Marlene Harrison:  

I graduated from Northeastern Illinois University with a B.A. in Art so what else is new? I wanted to become an art teacher but my "advisor" told me that the way that Chicago public goes on strike, they'll be fazing out art and music and I should go take business classes. I really had no interest in business classes and besides, my dad passed away a week after I turned 22 so I wanted to finish up and get married. I married Michael Harrison and worked for State Farm Insurance until 12 days before our first child was born, Amy was our first and only daughter and then I went to work on weekends as a receptionist for MGM Realty and then wanted to become a Realtor and Florence Bubes who was co-owner had come into my office one day to pick up some keys and she was a good friend of my aunt's and told me to come see her after I got off work and she showed me her back room and had a port-a-crib, changing table and tons of Huggies because one of her at that time million dollar sales woman had just adopted a 15 month old boy and Florence told me to go get my license and come work for her and bring the baby to work with me. I was pregnant with my son Jordan then. So I went to Oakton Community College in Des Plaines with my daughter Amy and she went to the day care class and I went to my real estate class and then when I went to my all day review it was at Niles East High School and they were filming the movie "16 Candles" it was the first time I was on a real movie set and it was really cool. Anyway I worked for Willoughby Realty and then Amy just started kindergarten and I asked my for husband for $4.00 to join the P.T.A. and he said no so I thought to myself, now what did I do wrong??? He took out a map of Wisconsin and proceeded to tell me that he was offered a promotion and where did I want to live ???? My mouth dropped and I thought he was joking. I was very happy because I finally had all of my friends home with me now that they had kids because I was the first and of course there was my family, but my aunt who was my surrogate mom told me that I should go where my husband makes a living and that the rest will fall into place. So for 4 months 3 days a week after Amy got out of school we went up to Milwaukee looking at houses. Since I was the Realtor down here , my house sold really fast and we finally decided on a cute Georgian Style in Whitefish Bay. Everything was set for closing around Thanksgiving and then I received a call that the financing for the guy who bought our house fell through and we had to start all over again. Well I knew that my house would sell again right away but we ended up in a beautiful 3 bedroom ranch style home in Bayside. I didn't know what I was getting into until I got there. It was very snobbish and if you weren't born there the inner circle didn't let the relocates in. The school system was very different from what we grew up with. They started nursery school at 2 still in diapers, kindergarten at 4 and 2 years of kindergarten and the grade school went from K-4 to 3rd grade and that was Indian Hill and then the middle school was Maple Dale and they went from 4th - 8th. Nicolet is the high school and when Amy was...Expand for more