Columnist Susan Snyder: Woman is a study in support

Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2002 | 8:22 a.m.

"People are searching for answers to their lives because their lives aren't working," the 45-year-old woman said. "They aren't happy."

Quinn wasn't happy so she ditched her office manager's job for one as a cigarette hostess at Flamingo Las Vegas and Caesars Palace.

"I was dying," she said of her office job. "It was spiritual suicide."

It takes help to pull oneself from the depths, Quinn said. And in July she found it takes a lot of money, too. She attended a self-help workshop where, after shelling out $1,300, she discovered the seminar's third level required another $1,000 and a three-month commitment.

When Quinn and about a dozen others said they couldn't afford it, things got ugly.

"You felt dropped like a hot potato," she said. "People who said they cared about you in the workshop were callous once you quit."

Such are the speed bumps in the journey for self.

It's a crowded road. The self-help publishing industry has become a $563 million business, and the assorted CDs, workshops and coaching sessions rake in about $2.4 billion annually, according to the Center for Studies on New Religions, an international clearinghouse.

Baby Boomers -- people born from 1946 to 1964 -- are writing and buying the books that explore alternatives, from finding success to beating disease.

So when Quinn and her friends found workshop organizers more interested in their money than their well-being, they had plenty of options to explore. Quinn found salvation in the book "Your Heart's Desire," by Sonia Choquette. Within a few weeks Quinn launched her own study group.

For 12 weeks she and eight others from the old workshop spent Sunday afternoons in the home of one member studying Choquette's book. The volume focuses on nine principles for making positive changes, and they studied one chapter a week.

The group of four men and five women included a construction worker, a bank executive, a schoolteacher, health care workers and a person who runs a nonprofit organization, said Quinn, who also is a single mother of 21- and 14-year-old daughters.

Quinn said they wanted to attend one of Choquette's workshops in Phoenix last fall, but it was too expensive with all the travel arrangements. So she picked up the telephone and asked Choquette to come to Las Vegas.

With family and friends, Quinn figures they'll have no trouble meeting the 50-person minimum for the $75-a-head workshop scheduled for Sunday. (The seminar is 10 a.m.-5 p.m. at Alexis Park Resort, 375 E. Harmon Ave. Call (877) 300-7352 for information or tickets.)

Quinn says the seminar is coming to the right town at the right time. A struggling economy and the Sept. 11 aftermath have wounded the community.

"Las Vegas never felt the disasters of the world because people would still come here. Now a lot of people have been laid off here -- proud people who have never been out of work," she said.

And it's fitting, somehow, that here personal salvation may lie in a book and the cigarette woman who brought it to them.