The story of us

My husband and son have made the weekly pilgrimage to the laundry room. I may not see them again for hours.

I met my husband in the summer of 1998. He was the project architect for the construction of Times Square Studios, where they now record "Good Morning America." I was working for one of the studio consultants. When we started on that project, what is now Times Square Studios was an old movie theatre in the base of an office building. I think they'd had two screens (quaint in these days of giant multiplexes -- no wonder they sold it). During the initial site surveys the place smelled like dead things, jasmine incense and piss.

Over the months that followed in the course of building these studios we spoke on the phone regularly, saw one another at meetings, and exchanged a lot of e mail. I can't remember anymore why we were on the phone that day, but I was opening mail and one of the pieces of mail was a resume from a designer who wanted to freelance with the company. The guy's name looked familiar so I scanned down the page and remarked, "Hey, look at this -- I just got a resume from a guy I worked with 18 years ago in Kansas City. We were both at Missouri Repertory Theatre in 1980." There was a pause on the phone and then Steve said, "I was at Missouri Repertory Theatre in 1980." I said, "Really? What did you do?" He told me he was welding sets there that summer. My response was something like, "No kidding? You're THAT guy?!"

Now, the thing is that Steve was 21 in 1980. I was 15. Do you think we even knew each other's names that year? We probably didn't. But after we got married and combined all our sh*t in one household, he was showing me pictures he'd kept in his portfolio from that summer. One was a picture of him and Peggy Eisenhauer (you know who she is? Very famous Broadway lighting designer. She tipped over in a cherry-picker that summer during a changeover.) welding the frame of a deck. And one of the other photos was of some decorative metal work that he'd done. I was in that picture. I said to him, "You'd been carrying a picture of me around with you for 20 years and you didn't know it!" Sometimes things happen for a reason. You know that silly game, "six degrees of Kevin Bacon?" Well, I think there's a related phenomenon that I call "the half-life of relationships." You keep running into the person you're meant to be with over shorter and shorter periods of time until you finally realize that DUH! I'm seeing this person so often that I should be living with him. Or something like that.

So anyway, eventually he asked me out, and in 2000 he asked me to marry him. And in August 2003 we had our son. And here we are today.