Retirement is meant to be a stage in life when you slow down and get to experience all the things you may have missed during your career. Retirees learn new hobbies and take vacations and catch up on sitcoms and relax on a weekday.
But when you’ve spent the better part of the last 30 years working tirelessly, it’s more than normal to need a transition period. That’s certainly the case for Suzanne Ostersmith, Gonzaga University’s founding dance chair who retired last year and immediately began working on a new story ballet for the school based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale Thumbelina.
“It has been a glorious pet project that I’ve been allowed and able to obsess over because I’m not running a department. I used to direct a musical or a children’s production every year for my first decade and a half at Gonzaga,” Ostersmith says. “But then as Gonzaga Dance grew, I just couldn’t take that on as well. So, the fact that I’ve been able to let go of the chairmanship and instead put all of this artistic, creative background to use has been really fun.”…