What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [108]
A few weeks later, Oprah’s Oxygen Network notified Myrna that she had been selected as one of three winners, from more than five thousand contestants. Her mentors and friends at the Women’s Business Center were jubilant. “Oh, my God! It was huge!” Wrigley said. Not only would Myrna, then fifty-nine, receive a computer and other equipment, business workshops, and a $10,000 award, she would also be flown to New York to be interviewed on television by Gayle King, television talk show host and Oprah Winfrey’s best friend. Almost overnight, the hits on her Ooz & Oz website skyrocketed by the thousands. “Oh, honey, every time you trot out Oprah’s name, people perk up. To have won that was a very big deal,” Myrna said.
There was only one problem. She still had no product to sell. Filled with urgency, she cut back on her teaching schedule and set to work developing a new packaging design. But a personal crisis thwarted her again. Myrna’s mother was on a cruise in the Caribbean when she was injured in a car accident on the island of St. Thomas. Her traveling companion had reboarded the ship and sailed, leaving Myrna’s mother alone at the hospital in need of emergency surgery. Myrna turned in the final grades for her students and flew down to be with her mother. Frustratingly, her Oprah moment slipped away.
It was not until later, in 2003, that Myrna, having turned sixty, remanufactured, repackaged, and renamed her product Mirror-aculous Art Activities “Circus” Kit, complete with thirty-two distorted drawings, crayons, and mirror decoders. By year’s end, her unusual, interactive toy and drawing activity kit had racked up a string of the nation’s most prestigious toy awards, including being named one of Dr. Toy’s “10 Best Creative Products 2003” and “100 Best Children’s Products 2003,” and received the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval and the Canadian Toy Testing Council’s highest ranking, and won Creative Child magazine’s Seal of Excellence.
The “Circus” kit is a unique way to teach children to draw that is intellectually stimulating and fun, according to Steveanne Auerbach, Ph.D., the educator otherwise known as Dr. Toy and whose imprimatur has been sought after in the toy business for nearly a quarter of a century. “It was easy, creative, and inexpensive. It took a lot of courage to take on a project like this and take it to the marketplace. To do that, you have to be a forward-looking person with stamina. Myrna invented something and has been able to sustain it by reinventing it several times. It has a classic quality, like yo-yos and Hula Hoops, that will allow Myrna’s product to be constantly rediscovered.”
Of course, her long entrepreneurial journey has occasionally been so challenging that she considered giving up. But each time, her passion for mirror art and her faith in her toy have pulled her back on track. In 2004, her vision was rewarded when the federal Small Business Administration for the Washington, D.C., district named Myrna the Entrepreneurial Success of the Year. “She has been indomitable,” said Maggie Constan, a friend. “She has been determined and flexible, trying angle after angle. She is organized just the way her desk is organized.”
Her desk, in fact, has no junk drawer. Paper clips are sorted by color. Multicolored Post-its, reminding her of tasks and timetables, are plastered around the two walls of the L-shaped desk that dominates her living room. Each night, she reads through all of her note cards—some of which have been written out numerous times, a habit she attributes to her accountant father’s relentless questioning. No matter what time she goes to sleep (she often works late into the night when she is struggling with a creative problem), by 5 A.M. she is usually back at work fulfilling orders, corresponding with customers, writing copy, and working