Joy Overbeck
Journalist and Author

One dazzling fall day I was lugging my portfolio down Seventeenth Street in Denver, making the rounds of store advertising departments, when a tall, jaunty guy with intense eyes and a Mick Jagger pout bounced into step beside me. He was a photographer, he said: was I a model?

Now, I knew this was the oldest pickup line in the solar system, but something in his delivery made me laugh. I told him no but said yes to coffee, over which I spilled my sad tale: new in town, jobless, fresh from a roadkill of a marriage.