re 15.”
    Instead, he dreamed of being good enough to perform. Now, 12 years later, Myers, 50, has a regular music gig. Every Friday evening at Kelly’s of Alameda, the Park Street jazz club, he plays jazz guitar and drums while his wife, Cynthia, sings. A bass player rounds out the trio. On a recent weekend, Myers, looking dapper in a black suit and turtleneck, even took a turn at vocals, singing the classic American road song “Route 66.”
    Myers, a soft-spoken man who works as a technical instructor for Oracle, admits that it was daunting to begin playing before audiences. There’s a crucial difference between teenage and midlife musicians, he says. “When you’re a kid, you have no fear. When you’re older, you have a better understanding of what fear of failure is.”
    Like so many others who learn a new instrument in midlife, Myers first showed interest in music as a youth. He was the oldest of six children in a Canadian military family that wasn’t particularly musical. But his father, who served in the navy, had “unrealized musical aspirations,” Myers says. His dad bought an old piano that was sitting inside a barn, refinished it and installed it in the household. “I think he liked the idea of being a ‘piano bar’ kind of guy,” Myers says.
    Myers had radio favorites, too. “I grew up listening to the Monkees, Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix,” he recalls. At 15, he learned to bang away on drums that his parents ordered from a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog. But he stopped playing in his early 20s when he began moving around, returning to drumming only on rare occasions over the years. The results were decidedly discouraging, he says. “I had no chops left at all.”
    His musical life took a turn for the better in 1992, when he met his wife, Cynthia, who was singing with bands in British Columbia. “I got hooked back into the music scene as a listener,” he says.
    Soon, his musical aspirations stirred again. He bought an acoustic guitar, the first in his current collection of six acoustic and electric guitars.
    At first, Myers taught himself. Later, he studied with an accomplished rock and jazz fusion guitarist who snickered at the newbie’s lesson books. “He just laughed when I showed him Mel Bay’s Guitar in Twelve Days,” Myers jokes. 
    He studied guitar tenaciously, sometimes lugging his instrument along on business trips. Myers even went to guitar camps for adults. Before long, he was “not just noodling, but playing little riffs,” he says. Buoyed, he dedicated himself to playing the drums again, too.
    Shortly before his 40th birthday, he played for the first time at an East Bay coffeehouse. In those early days of performing, “It was easier to get flummoxed,” he says. Besides typical showtime jitters, Myers sometimes had to contend with equipment malfunctions or hot weather that made him feel as if he were melting on stage. Now that he’s been performing for a decade, he takes such nuisances in stride, he says.
    At times, he’s happy with his playing, but not always. “Sometimes you play something and it’s just not musical,” he says. On those days, he banishes the niggling thoughts that can bedevil anyone engaged in a creative endeavor. “Just because you don’t have it on a certain day doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be there another day.”
    Every so often, he’ll run into others with musical aspirations still unrealized. His advice to them: “You just have to go out and start doing it.” That means casting off dreams of instant success in favor of the long-term discipline required to master an instrument. “We’re so impatient. It’s a journey. You’re never going to get to the end.”