Ladies with Options

By: Cynthia Hartwick

Narrated by: Barbara McCulloh

Minnesota, 1983

The Mostly Methodist Club met Saturday morning year-round, but was at its best in autumn and winter, when it helped steel the ladies for the Sundays their men spent watching TV sports with eyes glazed like so many holiday hams …

The mostly-married, mostly-middle-aged members of the Mostly Methodist Club (Deborah Cohen made it “Mostly”) were used to swapping recipes, not stock tips. They’d taken few risks in their lives, and had even fewer adventures.

But when a pink-haired young rebel named Skye found her way into the group, things changed. The ladies had already begun looking into investment opportunities, after realizing that their retirement earnings would barely keep them in Burpee seeds and baking powder. But it was Skye who tipped them off to a struggling new company that might be worth sinking a few dollars into. A company that was developing some interesting new technology. A company run by a man named Bill Gates …

©2000 Bob Coleman (P)2002 Recorded Books

My mom's favorite book!

The 1980s: Marginalized Midwestern ladies do a good deed for a pink-haired Stanford dropout named Skye, and she repays them by teaching them about a whole new world being born 40 miles from San Francisco. For all they know, “Software” is another term for pantyhose—but they’re sick of worrying about how they’ll survive retirement of librarian-level savings, and even sicker of guys’ telling them not to worry their pretty heads. Following Skye’s advice, they dip a toe, and then take a high dive, into tech stocks with silly names like Apple and Microsoft.

And before you can say "Silicon Valley," they're richer than Croesus—if Croesus had spent his time running bake sales for the Methodist church.

But will they save their Rustbelt town, or take revenge on all the guys who dissed and mistreated them?

Let’s just say that virtue has a lot of fun on its way to victory.