The Art of the Second Act

The turning point did not happen in a boardroom or an artist’s studio. It took root in the morning rush of a school drop-off lane.

Neighbors and fellow substitute teachers Beth Christensen and Stacey Kepler found themselves comparing notes about life’s sudden detours. Both women had reached points where the roadmaps they had spent two decades drafting suddenly vanished. Stacey was reeling from the abrupt loss of a seemingly secure government job, wondering who she was without an established corporate title attached to her name. Beth, who had spent nearly twenty years running Action Artists—an agency representing talent across the entertainment and advertising worlds—was watching seismic industry and technological shifts slow her business to a crawl.

Between playground duty and classroom assignments, an idea began to take shape. Las Vegas, they realized, was full of people quietly yearning for the same thing they were: a chance to step away from screens, shed the pressures of professional performance, and rediscover what it feels like to make something simply for the joy of making it.

Erasing the Map

For Stacey, the shock of unemployment in June 2025 felt like having the ground pulled out from beneath her. Her résumé was stacked with prestigious, easily explained positions spanning journalism, marketing, and graphic design. With that safety net gone, she resisted the urge to immediately jump back into the corporate grind.

Instead, she leaned into the eclectic patchwork of skills she had spent a lifetime assembling. She took up substitute teaching, volunteered for Sunday school, accepted freelance graphic design projects, and began experimenting with hands-on crafts. When it came to marketing herself, however, the transition proved humbling. Selling a campaign for an institution was second nature; walking into a local venue to pitch her own creative workshops required a completely different kind of courage.

Yet the pivot revealed an unexpected truth about identity. "Sometimes starting over doesn’t necessarily mean going backward," Stacey reflects. "Sometimes it means taking everything you’ve learned along the way and finally figuring out how it all fits together."

Moving from Behind the Curtain

Beth was facing a parallel reckoning. For two decades, her professional identity had been defined as "Beth from Action Artists." Her days were spent negotiating contracts, managing productions, and championing other creatives from behind the scenes. When the commercial world began to stall, she faced the unsettling question of whether she had the nerve to start over.

Her lifeline arrived in the form of wet clay. Diving deeply into ceramics, she began hosting pottery workshops at neighborhood breweries and wineries. To her astonishment, stepping out from the production booth to stand at the front of a room felt electrifying rather than terrifying.

She realized she had not abandoned her past twenty years of experience at all; she was simply repurposing it. The talent coordination, the logistics, the ability to read a room—all of it applied to this new, tactile endeavor. "Starting something new doesn’t mean starting from zero," Beth notes. "Everything you’ve done before—your relationships, your experience, even your mistakes, comes with you."

The Birth of Wild Muse

When Beth and Stacey merged their visions to form Wild Muse Vegas, they set out to dismantle the intimidation factor often baked into traditional art classes. They envisioned mobile, communal workshops hosted across Las Vegas and Henderson—spaces where burnt-out adults could gather over wine, paint, or clay without the fear of judgment.

The most rewarding moments regularly arrive from the skeptics: the participants who walk into a workshop crossing their arms and announcing they do not have a single creative bone in their bodies. Two hours later, those same people walk out holding a hand-built ceramic dish or a finished painting, wearing a look of quiet triumph. In an era dominated by polished digital outputs, getting hands covered in paint or clay has become an antidote to modern exhaustion.

A New Metric for Success

Both women acknowledge that starting over in mid-career required redefining the meaning of an accomplished life. The traditional markers—climbing a ladder, collecting prestigious organizational titles, tracking year-over-year revenue spikes—no longer hold the same appeal.

Today, success looks like having the autonomy to set their own schedules, the presence of mind to be fully engaged with their families, and the peace that comes with genuine human connection. As Stacey puts it: "I don’t think I’ve become less ambitious. I think I’ve just changed what I’m ambitious for."

For Beth, that freedom is equally tangible. Trading the high-stress demands of commercial entertainment representation for the personal satisfaction of teaching has unlocked a creative vitality she did not realize she had shelved.

Building as They Go

Rather than forcing Wild Muse into a rigid five-year corporate framework, the co-founders are embracing the beauty of an open path. What began as individual crafting sessions is evolving into a broader collaborative collective, bringing together local ceramicists, painters, resin artists, and glass makers to host curated community workshops throughout the valley.

For Beth, the expansion represents a poetic full circle—championing local artists once again, but this time at the grassroots level. For Stacey, it is proof that detours can lead to the truest destinations. Neither claims to have the entire future solved, and that, they insist, is the entire point. They are learning to build the road by walking it, inviting the rest of Las Vegas to get their hands a little messy along the way.