About Me

That's me, with my dad on Easter in our first house. Easter is a best dress, bonnet-and-gloves holiday in the South. The picture up there on the left, that's me, too, with my favorite red ball. The picture in the middle is of spectators watching a launch of the Apollo spacecraft that dominated my childhood landscape. If you grew up on the Space Coast of Florida you took school field trips to Kennedy Space Center and snuck into the AstroLounge and played video games at the Milky Way arcade. Until I left Florida for college, I assumed that every paper in the world had a section on the front page announcing the next space launch. 

Back up at the top, those hip young things in the minidress and sideburns are my parents. Groovy, huh? We lived on a riverbank, on the Intracoastal Waterway. Other kids got bikes for Christmas; I got a boat. We couldn't drink the briney water that came out of our taps but we spent Christmas in Aspen. After my parents divorced we couldn't afford to air-condition the whole house so we lived in one side of it. We were burglarized so often that our only TV was an old black-and-white that my mom hid in the dryer. 

As good Southerners we did know about the importance of appearances. The next picture is of me and my first nanny. The picture on the far right looks like a costume ball but it's not. It's me, again, being presented by my father at a debutante ball. I had a Princess Diana fixation at the time and designed my debutante dress to look like her wedding dress. Soon after that picture was taken, I joined four other escapee debs on the dance floor at the local ABC lounge. We looked like underage brides who'd jilted our grooms. My fake ID at the time said I was 22. You think they believed me?

I grew up in a family that cherished cocktail hour, and it wasn't until I got sober that I realized that some people really can enjoy one cocktail for one hour. For those folks, pretzel time -- as it was genteelly known in our house -- is a nice, social habit. For me it started out that way but somewhere along the line I slipped into more dangerous territory. I was always a drinker, a happy one, a two-drinks-only type, until one day I wasn't. 

Before that happened, though, I went to school and worked and travelled and eventually I got married. I designed my wedding dress, too, but that's the extent of my forays into fashion. Our family was complete when my husband and I adopted a lovely, much-cherished little girl from Russia. Now I am a mom, a wife, a teacher by training, a sociologist, a Floridian trying to live on the west coast. Some things I do better than others. 

I am nervous by nature, work hard to hide that, and thought I'd found the holy grail when I discovered I could take medicine for anxiety. I added large amounts of red wine for flavoring.That recipe didn't work out so well, or so they told me in rehab. Today, I am a Volvo-driving, church-going, tea-swilling, child-rearing, 12-step-meeting attending, former Southern debutante with a PhD, a gazillion frequent flyer miles, and one year of sobriety.

Welcome. I hope you'll stay for a visit.