Today we’d like to introduce you to Christie Jenkins.
Hi Christie, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
As an Idea Entrepreneur with many big successes, I gnash at those who think I’ve never had a job. All I do is work! But only sometimes get paid. And therein lies the secret of struggle.
It sounds glamorous to say that I grew up training for the Olympics in figure skating, but that means I got up at 4:30 am and went to Fair Park – the only ice arena in Dallas – twice a day, six days a week. Very hard work and a difficult location. I’d slide into school at the bell or five minutes after, ensuring hours in detention hall at year’s end. Darted out at end of each day to return to skate meant I could not be in activity clubs and was unable to make connections in the hallways like most. It was only choir in which I could make friends – my joyful hour. To this day I am always in a choir. The biggest senior year disappointment was not being voted Most Athletic – it went to a gal who played tennis.
On Sundays after attending the church my spectacular parent helped to create – Lovers Lane Methodist – our family would brunch at Parkland Hospital. Yep. My father had founded the Department of Anesthesiology and had mountains of work to do, so we’d eat in the Doctor’s Lounge – a curtain separating us from patients – and the same food. I learned way too much at a young age about child-birth (watched), effects of smoking (played with a set of real lungs), and my respect for what doctors and nurses do has never wavered – in fact, they are in my daily prayers as this pandemic rings them out sideways.
Naturally, I thought I would become a nurse, but skating meant I was used to being in front of watchers, so I majored in theatre in California, and made a little living as a headshot photographer in Hollywood, as I made the studio rounds as an actress myself.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
FIRST BIG SUCCESS: Today’s influencers are stressed to stay on top of what the next trend might be. My intuition is part of wide-observation; ‘here is what women want, are not saying, I can fulfill that’.
BUNS: A Woman Looks At Men’s became a landmark little book for Putnam at a time women were still whistled at. What if we girls were commenting to men on their clothes, fit of pants if we found their back-side appealing or not? This was so radical in 1980 that some of the talk show hosts would not hold up the book cover. The follow-up was five years of Buns Calendars – and I’ve been credited with ‘creating the women’s market in publishing’. This led to agents asking me to do unique portraits of their stars, and my studio became known as Strictly Men, even though some women found me!
THEN, HUGE STRUGGLES: You will banish me as having reverted to Jane Austen times with this next statement, but the world is set up for couples, two incomes, extended family, marriage. Sorry, but it just is, despite the change in acceptance for not that path. And at age 37 (so late!) I married, sold my house, helped support the end of his medical training before he’d go on hospital staff, and then he left me for a nurse. The most typical event that has ever happened in my life. And because he left me in one day and with nothing, it threw me off the path most Americans work for – early homeownership – and then trade up and up and gain assets. I became a renter in one fell swoop, and still am, all these years later, paying others’ mortgages (median rent in LA is still $4k a month), but never my own as that lump of down-payment money went with him.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
NEWEST PROJECT, IN DALLAS: I sold half of the Lodge furniture, packed up, and did what many did during this time; went “home”. Dallas. On the way here both moving vans and my car were vandalized. For weeks I sat dazed in the tiny rental, wondering how to un-hook from the swirl of negative energy that had clung to my hopeful, positive thinking life. Highland Park Presbyterian Church was a kind and loving help. I kept at my list-making to see forward. What does all this moving qualify me for the most? Got it!
The newest project, just released, is www.RentalRoadtrip.com. People are kicking for adventure now, move somewhere cool and unique -BUT WHERE TO GO? START HERE! Rental Roadtrip has four unique features; 1) Hometown Reviews, written by real residents. 2) Like the sound of a town and wish to be shown around by the person who reviewed? Just reach out to customer service and we’ll contact them for you. 3) Love where you live now? Then WRITE a Hometown Review to be posted on the ever-filling pages! 4)Read Articles written just for this site – the truth about your credit report and how to rent even if it is low, what landlords & moving companies are hiding, fun quizzes to help you discern dwelling amenities you’d never thought of!
WEBSITE & PRICING:
The Atlantic ran a report stating that people will pay $5 to be on a site that does not gather, share, or sell any information, and that has NO ads. THAT’S US! The one-time joining fee is $5. Come back anytime. Write up as many places you’ve lived as you like. Check back in and read the new postings. I am considering many new hometowns based on these Hometown Reviews – places I’ve never heard of. St. Mary’s, Georgia. Paonia, Colorado. The Roanoke Valley. I honestly don’t think there could be anyone more sensitive to renting challenges than I am. The first article just dropped, that contains a unique graph for each move-seeker to fill out – and I guarantee surprise answers. Give Rental Roadtrip a spin!
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
TASKING THROUGH THE RISKS: My loving parents were both dying right at this same time. I moved back to my childhood Dallas home and took care of them. Trying to not lose all I’d built up in LA, I got a cottage there and flew back and forth, wrote scripts, got tabbed to come up with new TV shows, acted, produced, sang, kept my sanity by rollerblading. AND, of course, my one true God-given gift, as a portrait photographer. A life as a creative-artist-entrepreneur is to keep forward motion, which means several projects must be in the works at all times. When there is a fallow time, inevitable when nothing is working and you can barely buy groceries, you have to make good, real notes about yourself, to take in a large world view. Someone will say “just move to a smaller/cheaper place”, so you make lists, and realize the cost of moving/storage/changes will add up to more than just staying at your desk and pushing. I had been the early successful one who owned a home at 28 and would lend rent money, but now I was on the other end, and most friends wandered. It made me angry that I had been the extra theatre ticket buyer, done the inviting, gave the dinner parties, and now I had nothing to do but work.
NEXT SUCCESS AND FAILURES: I was fortunate to receive an inheritance, yet I invested it all to create the first video to teach American Sign Language to the general public. Thought of buying a home and having an easier life, but that seemed selfish, and I’d just met a deaf actor (they do not use the term hard-of-hearing), and when I couldn’t find a video to help me learn his native language, I decided to produce one. It was splendid, and sold 200,000 copies – phenomenal for a special interest video – so I made my money back, but then went bust as I continued to invest in that world, flew around giving lectures and workshops to whomever asked. My site got ‘splintered off’; orders for the video went to some guy who was buying them wholesale and re-selling, and by the time this was discovered, I was broke and living in a friends’ garage, my lovely furniture in storage. It destroyed me. That same year I created a wonderful television series, but no one wanted it; it got produced years later, is still on the air, and the significant lawsuit, despite acknowledgment that it was my idea…. never mind. Book to come. This punch I still am rolling from, the most successful idea I ever had, and I’m not part of it.
HIT ON THE HEAD AND LEFT FOR DEAD: That professional loss unmoored me further as if husband leaving and parents dying in one year was not enough. I bopped around, got cottages, ran hard, to end up back in a garage/guest house. Sold belongings, worked as a photographer, taught Sign Language, organized homes and garages, sold shoes, arranged flowers, whatever might pay rent. I went exactly 14 years without a vacation, not even a weekend away from toil. Thank goodness I’ve never been interested in drugs or alcohol.
I finally eeked out enough to open a dream – a Writers Lodge in Seattle – a very smart, literary town. It failed. In the final hour of packing the moving van, something happened – or someone. When I woke up in the carport, I was blind in my left eye, disoriented. Taxi to ER and they thought I was drunk. After a long time in the corner, my every survival instinct rose, and I finally impressed tirage to get an ophthalmology intern whom I told to look at my website – that I’d been a TIME Magazine photographer and I needed real help. Two surgeries and a long lonely recovery in a basement (two suitcases, my cats, a big plant), when a miracle happened affording me to move to a house again.
CELEBRITY GALLERY: I got reorganized in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, a tiny town where I could live without a car, and open a Celebrity Photography Gallery, which was great! People came to see my former years of celebrity work – like a blast from the past (Christopher Reeve, Rick Springfield, Olympic athletes, and figure skaters) – and read the private stories posted next to each. Many would hire me for their own portraits; gosh it was wonderful to get so much work at that weird digital time when every man woman and child fancied themselves a photographer! That’s not past-tense, by the way.
And then, the fate of every renter reared its ugly head once again – living at the whim of landlords. Mine wanted the house back and found a way (they always find a way), and there was in fact not a dwelling to be had in that whole area. With a very heavy heart, I closed the gallery and moved south. Untethered, gallery in crates and storage, over the next two years and many moves, all the while working to create and fund the next project, I ended up at a place of calm. A house I could afford for three whole years, if careful. And a car.
TWO STUPID RISKS: But I wasn’t careful. February 2020, I produced a spectacular live event – The Mercury Ballroom Supper Club. Broadway dancers, singers, 20-piece jazz orchestra, showgirls, bellhops, full dinner, retro cocktails, dancing, sets, lights, costumes – fantastic! Great advertising, but residents of that town would simply not buy tickets, despite after opening major press saying to GO! It bled me out over the six-night run, and I lost everything. Again. I could hardly believe it. Rental home lease over, it was going up to $6,700. HA! I looked for the next chance to invest the teeny bit I had left that could also provide income. At exactly that time of no home and lost fortune, the pandemic hit – March 2020. I fled north to open a 20-year dream of The Writers Lodge on Bainbridge Island, as I’d found an amazing home on the water, and upon opening met my goal in the first week – five writers a month, spread out, one at a time. It was wonderful and would supplement the rent. Then a neighbor decided he didn’t want this completely quiet business on his street – so he wrote an anonymous letter to my landlord, who shut me down flat, but held me to the year lease of high rent. Another attorney hired.
Pricing:
- FREE
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.rentalroadtrip.com
