Zibby speaks with writer and former film editor Lisa Cheek about her heartfelt and quickwitted memoir, SIT, CINDERELLA, SIT: A Mostly True Memoir. Lisa shares her story, from her groundbreaking career in TV commercial editing to her extraordinary adventure flying to rural China and editing a film about the origins of the Cinderella story on the Tibetan border with a Mandarin-speaking crew—a job she took without knowing the language. She also touches on her nomadic upbringing, her father’s love of books, her pandemic pink hair transformation, her love for dogs, and the profound role kindness has played in her journey.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Lisa. Thanks for coming on to talk about Sit, Cinderella, Sit, a Mostly True Memoir. Congratulations. 

Lisa: Aw, thank you, Zibby. I'm so happy to be here. It's such an honor.

Thank you. 

Zibby: Aw. Well, for those listening, Lisa has come on what, every retreat we've done? Almost every? Every one? 

Lisa: I try. They're, they're so spectacular and I have the best time ever, Zibby. It's just such a great thing. Like I said earlier, it's the best party I go to. 

Zibby: Aww. And love seeing you in our bookstore all the time and seeing your book as it's, you know, I have this book, it's coming out, I'm gonna, you know, and then here's the cover and here it is and it's been fun to watch.

So thanks for including me in this whole, uh, this whole process. Tell listeners what your book is about, please. 

Lisa: My book is about four months of my life. When I was about 45, I was told I'd been in TV commercials for about 25 years. Editing was a great life. I loved, I loved editing TV commercials. It was so fun.

And, uh, you know, they want the young hip kids. And so I was basically told that I had aged out of commercials and found myself without a job. . 

Zibby: Wait, can I actually just read the, that chapter, like the first, the beginning of that chapter? I loved how you described this. Is that okay? Sure, I'd love it. Okay, you said, I turned 45 that year, the age they put you in an old folks home in the ad business.

One is long in the tooth once she hits 40 in Hollywood, and I was not only over 40, but I was also a woman cutting TV commercials. Like spotting an albino mountain gorilla. Riding a polar bear while eating a pineapple on a safari in the Serengeti, there just weren't that many of us. I'm sorry. I love that line.

Okay. Keep going. 

Lisa: I love that. Thank you. Thank you. I love it. People keep asking me for quotes and I don't have any and I'm going to pull that one now. You just gave me one. Thank you. But so anyway, like everybody in Hollywood, you know, you meet people and lots of directors get their starts in commercials.

Everybody from David Fincher to Michael Bay, they all started in commercials, you know, so they all have these projects that they want to do. You know, you always hear and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Great. You know, let me know when it happens, right? Because we all think it's never going to happen because it's so hard to make a movie.

It's crazy. So, sure enough, luckily, you know, this guy that I had been working with before, this director, had moved to China and, uh, had found some documents that he thought were the original telling of the Cinderella story. It was a Cinderella story of some type. First, you know, earliest version he could find.

And he'd adopted two little Chinese girls, and so it was very special to him to tell this story. about too little about a little girl and and and to tell it in Chinese and he Mandarin really let's say it was Mandarin because I didn't speak a word of it so I wind up taking the job needless to say and I wind up going to Yunnan along the Tibetan border with an entire Chinese crew who didn't speak a word of English and I didn't speak Mandarin all you know I learned Ni hao and I you know hello and I learned xie xie But that was about 

Zibby: Wait, what does, Xie xie mean?

Lisa: Xie xie means thank you. 

Zibby: Oh. 

Lisa: Hello and thank you, the two polite things. And yeah, and then I wind up living with 14 men who were the camera crew who didn't speak a word of English. And you know, we're working nonstop, you know, it's 19 hour days, whatever, while everybody's shooting on the set. And it was truly, it's funny, you know, most movies and they're not very good.

You know, if you take a movie, you do it for the people or for the experience. And, you know, I was certainly was never lucky enough to be asked to work on an Academy Award movie, but I'm just saying for me, when I heard about it, I thought this is going to be an adventure of a lifetime. Right? I just, but I had no idea what kind of adventure it was going to be.

And I certainly didn't think I was going to be writing a book about it. I know. 

Zibby: Did you take notes? Like, how did you? No, you just remembered it all. 

Lisa: Well, I had just gotten face, Facebook had just started to happen in 2009. And, uh, so that was it, you know, I would post on Facebook. That was kind of my journal.

That was my, you know, my diary of what was happening. So I posted photos. 

Zibby: So how What is the short version of how you navigated this? How can anyone navigate a situation in which they feel completely overwhelmed and ill equipped? 

Lisa: Uh, well, I think I had to let go and I just had to be present. Because, you know, things would break down, stuff wouldn't happen, they wouldn't be able to shoot, they got shut down one day because the costumes looked too Tibetan.

I mean, it was like always something crazy going on. And yet, it was in a language I didn't speak, so that made it even more crazy, so I didn't really know what was going on where. But it was, you know, On top of it being a Cinderella story, which is, you know, I don't know about you, but as a little girl, the Disney one, that's what I heard, and that's, you know.

Yeah, of course. So, and this one actually is a little, it's definitely not being saved by the man, she basically saves, she saves him, which is really cool. This is a different way of, you know. Seeing life and seeing, you know, the story in that she's the one who saves things, makes the world a better place. 

Zibby: I love it.

And talk about the role of dogs in the book. 

Lisa: Oh, I know. One of the reasons I have to tell you, I love your book stories. It's like five blocks from where I met Ron Howard. Now they're used to like, I just love it. Your whole, my whole, My whole book opens right, right where your location is. And it's just so magical to me, that area.

And yeah, I got my first adult dog when I was about 40 and I took him everywhere with me. He went to work with me. He paid the mortgage one month. He, you know, he was in commercial. My clients would come in and they'd be like, Oh, he's so great. Let's put him in the commercial. So yeah, he was my best buddy.

He really was. And of course I had to, I had to, you know, find somebody who would look after him while I was gone. Cause In the book, I just tell you about three months, but technically, I was gone for six. The other three months, I was in Hong Kong, you know, just kind of like a modern city. There's a 7 Eleven and a Chanel on every corner there.

So it didn't feel like it needed to be told. So I was gone a long time and, and he truly was, was my best friend and I just think dogs, I think every home needs to have a dog, I think they are just so magical, they're, they're creatures that teach me patience and love and unconditional love and they love me when I smell bad and don't look pretty and you know, it's just um, there's nothing better than a dog.

Zibby: My dog, actually, where did she go? Oh, she's on the floor next to the couch. You can't even see her, but, yeah. I know, it's, it's the love. It's like, she's so excited to see me in the morning, and she's so excited when I walk in the door, even though I just, like, ran downstairs. It's just the sweetest. 

Lisa: It is.

There's nothing better, and I think, I think our lives would be a whole lot better if every home had a dog. I just think I learned so much from my dog of acceptance, and like, yeah, you're, you're it. I'm gonna, you know, you're here. I love the one that I'm with. You're it. 

Zibby: So when did you know that your experience would be 

Lisa: a book?

So my father died and my father raised me mostly and my father died. In 2018. So I went to go see a psychic. I went to go see this channeler because I wanted to know how he was doing and what was happening. My dad would read a book a day. He loved books. And, you know, he took me to movies when I was little, like that's where I got all my love of all of it.

And so I went to find out to talk to my dad, which by the way, he says that heaven has the best library. Oh. Oh, yes. Yep. So I thought that was really cool that she told me that and while I was there she said you had this, you just came back from this adventure and you need to tell the story because I was working on something.

I was working on a novel and she said this is this. This is your story. You need to tell this story and I originally wrote it as a novel. But it was just so magical and so sweet that I felt it needed to be owned, you know, I wanted people to know that, that life is an adventure and that, you know, there's magic in there all the time.

And you know, what other people think of me is none of my business and it's not always accurate, you know, so someone tells me I'm too old, you know, I go to China and all these, you know, really old ladies are, are, you know, amazing, right? So, There was so much learning for me to do, and the main one was just kindness is the universal language, you know?

It really is. So what did, what did 

Zibby: you get out of writing the book? Like, after you put it aside and you're like, okay, yes, and now I'm gonna try to sell it, fine. But like, what did you get out of even writing the first draft? First draft was a mess, 

Lisa: so, because I really didn't know what I was doing. And, you know, I was, I was working with people who insisted it be a novel.

And it really, once I got, you know, I've been trying to write for 20 years. And, but as soon as I met the right editor, I met Amy Farris and she, at a, at a retreat, you know, and she loved my story and she spent nine months with me working on it. And then I said, I'd really like to see, you know, what Brooke thinks of this, my publisher, just to send it to her.

She was not my publisher at the time, but I had known her and I said, I'm hoping she'll give me some great feedback. And the feedback was, I want to publish. That is the best feedback of all. Right? So I didn't, I didn't move on because I thought, Oh, at this time, I'm 62 now. I need to like, I have so many other stories I want to tell and I don't have time to pitch.

So yeah. So it's really exciting and I love Brooke. She's amazing. Great, great publisher. I love being with her. She's taught me so much along with Amy and you know, it was just when the right person comes along, the right person comes along. Right? Absolutely. 

Zibby: Wait, can you tell me, I don't know much about like where you're from.

I know your career prior to this because it's in your bio and everything, but tell me more about your growing up and like where you grew up and your family and I'm sorry about the loss of your father. That's terrible. 

Lisa: Thank you. He was really fun. He was a great guy. We grew up, I grew up all over the place.

I was born in Oakland. We moved to Coronado before there was a bridge. And then we moved to North Carolina. And then we moved to Massachusetts. And then we lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for a while. And then And why, why all this moving? Well, my father wound up I think he really wanted to be a spy, but that didn't happen.

So, uh, he just wound up being an engineer. Or maybe, or maybe he was a spy. Maybe he was. He could have been. But I, I know that that was his sort of first, first goal. And, um, anyway, so we, he wound up working for an international company and they were there mining for diamonds in Johannesburg for cutting materials.

And then we moved back to Detroit. I lived in Detroit and then I lived back in North Carolina and then Charleston, South Carolina. I graduated from high school there and then college. I went to a small school called Winthrop in Rock Hill, South Carolina. And then I worked in broadcast for six years in little tiny stations.

And that was my film career, was editing movies, watching three movies a day, taking out the swear words and nudity.

Zibby: Wow. So how do you feel like that sort of transient, transience of childhood affected you, especially now here you are writing about a travel situation, which for most people, like if you hadn't traveled, which would be, would be jarring and everything, but you have at least some sort of background in this.

Lisa: Oh, definitely. And my mother, when my parents got divorced, my mother moved to London, and when I was eight, nine, when I turned nine, she moved to London. And then she married a man who was in the oil business. So they lived all kinds of places, Turkey and Indonesia and Singapore. And so I would go and visit them.

And then my father too, up until almost the day he died, he, I was supposed to go on this last trip with him and he went to go, did the bus tour of the stands. So I just said, I don't think I can do that daddy, my back, I just think it's, but he was game. That was the last trip he did. He'd been, I think there was like four or five countries he didn't get to go to.

Oh my gosh. I know. Crazy, right? Yeah. That is crazy. 

Zibby: Huh? So. What do you what do you take away from from this like do you like I haven't been to that many different places What do you take away about human nature so to speak? I mean, I know you were a kid and this is a lofty question but seeing all these cultures and even and in your book seeing this culture and being immersed in it in Different worlds, like, what do you take away from all that?

Lisa: Well, you know, it's interesting because, you know, I moved every two or three years as a kid. So, I continued to do that until I moved to L. A. when I was 28. And after being here for five years, which was the longest I'd been anywhere, I gotta move, I gotta move, I'm moving to New York, I gotta And then somebody said, Lisa, maybe you should just get a therapist.

And I just sat there for a while. Right? And learn that it's okay to stay in one place. And so now I've been here 34 years. Wow. You 

Zibby: have the same therapist? Have you moved on? Well, actually, I've had a few. Let's just say I've had a few. Okay. And at what stage of your life did you dye your hair pink? 

Lisa: This has been something fabulous.

I just, you know, during covid, basically, you know, I wanted to be a platinum blonde. I always wanted to do that, and I just thought, you know, when Covid happened, I was like, what am I waiting for? What is this all about? Right? And I was a, I became a platinum blonde and I was awful. I could not pull it off at all.

I was like, this is, I don't, who is this person? So, and then I thought the only other color I always said if I ever lost my hair was I was going to go buy a pink wig. And I did, I, I went to my hairdresser and she was just going to put some streaks in it. And I said, just go for it. And I got to tell you, it's like having a pet.

I walk into grocery stores, young people talk to me. Everybody talk, I was not approachable when I was a blonde or my, whatever. Since I've become pink, all of a sudden. You know, everybody talks to me. It's like immediate conversation, just like a dog, like having a dog with me. It's like, I don't, people say, Oh, I love your hair.

Wow. I wish I could do that. Or, and I'm like, great, go do it. Right. Cause it's, it's, um, I feel like I was born this way now. Oh 

Zibby: my gosh.

And when did you sort of fall in love with, with reading? And when did that whole chain, whole passion come into your life and authors and wanting to be with authors and all that? 

Lisa: Well, my parents were, were always like, you know, I was an only child for eight years until my sister came along. And then, so we were always a reading family.

You went to bed with a book and that's what you did every night. That's just how you went to sleep. And like I said, my dad would read a book a day. So, um, Books were always, you know, I mean, I was the library he had was crazy, but then, you know, I, you know, I went into movies and I started working there and, and all of that and, and commercials.

And it was really only, you know, in the last four or five years that I have had an opportunity to be around writers. I'm, it's just a whole new world. It's a whole nother adventure. You know, it's almost like going to China cause I have to learn all these things about publishing and I had to, you know, it's just.

A whole new world is opening up and I'm meeting the coolest people and I love hanging out with readers, which is why I adore your retreats. It's just so much fun. I, every woman I meet there is, is interesting and, and fun and it's just books. They do, they bring us together. They, you know, it gives us something to talk about.

Kind of like my dogs, I keep telling everybody I'm so grateful I have dogs so my husband and I have something to talk about. Because we don't read or watch the same television shows, right? We don't. We just do completely different things. And I'm like, I'm so grateful my dogs, you know, what, what do people talk about if they don't have a dog in the house?

So yeah, I find that, I find that with readers, it's, I don't know, they're just so, I can't wait to hear, because I think we all project our own stuff onto people's books when we read them. So I'm fascinated to hear what, what people, you know, because what I put on the pages. And I learned so much as you write, you know, I, I, it's like, oh yeah, I learned this and I learned, right?

It's, it's not until you really get into it that I could see, I knew it was magical. I knew it was a extraordinary time, but I didn't realize it. the lessons I had learned until I actually put them on the page. So what is one lesson you took 

Zibby: out? 

Lisa: Well, the big one is life is an adventure, you know, it really is.

And, and to always be open to, you know, when one, as they say, one, one door closes a window opens and you fly out of that, right? So that is the, is the big one. Kindness is a universal language. I just, I, I. I had so many experiences. There were people were just so kind to me through a smile or through giving me something or, or something without saying a word, you know, and that was really lovely.

And, you know, I had to learn to trust that, that what I needed was going to be provided for. Because I, I think growing up I didn't have that, so it was a real big experience for me to see how they showed up, not even speaking the same language, not like whatever, but they were there when I needed anybody.

And that is amazing. 

Zibby: Amazing. Are you going to send this book to everybody? Even though it's not in the right language. 

Lisa: Oh, well, I will say my, my assistant, so I only changed, I changed everybody's name, but mine and my assistant's and his name is Max. And I, his father was in publishing in Hong Kong. And so I sent it to him on a Friday night and by, Sunday morning, he had read it, and he lives in Singapore now, by the way, and he left the most magical review on, on, uh, Goodreads.

It's super sweet. He says, I'm maxing the book, and it's just so lovely. And I don't know, who knows how, where it'll go, what it, like, that's the other thing I've learned is it's like, you never know what's going to happen, because I didn't have any thought of writing this, you know? Mm hmm. But I am looking forward to the next few that I'm getting ready to, you know, that I'm working on now.

The next few? Oh my gosh. Okay, so 

Zibby: tell me, tell me the next few. 

Lisa: Well, I've got two more memoirs that I'm working on right now. One is about one night of my life, and the other's about ten days of my life. I'm intrigued. Uh huh. You can't tell anything. Nothing more than that. That was quite a tease. Well, the first one, the one that I'm, I'm hoping I'll have finished by, uh, June is, uh, about getting married at 49.

Is this the one day? For the first time. For the first time. But I just wanted to say that it was getting married for the first time at 49. Wow. Right. I didn't get married until, yeah, when I came back from China. It was sort of like, I thought, well, I could probably do 25 years with somebody now. I could never do 50, right?

You know, when I was younger, I kept going, I don't think I can live with you that long. That's too much time. But, uh, yeah, when I came back, I was like on the dating machine. I was like, I really want to try this out. I want to see what marriage is all about. What this, you know, so it's, yeah, sort of about my, it's not sort of, it's about the men I chose before I, I met my husband and what happens and, you know, it's super sweet and funny and yeah, I'm super excited about getting it out.

Zibby: Amazing. That sounds great and very hopeful. Thank you. Yes. Amazing. Well, now that you're a published author, what advice do you have for aspiring authors? 

Lisa: Ooh. You know, just to keep writing and to, to go to, go where other writers are. It's such a lonely place, you know, when we're at home and we're in our head and we're, you know, and for me, I'm always in a writing class.

I'm always going to retreats. I'm going to conferences. I go. wherever there's other people who can show and show me how to do it, because I don't know how. I just know that being in, being surrounded and, and in the middle is the best place to be. Love it. 

Zibby: Amazing. Well, Lisa, I am so excited for you.

Congratulations. And yay, just a huge Yay, and a hug, and bravo to you. 

Lisa: Thank you, and thank you for Zippy's Bookshop. It's my most favorite bookstore ever. I just love it so much. You bring me so much joy. It's like, it's like cheers for me. It's, you know, Zippy's is cheers. I go and meet my girlfriends and hang out, and it's just, it's so fabulous, the experience I get to have there.

Thank you. 

Zibby: You're welcome. You're welcome. Okay. Bye, Lisa. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibi. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.