Women of an uncertain age
By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor
So, you’re a woman of a certain age. You’re looking into the mirror that is TV, and the idealized face reflected back looks nothing like the one you’re wearing. What’s a girl to do?
Rectify the situation.
“Women of an Uncertain Age,” a monthly program seen on local public access television, is dedicated to the proposition that women, especially those who are no longer in the bloom of youth, “are doing astonishing things on the local and regional level, and getting less recognition than they deserve,” said Anne-Marie Oomen, who co-hosts the show with Susan McQuaid. The show is produced in the UpNorth Media Center studios at the Land Information Access Association (LIAA), 324 Munson Avenue, Traverse City.
When Oomen and McQuaid began talking about the idea of a program in 2013, they both felt “we weren’t seeing women who looked like us — middle age to older women — in media,” said Oomen, 63, an Empire resident. Need and absence became the mothers of invention.
“That’s what started our friendship,” said the 64-year-old McQuaid of Traverse City. “We were two women of the same age. We have this new challenge ahead of us: Where’s it going to take us?”
The show’s title is a twist on the old descriptor “women of a certain age.” It’s a slippery phrase that suggests a storybook woman who is no longer a fertile goddess, but not quite a withered crone. “Everyone assumes women of a ‘certain age’ are old,” McQuaid said. “Well, we don’t feel old. We don’t feel over-the-hill. We feel uncertain, and we think that’s a good thing. From my personal perception of my age, I’m growing and blooming every day.” The uncertainty-end-of-it is the not knowing where “life is going to take you.” And that, as the program strives to illustrate, can be a good thing.
The majority of McQuaid’s adult life has been spent working in the media trenches. She moved to Traverse City in 1990 from Marquette where, for 20 years, the native UPer was an on-air reporter and noon talk show host for WLUC-TV — the first women to be hired for the station’s news division, she said. Shifting gears after the move, McQuaid became the director of United Way’s Volunteer Center while simultaneously volunteering for the UpNorth Media Center. She retired from United Way in 2013.
Oomen’s name is familiar to many. She has published four books of poetry and memoir. She’s a playwright. And until her retirement last spring, taught creative writing and chaired the department at Interlochen Center for the Arts for a combined 17 years. Her teaching continues through a low-residency MFA program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass.
Adding “television person” to her bona fides wasn’t something Oomen had in mind when she surveyed the post-professional landscape. McQuaid, on the other hand, was ready to jump back into this familiar territory. “This is an idea I’d had in the back of my head for a long time,” she said.
A mutual friend introduced the two women, thinking, Oomen said, they might have something in common. Turns out, they did. Oomen’s shared belief — that women of a certain age are largely invisible to the wider community — led to a series of four exploratory conversations. Between the coffee and the talk the two brainstormed a concept for celebrating “women of all stages and ages,” McQuaid said.
“When we started out, we thought the (monthly) show would only run for a half-hour,” said Oomen, who finishes off that thought with a self-deprecating harrumph. As the idea moved from concept to execution, both women found there was easily enough raw material to shape into a 60 minute show. The inaugural episode aired in May.
Each “Women of an Uncertain Age” program unfolds over four segments. The self-explanatory “Women You Should Know” shines a light on women “who are doing important work in the community,” Oomen said.
There are interviews with artmakers in a second segment. “Then and Now,” hosted by Traverse City writer Karen Anderson (a woman in her self-described “late ’60s”) is look backward and forward at women’s lives and progress in the world. It’s the third segment.
A fourth segment, The Hot Spot, is on ice for the time being, Oomen said.
“It’s a one-minute rant on anything that drives (the guest) crazy. We had one on cell phone etiquette, another one of high-heeled shoes, which is a form of foot binding. The rant is a legitimate form of expression,” she said. Much to her and McQuaid’s mutual chagrin, it has been hard to find enough guests to regularly fill the spot.
But much to McQuaid’s and Oomen’s mutual delight is the addition of a new, monthly conversation about cooking with chef-author Nancy Allen, 63, of Maple City. Allen, the author of multiple cookbooks and academic texts, will host cooking segments in her own kitchen as well as visit others.
The skill set Oomen acquired over multiple decades of writing and teaching didn’t include television hosting or production. But an innate curiosity, which served her writing well, transferred to this new endeavor. “And then I have a good theater background,” Oomen added. “After the first couple of shows, I felt myself developing the personae you develop when you’re acting.”
McQuaid’s belt holds back decades of television experience, both in front of and behind the camera. In addition to her co-host duties, McQuaid produces, directs, shoots video segments and edits the program.
“When I started volunteering (at UpNorth Media) 10 years ago, I worked with film. Then we went to beta tape,” she said. “Computers change everything in six months, but the basics of videotaping remain the same: how to shoot something, how it holds together. Those things have been set in me since the 1970s.”
Oomen got the training she lacked through UpNorth Media’s how-to-be-a-producer program, a series of seven workshops that provide one with the technical skills to bring an idea to life and televise it on this commercial-free, public venue.
“The beauty of it is anyone who has the time and knowledge can be a produce, can have a television show. That’s the beauty of public access,” McQuaid said. “You don’t have to please a sponsor. It’s not promoting one product over another … The beauty of UpNorth Media Center is it gives our community a voice. You don’t have to have the sponsors of the dollars to spread the word, whatever the word might be.”
“Women of an Uncertain Age” airs on Charter channel 189, 7 p.m. on Wednesdays. It can also be watched on-line at the UpNorth Media Center website www.UpNorthMedia.org.
