Georgia on My Mind

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“The year I turned 40, I realized that I was physically cold all the time. So I grew up in New York, I went to college in Boston, I went to graduate school in Michigan, a little bit of time in Africa – warm weather. I discovered I could live in warm weather and actually I quite liked being warm.

"So in my late 30s I discovered I have Raynaud’s which is a circulatory syndrome which made my hands and feet cold all the time and it was kind of causing me to physically contract. And so I started to think about you know where could I go or where could I live where I could really be able to be more relaxed and comfortable and have my body – a more sunny outlook if you will. Cause I think, you know my mom used to call me “Jackie Sunshine” when I was a kid, I had this bright yellow raincoat and I think you know I had a sunny side but as I got older and I got colder that really became difficult, and so I was looking for a warm place to live and I had a few criteria: I wanted it to be cosmopolitan because I liked museums and theater and things like that, I wanted there to be a good sized Jewish population, I wanted it to be warm, and I wanted to know at least one person, and my college roommate Cindy Smith lived here.

"And so by a process of elimination, I guess I had an unwritten criteria that I wanted to be relatively, you know, on the same coast as my family. So, that’s what brought me to Atlanta.”

Editor’s Note: Jackie Sherman moved to Atlanta in 1994. She started her own consulting firm, The Jackie Sherman Group, in 1999, with a focus on strategic planning, staff and board development, capacity and community engagement for nonprofit organizations. She has served on the board of various arts and educational organization throughout the city as well as her synagogue, Congregation Bet Haverim.