PRIMETIME of your life FREE | VOLUME 5 • ISSUE NO. 4 | APRIL 2016 Interesting features for our 50+ audience
Michele Quinn Kaner Wanderlust Personified By Lucinda Sue Crosby For PrimeTime of Your Life
M
ichele Quinn Kaner was born under a wandering star. She has traveled the world, explored ancient ruins in the birth places of civilization, visited bunkers underneath US Air Force bases in Southeast Asia, devoured freshly made pasta in Italy, sipped of the wine and the culture in Paris … well, you get the picture. Michele was born into a large and bustling traditional Irish Catholic family in San Francisco. Her rather sheltered early life was spent in a convent-run grammar school and high school – like her mother before her. “Aunts, uncles and cousins as well as nuns and priests were in and out of the house regularly,” she said. “We lived in a big close-knit Parish where everyone knew everyone else’s comings and goings.” In her youth, Michele discovered one of her lifelong passions in her favorite Uncle’s living room – opera – and has enjoyed performances all of her adult life in places as farflung as Italy, Germany and across America. She still adores classical music and listens to it when she’s at home, until daughter Jennifer turns the channel. After attending two colleges in the Bay Area, Michele wound up studying at England’s storied Cambridge, where her unusual curriculum in-
HUMOR TIDBITS PAGE 4
cluded classes in couture sewing, watercolor painting, sculpture, furniture caning and artisan bread baking. In no way a suitably modern education, it felt particularly satisfying to the young American on her own and away from home for the first time in her life. “Maybe I was born into the wrong century,” she said with a lovely, warm smile, her deep blue eyes lit from within. “I lived in an old English rectory for quite some time that felt so familiar to me … even though it was across from a cemetery, I never felt afraid. In fact, I felt right at home.” Upon returning to San Francisco, she became engaged to a young fireman. But her sister was divorcing as were her parents and Michele suddenly became afraid of such a serious commitment that could eventually crumble around her. About this
same time, she interviewed with World Airways and was offered a job based in Japan. The only hitch? She had to leave the next day. “This opportunity was an answer to my dilemma but it devastated my fiancée,” Michele explained. “Happily, we were able to become friends later in life.” Her shifts usually took 15 days to complete and her routes changed often. A thirst for roaming was slaked as she made her way from her all-girl schools into the Big Wide World. She was amazed by anything and everything, enjoying her discoveries adventure by adventure. She dabbled in archaeology throughout Egypt’s digging sites and prowled Rome’s Coliseum and Athens’ Parthenon.
Continued on page 11
RECIPE: LEMON MOUSSE CHEESECAKE – PAGE 6
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY PAGE 8