She was just a young thing in the 70s when the birth of Penelope occurred. She arrived in Aspen, Colorado freshly scrubbed, bright-eyed and ready to take on the world. She lived the life of Aspen-of-the-time as she sought to gather fodder for the position she assumed as the chronicler of the times for the Aspen Times and thus Penelope Bijoux was born. Some might have called her chronicles “gossip”, but she preferred to call them community observations — observations of the times which never were to be again and were never ever seen before.
Aspen was an unusual place then, different from other communities of its size, more sophisticated and certainly much, much more liberal. It was a formative time in Penelope’s life serving to refine the given shape of her existing attitudes; not just the genetic engineering of her attitudes, but the environmental influences that shaped them. Here was this baby boomer seriously influenced by all that the 60s offered trying to express her soul through words. Well maybe that wasn’t exactly the intent of the column in the Aspen Times, but it was Penelope’s ultimate goal for life.
Now Penelope is older, wiser and has observed more of life. She has been wounded by romance, capitalism and bad hair days. She has learned to deal with the trite and the stupid. She is still perfecting the craft of writing and observing, but has learned that to perfect is to practice. Even though “they” say that life isn’t a dress rehearsal, isn’t everything we do a learning experience for something else that we will, hopefully, do better the next time?
The point is that Penelope has been practicing to take on her goal, to share the chronicles of life and to be relevant to anyone who will take the time to read what she writes and hopefully be amused by her chronicles. The time has come to regurgitate the bumpy experiences of life in a light-hearted way, possibly as a therapeutic exercise for the author, other contributors and most hopefully for every reader.