What would you say about a career that started with a chance encounter in an advertising company’s break room and has since spanned over 50 years? I’d call it remarkable, and that term certainly applies to Lynn Ahrens, who was 22 years old and bored silly with her secretarial job in 1970. So she started bringing her guitar to work with her to break up the monotony by singing and playing over her lunch hour. One of the company’s executives walked by and heard her. He had gotten involved with an educational project called “Schoolhouse Rock” and thought she might be able to write a song for it. She ended up writing several songs for the series, with the first being “The Preamble.” (These three-minute animated shorts originally ran from 1973-1984, but the pilot was produced in 1971, about the time that Ahrens got her big break.) As she says in an interview, “It was dumb luck—being in the right place at the right time with the right person passing by.” (“’Schoolhouse Rock’ interview: songwriter/singer Lynn Ahrens”) The songs she wrote and sang for that project got her out of the secretarial pool and into creative work. (If you’re reading this and you don’t know what a secretarial pool is, well, you’re just too young.) She went on to a career as a copywriter, as a freelance TV writer, a jingle writer, a television producer of many network shows for young people (including a stint at “Captain Kangaroo,” one of my childhood faves), and ultimately a musical theater writer. But, as she says, “It all started there.”