GUEST COLUMN: MARIANN AALDA

Living on “The Edge…”
MARIANN’S MIDLIFE MAYHEM & MISCELLANY: The Mouse that Roared

As a little girl, my big dream was to someday be a “Mouseketeer.” Fuggedabout Romper Room, or Ding-Dong School, or Captain Kangaroo! The Mickey Mouse Club was my favorite television show of all time.

Of course, I could never just watch the show. Nooooo….I had to perform all the little songs and dances in front of the TV set, just like I was a regular member of the cast.

To this day, I remember most of the songs and the weekly line-up. I was especially fond of “Anything Can Happen” Day, because if anything could happen, that meant that someday I could become a Mouseketeer. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was probably my first “autosuggestion”…with Mickey Mouse acting as a hypnotist!

I am not being facetious. That little rodent gave me hope. Because of Mickey Mouse, I could imagine a joy-filled world of laughter and song – a world where parents didn’t argue and mommies weren’t sad. Some of my fondest memories are when my mom would watch the show with me, which she sometimes did, because it came on right after her favorite program, the soap opera, Edge Of Night.

Well, eventually I grew up, and The Mickey Mouse Club went off the air, and I missed out on the chance at my big dream.

But isn’t it curious, that some twenty years later, I would end up as one of the stars of Edge Of Night?

I’d auditioned for a lot of soap operas in New York…how is it that I ended up on that one? Had an image of it been imprinted on my subconscious mind from hours of watching it with my mother? Did I manifest being on it because of its strong positive associations for me? Did the Universe give it to me because, as an adult, the closest equivalent to The Mickey Mouse Club it could come up with was an acting gig on a show in its formerly adjacent time slot? With all that I learned about the subconscious mind during my training to become a hypnotherapist, I wouldn’t doubt it.

The great lesson in dreaming a BIG dream (and believe me, for a poor, little black girl from the five-block-by-nine-block Village of Phoenix, Illinois, being on The Mickey Mouse Club was a very big dream) is that BIG dreams stretch your imagination of what is possible. When you dream a “little” dream, you only pump up the volume of what you’ve already had; but when you dream a BIG dream, you embrace the possibility of something you’ve never had before.

Even if you don’t get your BIG dream, you still end up better off than settling for a little one. When you aim for the stars, chances are, that at the very least, you’ll reach the moon; but when your goal is only as far as Palm Springs, you might only make it to Pacoima.

Listen to the voice of experience: I never got my BIG dream. I never made it to The Mickey Mouse Club. But I did get to be on Edge Of Night. And you know what? When you DREAM BIG, second best ain’t half bad.

Keep believin’!
Mariann
www.mariannaalda.com

(Mariann also blogs at Lee Bailey’s Electronic Urban Report)