We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Molly Brandenburg. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Molly below.

Alright, Molly thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I think one of the biggest risks I ever took was leaving a full time job at The Disney Company. I’was a Senior Advertising Copywriter there and had worked my way up after working at a couple of small advertising/design agencies. It was a seemingly stable position with really good benefits, but I struggled to fit in any time for my creative projects as a performer and as a visual artist.

Finally, it turned out that things really weren’t as stable there as “advertised,” as they had a major restructuring after I’d been there for four years, and many people were quite unceremoniously laid off, including me. A few weeks later, I got a call asking me to come back with full benefits, but I decided not to take the offer. Certainly, I would have had a steady, well paying job again but it just didn’t seem right to continue. I wanted to be able to have a more fully creative life, and I also wanted to become a mother, and working long hours in advertising just didn’t seem right for me anymore, so I turned it down and got to work “reinventing” my life.

Molly, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve always followed two areas of creative work, visual art and acting and performance. I moved to L A as a teenager to attend USC, and after school I started my career here. I was fortunate to have great mentors here, Gary Austin of The Groundlings Theater, and my voice teacher Alice Rowe. The work I did with them led me to create my own performance entity, the lounge singer Miss Peggy Judy.

Gary stressed the importance of creating your own characters and writing your own material, because doing that gives much more control over what opportunities come your way. Doing your own character can also give you a role to play that might never be offered to you otherwise.!

As soon as I put on a blonde wig and became Peggy Judy, doors opened and I was able to have a career as a nightclub performer, which has been a pretty amazing adventure. My work with Alice Rowe and later Wenndy McKenzie gave me a stronger and more flexible voice, which is crucial if you want to do live performances. I did all this because I loved doing it, but it also led me to a second career, as a podcast host with The Parcast Network on Spotify, where I host “Conspiracy Theories” and “Unexplained Mysteries.”

Meanwhile, I continued working as a cartoonist and created two books, “The Truth About Cats” and “Everyday Cat Excuses.” My Cartoons can also be seen on the interior design site Www.Houzz.com and my paintings can be seen on www.mollybrandenburg.com.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

To me, the most rewarding aspect of living a creative life is the connection your work has to your real passion. It can sometimes feel like you’re connecting to an electrical Current that energizes you and makes you feel incredibly alive. There are also moments on the creative oath when the work itself takes you Into “the zone,” a place where time seems to stop and you ride along in the energy of the work. That’s the place every creative person is familiar with, and it’s the place we want to connect to on a.regular basis,

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think some people have a hard time understanding the connection to the childhood self that creative people have, that sense of wonder and endless curiosity. I understand that to be an adult we have to be practical and stable, but sometimes the need for security and control can snuff out the creative spirit.. I know some people are threatened by creative people and that can turn into a certain kind of fear of it all, which is a shame . Down deep, every person is creative, and think it’s okay to let the child self come out and play sometimes . Life should be an adventure, and the creative spirit provides plenty of them!

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.mollybrandenburg.com
• Instagram: @mollybrandenburg1