Today is my wedding anniversary to my second husband, Chris McHugh. Was getting married on Valentine's Day a cliche, campy? No, it was classic, it was lovely; it was fantastic. I could never have wished for a wedding more suited to who we were and what we wanted.
My first husband, Fred Hatt, and I had done the conservative thing, oddly since we both were students and artists. But there were our families and it was the first wedding for both of us. So we rented the white chairs for a whole lot of guests, bought a giant tiered cake, rented his tux, bought tons of champagne, food, plates, etc.. It was nice having it at Palisades Park in Santa Monica but there was so much stuff to buy and rent that it cost so much that we had to compromise on the quality of everything. Thus, the cake looked good but had no flavor, the champagne was the cheap kind, etc. Kind of disappointing. Seemed more like a movie set wedding than a real one.
So nine years later when Chris and I were going to get married I said how about we do it differently. How about we need far less so we can pay far more for the things we do need. He said yeah, sounded good. That was the last year of the 80's and first year of the 90's and Chris and I lived in New York City so this was very possible, to find quality in anything we wanted. He bought a gorgeous designer suit and a killer silver tie. I bought a champagne-tinted suit from a little shop in Soho. The jacket bodice was Irish linen and the sleeves were Irish lace. The skirt was entirely lace with lining, straight, mid-calf, perfect. I bought a lovely wine-hued hat and his aunt and uncle had delivered to me a lovely bouquet the morning of. My shoes were also in linen and I had them dyed to match the suit. I invited only one good friend, an actress from Hooper, Nebraska, Lori Gustafson, and he invited his best friend, Danny. We ordered the cake from Dean and DeLuca (which needs little description; suffice to say everything is fabulous) and instead of a huge, typical wedding cake we bought a small, single-layered chocolate raspberry delicious cake with soft white glazing decorated with a few simply lovely white flowers. We bought one bottle of the finest champagne we could find. On Valentine's Day, 1990, I put the cake and the champagne, four pieces of china, silverware, four champagne glasses and cloth serviettes into a picnic basket and Chris and I, Lori and Danny boarded the commuter train north from New York City to Groton, Connecticut. My grandmother on my mother's side and scads of generations before her had been from a small town next to Groton called Noank, on the Atlantic. It has a small pier, fishing boats, pretty houses. My grandmother's name is hand-written into the 1901 birth record book in Groton where vital statistics from Noank are recorded. Chris and I applied for our marriage license in that same old office. Then we walked to the Justice of the Peace's home, which was a white clapboard house with doilies on the furniture in his living room where we were married. He had been marrying people in that house for decades. Then we four walked down to the pier where we opened the picnic basket, took out the china and the silverware, the serviettes, the lovely delicious little cake, the champagne and champagne glasses. We each had one quarter of the cake and one glass of champagne that crisply beautiful day on that little pier with the blue sea and sky before us. We toasted to love and happiness. Then we wandered back to the train where Lori and Danny boarded the train heading back to New York City and Chris and I boarded the one for Boston. We had booked the bridal suite in one of the best hotels in Boston, the Bostonian, for three nights. There was a fireplace in a perfectly tasteful room and room service would bring extra pillows, logs for the fire and roll in a table any time day or night covered in a heavy white tablecloth upon which well made and well served, anything you could think of ordering. It was just perfect.
I met Chris about a year after Fred and I divorced. I had been sending my plays off to New York and L.A. for a few years when Fred and I lived in Oklahoma. I happened to join a grassroots women's writer's group in NYC. Everything they offered was affordable, including seminars and conferences. One conference was to introduce new writers to literary agents and artistic theater directors. It cost only $10. I sold our piano for the plane ticket and stayed a few days with my friend from college, Meredith Jacobson. I was a total rube, the only one at the conference in an aqua business suit off the rack from an Okie clothes shop, holding in my hand my newest play, The Beekeepers. I found the artistic director I thought should take it and cornered him, shoving the play in his face, saying take it, take it, it's good. He, horrified, waved me off with the hand that wasn't holding the martini, saying, "Make an appointment make an appointment!". Since I was only going to be there two more days, I found a pay phone in the hall, called his secretary and made an appointment to see him first thing the next morning. The next morning I only had to walk one block to his office. His company, Dramatic Risks, was housed in the R.A.P.P. Arts Center in the Lower East Side on Fourth Street between Avenues A & B and Meredith lived in a tiny studio apartment on Third Street between Avenues A & B. She was just starting her business as an extras casting agent. She and I had gone to USC Cinema together, same year, graduating together. I remember the second I dropped my luggage on her floor, she said, let's go to the galleries. She had a gallery guide in her hand for right there in her neighborhood. We walked out her door. In both directions and all over that neighborhood were galleries for new artists and off-off Broadway theatres.
When the artistic director of Dramatic Risks, Mark Grant Waren, showed up at the theatre building, to his surprise and no doubt chagrin, I was waiting, play again in hand. He took it but refrained nicely from being too sarcastic about my chances. I, elated, went back to Meredith's and then back to Oklahoma. A few months later a theatre in Hollywood called First Voices accepted one scene from The Beekeepers as part of a New Voices set of staged readings. I went out to L.A. and stayed with my friends, the actress Patricia Purwin and her husband the lighting designer, Ed Layton. The afternoon the scene from my play was going to be performed, Patricia's phone rang just as I and Patty and Ed and several friends from USC Cinema were about to walk out the door. It was Fred on the phone back in Enid. He said a letter had come from the Dramatic Risks Theatre in New York. I said oh, don't open it now! He said, yes, that he should, that right now was the perfect moment since I was on top of the world. I said all right reluctantly and he opened the letter. "You've been accepted!" he yelled into the phone. "They're going to put on The Beekeepers!" I turned to everyone standing in the room looking at me, the door open for us to leave. I held the phone up in the air in triumph and yelled, "I'm bi-coastal!"
I was invited by Dramatic Risks to be a playwright-in-residence for the upcoming summer. There was no way I could afford such a thing and told them, sadly. I would need an apartment, at least a room, and a job, right away. I said I couldn't do it. They phoned me back an hour later and said they had a job and a room for me. It seemed the R.A.P.P. Arts Center leased their huge building from the Catholic Church next door. The building had been an insane asylum, a convent and an orphanage. Now it was a theater complex and a stipulation in the lease required that one person live on the premises and work as the facilities director, renting the spaces for reheasals and performances. That person had to be the one to make sure everyone was out and all the doors were locked at night, locking themselves in. They gave me the job and the mother superior's old cell on the top floor. I found some furniture in the basement that suited the room fine. There were workshops every day. A publicist who did pieces on theatre wrote an article about me being this up and coming new playwright; it was published in the New York Daily News. My play, The Beekeepers, had a staged reading with a full audience. Life was good. Then the summer came to a close and I had to go home. But they asked me to stay on as a permanent playwright in their troupe, which cleverly consisted of both playwrights and actors in teams of two; if the actor got a role, he'd mention his playwright partner to the director; if the playwright got a script accepted, she'd mention her actor-partner to the director. I phoned Fred and asked if he wanted to move to New York City. You bet! he said. He was a painter, after all, and what better place than New York City for a painter? I went home; we split up the tasks. He was to fly to NYC as soon as possible where it was arranged that he could stay with a fellow playwright of mine, Stephanie Wilson, in Harlem. He was to find a job and an apartment. I was to pack up everything we owned, sell it, store it, get a rental agent for the house, put what I could stuff into our Volkswagon Rabbit and a UHaul trailer, force our two cats and dog into the car and drive it all to NYC by November. We both succeeded. Fred found a job in a film post-production house and sublet a garden apartment on a side street next to Brooklyn Academy of Music from a performance artist who had a long-term lease on the garden apartment and the parlor floor directly above. I drove the 1474 miles with two screaming, panting cats and a happy dog all the way to Brooklyn. When I arrived, Fred had been sleeping on the icy floor of the damp, half-underground apartment. But he was so happy and I was glad to be back. It was, after all, New York City where everything was possible.
A few days later I answered a two-line ad in the New York Times. It read, "Private eye needs researcher. B.A. required." An old hard-boiled private eye named Ed Goldfader had landed a job as Vice-President of a stock-holding recovery firm on Lower Broadway on Wall Street. He was V.P. of the research section, which meant twenty-four people who traced the current addresses of missing stockholders. Ed hired me and two other women, Bonnie and Naomi, on the spot. He wasn't one to bandy or dally. He was decisive and fair and I liked him a lot. I started working the nine to five, good regular job, pay ok, interesting, goal-based projects, bagels and coffee delivered every morning. It was in an old stately skyscraper with a marble lobby, a grandfather company on two floors. We tracers were on the 26th and the V.P.'s and contract negotiators on the 32nd. I loved the job. I was promoted twice in two years. I found two hundred missing stock holders and a few private missing persons on the side for Ed.
On weekend nights I worked at the Manhattan Brewery selling T-shirts. Everyone I knew from Dramatic Risks as well as actors from other troupes worked there. Hardly anyone worked there who wasn't an actor or writer. My friend Lori was a hostess who seated people. My actor-partner, David Blackman, a fantastic actor from Australia, was a bouncer and let people in at the door. Every moment we had free we talked theatre. One night two drunken yuppies came up to my counter and one bought the other a T-shirt for his birthday. The birthday boy was Chris McHugh, the guy I married a year later. He was giggling continuously, as he always did when drunk. His friend Danny bought him the T-shirt then they went and sat down. A little while later Chris came back, asking for my phone number, giggling. I figured it wouldn't hurt to give him my business card from my job on Wall Street so I did. Two weeks later he called, impressed. He had thought I was just a T-shirt salesgirl.
He was the most romantic, fun guy I've ever known. I was crazy about him from the moment I laid eyes on him. After, I don't know, several months of him buying me arm fulls of flowers from kiosks that we passed on the street and hanging out together more and more and more, he took me on a date to Club Med in the Bahamas for a week. My girlfriends at my company asked me, "How can you have just practically moved here and already have landed a straight, HIV negative, well-employed, single, gorgeous guy?! We hate you!" When I told them about the upcoming date in the Bahamas, well...they just shook their heads. Just lucky, they said. Chris and I took off for Paradise Island a few days later, went snorkeling, swimming, dining on the great recipes of the chefs of Club Med, wandering around the wonderful old town of Nassau. One night in the Italian restaurant on the Club Med resort, we were seated with another couple, which is the way they do it there. I went off to get dessert and when I came back they were looking at me funny and Chris looked pale. I glanced back and forth at them and then noticed that the whole restaurant had gone quiet. He had told everyone but me what was about to happen. He slid awkwardly to his knee on the floor in front of my trembling chair, held out an incredible ring, a cylindrical emerald pierced by a gold pin that was set on either end into a gold band, made at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an exact copy of a ring from King Tut's tomb. He asked me in a shaking voice to marry him. I sat there dumbfounded. Then I heard loud pounding behind and around me. All the people in the restaurant had begun pounding on their tables. Then they started yelling, "Yes, yes, yes!" I looked into his eyes. Not just yes but hell yes.
