Broadway in Oakland Print

She was born as a biological male in the late 60’s to Walt and Moira Nichols, two bright-eyed kids from the upper San Joaquin valley in California. Walt was the son of two Belarussian immigrants while Moira was the daughter of Irish people. Paulette grew up in Stockton, California, a port city in the San Joaquin delta. She grew up playing soccer, making and flying remote control gliders, drawing, being a negligent pet owner to her parakeets, chameleon, alligator lizard and frog. She got her amateur radio license when she was in the third grade, but she never used it to go on air. She had a paper route for a couple of years and used the money she made from that to go golfing and to buy a bike. She loved golfing at Swensen Park golf course in Stockton. It was a public course. She started taking piano lessons when she was 11 years old. Her teacher thought she might be a reincarnated bebopper because she made bebop melodies somewhat naturally. She played her brother’s records in High School. He had Pat Metheny’s As Falls Wichita, So falls Wichita Falls, Todd Rundgren’s Back to the Bars and others, Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Greatest Hits. She started playing guitar when she was 16. She liked the Tubes a lot, mostly the first and second albums. One of her first songs was about wiping out while skiing and hurting her neck. It went, “Ouch my neck, it hurts so badly, not good at all, could you fix it, I need it by tomorrow, so I can turn my head when they yell and scream and shout and wait for any utterance from Paul.” Her name was Paul at the time and she played the song for her music teacher. She sang “I Want To Be Your Dog” in the high school talent show her senior year with the impromptu band, The Ugly Girls. Paulette had to face the reality of leaving home and living on her own, but she wasn’t ready for that so she went to college for seven years. She dropped in and out of college, changing her major from engineering to English to music to English and finally to music. She found that whatever major she pursued, she was still transgender. It just wouldn’t go away. She got her first real job at a stock brokerage firm and worked there as a wire operator and ultimately an assistant trader She did that for six years, using up a good deal of her money to pay a psychologist who thought she wasn’t really transgender, that she was scarred by her environment. While working at the brokerage firm, she played with a band of traders called Shiner.