Have you ever come across a call for submissions for a themed anthology or special issue of a magazine and thought, “Oh, I have something I could write that would fit”? Combing the submissions-wanted section in Poets & Writer’s magazine and signing up with Creative Writing Opportunities to receive daily emails about literary magazines and contests seeking work are good ways to find such calls. Writing for a themed issue or anthology will encourage you to sit down and write on subjects you haven’t thought to write about. A couple of years ago, I heard about a submissions-wanted call for essays about odd jobs writers had. I immediately knew what I wanted to write about. Today the odd jobs essay I wrote is with essays in a manuscript looking for a publisher. In the meantime, I sent it to a local literary journal, Soundings, and it appeared in their Spring/Summer 2011 issue. I’m posting it this week to inspire you about writing in response to those calls for submissions that connect with experiences you’ve had. NOTE: Two years after writing the essay, I saw ways to strengthen it. So this version differs from the version in Soundings.

I spent the summer of 1969 demonstrating a body-toning gizmo called the Trim Twist. My post was on the first floor of the Lord & Taylor’s department store in Short Hills, NJ. At five feet tall and 102 pounds, I wore a bright green miniskirt with lots of leg showing as I demonstrated the square wooden board with ball bearings sandwiched between it and a base. Knees slightly bent, I twisted left and right for hours, as I talked about how using the board trimmed waistlines.

When I think about it now, twisting right and twisting left all summer seems a metaphor for what I was going through at the time. Over my three years as a student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I had been initiated into radical thought. Professors Howard Mossy and Maurice Zeitlan, the infamous Dow Demonstration and the oratory of the Weatherman organizers clashed with my upbringing that included trust in our nation’s leaders and a belief that the United States always stood for good in the world. As much as I wanted to spend time striking against the establishment and not going to class to prove we felt urgent about changing the world, I couldn’t let my parents down by letting my grades slip. I knew how hard they had saved to put my sister and me through college.

But what might I do in my life to combat the dangers of sticking to the status quo and participating in our society’s growing materialism? Entering college, I wanted to become  a scientist and contribute to winning our country’s competition with the Soviet Union to conquer space. Now, I thought I should work to overcome oppression. Worried about what major to declare, I took a test the University’s psychology department administered to students who wanted to figure out what jobs suited them and what jobs to avoid because of individual aptitudes and beliefs. I laughed when my test results showed I would hate going into business, especially sales. It seemed another sign about the differences between my generation and my parents’ generation. Business was what my family was all about. One grandfather imported goods from China, raincoats, galoshes, inflatable rowboats and hula-hoops. My other grandfather’s business was in designer ladies coats and suits. My uncle’s farm sold milk and cheese. My father was vice-president of sales for a pharmaceutical company. At family gatherings, it was never long before the men of the family asked, “How’s business?”

After four semesters of riots, tear gas and watching police using their Billy clubs on my fellow students, who like me grew up listening to heated debates about building bomb shelters and participated in “no hope” air raid drills in which we went home to die with our parents, and after dropping hot zinc on my lab partner’s hand in organic chemistry and being unable to slice a cell off one frog embryo after another in biology class, I decided to become an English major. Whatever the test proposed I do for a career, I loved poetry and plays and stories.

I also felt compelled to talk about Vietnam with my father and grandfathers. They called my opinions naive and supported the war, even though their own parents had fled Russia and Eastern Europe to escape war. This seemed right to them because they wanted to be sure their children had good lives, lives that honored their parents’ families’ decisions to emigrate to the US to avoid the Czar’s army, to get out of Poland and Austria as terrible war loomed. And now that good life included my mother’s plans for my wedding to a young man I was dating.

Just home from school that summer between my junior and senior years, I responded to a help-wanted ad in our local paper for Trim Twist demonstrators. I passed the screening questions, and when I was called to an audition, I sat in a room with a dozen or so attractive girls. We were each handed a card with promotional text about the Trim Twist and given ten minutes to memorize the words. When a bell rang, the company’s agent asked us who would like to go first. As demure girls taught not to assert ourselves, we giggled and didn’t raise our hands. But then, in a flash, from my days helping my dad rehearse the words on his detail cards for the pharmaceuticals he sold to doctors, I realized I’d have a better chance of getting the job if I showed confidence by volunteering to go first. My hand shot up.

For twenty hours a week, I demonstrated the Trim Twist, selling the most during evening shifts when husbands shopped with their wives. The men stood holding tissue paper topped bags full of silk ties and imported sweaters as their overweight spouses walked right by me to the store’s fancy candy counter.

“Does it work?” the men asked.

“Sure it does,” I answered, “I lost an inch from my waist the very first week. It’s easy and you can watch TV or talk on the phone while you use the Trim Twist,” I said, trying to picture their heavy wives stepping onto the little board. Just as the test predicted, I didn’t enjoy the selling part of being a demonstrator. I felt like a hypocrite. I knew their wives would never step on the little device. I knew the husbands were asking their questions and buying the Trim Twist to justify their interest in watching me. I knew I didn’t want to marry the man I would be marrying the next summer. I knew I wanted to move for awhile to New York City or Boston, to share an apartment there with my college roommate. I knew I wanted to start living an open-ended life to see what turned up. But I kept on twisting, my feet on the board. And after that summer, I stayed on a metaphorical twist board for ten more years, to the left, radical in the ways I taught students in my classrooms (what else did one do with a degree in English?), to the right, acquiescent to my parents’ ideas for me and my marriage.

Somewhere in those years, I started writing as well as teaching, adding my voice to the literature I loved and helping others use literature as a model for writing their way to hearing their own true voices, for writing their way to understanding experiences and wishes for this world.

Recently, shopping for weights at Big Five Sports, I saw a plastic disc-shaped version of the Trim Twist called Everlast for Her Twist Board, and I bought it. (The wooden Trim Twist from the company I worked for, it turns out, is now on exhibit in a Florida museum of antique toys.)

At home, I put my feet on the Everlast’s surface, six inches apart as I remembered, and once again twisted from side to side. I thought about that summer, about my college years, about my first marriage. I thought about life’s twists, about the world’s turns, about how we use what we learn as we go along, and how, if we are lucky, we get off the board and come true.