Laura Douglass

Born in NYC, raised the burbs Westport, CT. All I wanted to do was be an equestrienne, which I did for 20 years, show jumping and competing all along the East Coast with my trainer and family of other riders at the Ffld. County Hunt Club. My mother escaped Stalin's regime with her mother arriving in the U.S. from Poland after seeing atrocities such as the violent murder of her grandparents their farm home burnt to the ground, then being shuffled to work camps for non-Jews all over the region and in Germany. The traumatic effects of such a brutal regime have blurred her full memory of all events, but we know it was horrific. My mother's appreciation and loyalty to this country was passionate, and she raised me to appreciate the freedoms and opportunity to prosper in America and to never forget how lucky we were to live in this amazing country. She arrived without anything but the clothes on her back and no knowledge of the English language. They were eventually taken to live in convents in Kentucky where British nuns taught them English. My mother spoke 5 languages, including Russian, German, Polish, and now English learned by Brits in the U.S. Her accent was quite unique, and also had to learn our sense of humor,. Sarcasm didn't translate well, and humor was not a natural sense. She moved to NYC put herself through Hunter College doing odd jobs, some of them bikini contests, and pageants which she doesn't like to mention, but there are some newspaper clippings that I keep framed, proud to see my mom win contests she didn't want to be in. She graduated, and quickly rose to be the executive secretary to a man at the top of Singer Corp., where she met my father who was a Wall Street attorney and handled some of their legal counsel. They were married for 9 years, went back and forth for another five, and drove me nuts as I was an only child and had to make sense of non sense from an early age. I struggled with focusing, I wanted to be a nurse, a stock broker, a psychiatrist (go figure) and finally a journalist. I graduated from the University of TX with a B.A. in Journalism/Public Relations. I worked at N.W.Ayer in NYC, Texas Lawyer Magazine a Time Warner publication, and the Dallas Bar Association's publication HeadNotes. After 4 engagements, I've resigned to the fact marriage and kids was physically impossible as I suffered panic attacks at the very confining thought. I'm happily single working freelance based in Dallas, TX and W.Palm Beach, FL.