Last year, I went to a benefit with a girlfriend to support my brother in law. He is the Director of the Board of this commendable non-profit organization. Unfortunately, I was more of a liability than a help.

On this afternoon, one of my particularly free spirited, adventurous friends made a quick diversion to a local dive bar that was on the way to the benefit. I had driven by this bar every day and it had somehow escaped my eye. Curiosity got the best of me and with slight trepidation I followed her in. Time stopped, and so did the half dozen locals who were already sauced. Noticing the yeagermeister on tap, I realized that this was no ordinary pit stop. This place must be famous. To think that I had driven right by it all these years. Free shots were sent our way from one of the six barfly’s. Six tequila shots and half a dozen new friends later we stumbled out into the blinding evening light. Thelma and Louise were ready to spice up this benefit with our charm and tequila soaked grace.

In my insecure youth, tequila would expose my vulnerabilities, especially when I would drink it with my sisters. I would become a weak and emotional mess confessing my insecurities, “you don’t love me”, I would sniffle.  Like all older sisters, they would hand me a tissue and tell me to shut up and not be so dramatic. With age comes less insecurities and a greater ability to accept the alien substances that I consume.  Instead, I am filled with bravado, clairvoyance and an inner light that, I’m certain, emerges from all of my orifices.

The Live auction began at the benefit. My generous mother had donated her summerhouse in Nantucket to to be auctioned off. When the house came up I offered my services to help sell it. After all, I knew the place well. Taking the microphone away from the MC I gracefully stumbled onto the stage.  I asked, “how many people out there have ever been to Nantucket?” A few smiling people raised their hands inspiring me to go on. I was doing really well, starting my own comedy routine, when I got politely, but abruptly kicked off the stage. My normal sense of humility must have been taking a powder.

Then came the horse up for auction. We needed a horse, with gas prices so high this was the perfect solution. Plus we had a barn on our new land. The bidding began. My brother-in-law from across the table was aggressively shaking his head, no. His wife, my sister, was encouraging me to go forward. She had land where we could board the horse. Louise, my partner in crime, had a brother that broke horses in Wyoming – a fun road trip. $3,000 later I won the horse. All night, I was so excited. I knew he was in the field and I wanted to go meet him and talk to my new pet in the moonlight.  The horse people kept getting in my way with questions like, “How long have you been involved with horses?” and “what will you do with him in the winter time?” and “were you aware of the costs involved”? Slowly, I started to sober up. The only horses I knew were Spirit and Flicka.

The next morning, I woke up not so excited. How was I going to tell Wade? At breakfast I stated that, once again, I had bought something big at an auction. I gave him the choice of hearing the news before or after his pot of coffee. He chose the latter. When he was ready, I announced that we had bought a new, unbroken, two year old pet for the kids. Wade and the kids looked at me incredulously with sleepy eyes. They told me that they  did not want a horse and I was to give it back.

I called the Director of the Board and burdened the organization to reverse my actions. It occurred to me that maybe I should return to the dive bar  to eliminate the pain I felt for embarrassing my family and myself. On the brighter side, I have switched forever from yeagermeister to tequila. YEEEEHAAAWWWW!

I am always frozen when people ask me what I do for a living. My immediate reaction is to tell them about how adept I was in procuring outrageously fun jobs during my single days. I was a professional interviewee and could sell myself to anybody. Sadly acknowledging that I must no longer live in the past, I tell them that I am CFO, Producer, Creative Director and Gestapo of three hellions and my husband, Wade. “What is it that you do”, I ask in return.

I have signed up for a lifetime of raising well rounded, honest, confident, sensitive, humble, chivalrous and charming boys. I really had not the faintest idea of what I was getting ourselves into when I convinced Wade that we needed to have three children. Nine years later we are in the throws of family life and I pray that the results of our efforts will start shining through anytime now. The feedback has been promising.

When we were growing up, my father would reprimand his three daughters for focusing on fun and not being serious enough about making money. Spoken from a true bachelor until the age of 42. Fun was his middle name. I can’t help but think that if I had actually been making money I would have lost it all to the Madoff Ponzi Scheme anyway.

My first job in New York City was at Simon & Schuster. I had just moved from Los Angeles and was traumatized by the loneliness and emptiness of living in the shallow world of film. New York City was so much more my style. Every day was an adventure and I was electrified by the magic of the city. As long as I didn’t feel an alien body rubbing itself against mine on the subway, I could manage.

I loved taking the elevator at Simon & Schuster and listening to the buzz of the Literati. Entering my little Department, I would run to my desk and answer the phone, “Hello, Pocket Books Publicity Department”. I developed good relationships with my co-workers.

Meg, a native from Manhattan, was a quick-witted, no-nonsense, fiercely devoted friend, as long as you passed her character strength test. When she would get embarrassed she would fan her face to try to decrease the blush on her creamy white skin. Next came Joanne, a homely Publicist with a childish voice who married her boss while working for a phone sex company. She loved to astonish us unexpectedly by talking dirty. Once as we all descended to lunch on the elevator, she started talking smack and shared her fantasies with us of tonguing our boss Roger. We all nervously laughed until the elevator opened and Roger got in with us. A very uncomfortable silence descended upon us.

Then there was Joy, a beautiful, highly emotional woman who wore red stilettos and short skirts to work. Her fiancé was Adam, a fellow Publicist in our department. He was a cool and sophisticated man and he was her rock. They lived together in a tiny apartment near Columbia University where they had gone to college. Dinner at their apartment was my first introduction to Bohemian life and I loved it. They would crank out home made pasta and introduce me to their shelves of vinyl records and books.

When she was not in her safe haven, Joy was fragile. Daily I would visit her in her office and find her in tears. She would talk to me about her Catholic Italian mother who was not too happy about her engagement to a Jewish intellect. We would visit the ancient press together that should have been replaced years ago. As much as the cogs and wheels were Joy’s therapy they were the bane of my existence. She had an understanding of that machine and would liken it to the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I had never read that book and struggled to follow her thought process.

I worked directly for Roger as his assistant. He was the Publicist for the romance novelist, Jackie Collins. It was no surprise that the lead men in most of her novels were based on his suave good looks and character. He was tall and lean with a tousled head of beautiful thick, silky, black hair coveted by every woman. My desk was directly outside his office and frequently he would scream out expletives ending with, “WERNICK get in here”. I loved him and became a bumbling mess in his presence. I don’t think he ever noticed it.

When the office was slow I would clunk down the hallway to visit my friend John in the editing department and listen to all of his quirky anecdotes. After work, we resided at hip bars like MK, a long narrow bar with a fish tank embedded on one whole side of the wall and stuffed Doberman Pinchers that loomed above us with sad marble eyes. Drinking the days’ pay away we would comment on all of the beautiful posers.

I left the company when I realized that the only way up was to take over the job of writing press releases for romance novels. I knew that I was not up to the task of repeatedly writing about hot bulging muscles and curvaceous femme fatales.

After I left, David Letterman spotted Meg’s long blond hair from his studio across the street in Radio City Hall. She became his muse and he would send marching bands through our office and call her often live from the Studio. I was able to keep up with their lives as I regularly watched them on The David Letterman Show.

My next job was working for Seventeen Magazine as a Merchandising Editor. I put on fashion shows across the country. My boss was a  woman who sat on crystals and wore her string bikinis and stilettos down to the cheesy pools we frequented when we traveled.

The movie, “The Devil Wears Prada”, resembled my life while working at Seventeen Magazine. My friends and I would meet in the morning and evaluate the clothes that we were all wearing. I always failed as the country bumpkin from Massachusetts with no fashion sense, Anne Hathaway I was not.

My biggest fear at the time was public speaking. Unfortunately, being the MC on fashion shows was part of the job description. At my first show in Washington D.C., I passed out under the hot lights and silence ensued as the models strutted down the runway. My co-worker had taken me out and ruined me the night before.  She abandoned me at my first debut feigning laryngitis. Upon our return she blamed the failure of the show on me and tried to get me fired. Luckily the crystals were working in my favor and I put up a good fight.

I decided to leave New York City three years later, in 1995 after a traumatizing morning. As I walked into my favorite coffee grind the people walking out got hit by a car that had lost control. As I helped the wounded that were strewn throughout the street the city lost its charm on me. I quit my job, packed up and drove to stay with my sister, Michele, in Aspen, Colorado.

In one week of living in Aspen, I got hit with three speeding tickets as I deftly maneuvered my red Honda Prelude down Main Street. It took me a long time to shed my city skin. I missed the ethnicity of the city.

Once again, I excelled at being interviewed and landed a job editing for a small group of National Geographic photographers. I immersed myself in the cultural side of Aspen and began making a life for myself there.

Fifteen years later, I am traveling down a different road. I have jumped into the insane world of writing. Hopefully in the near future, I will be able to respond to the dreaded question of what I do by stating that I am a famous writer who makes money by writing about my fabulous boys and husband.

As long as I can remember boys have been my distraction and my muse. Life has played a quirky joke on me, be obsessed with boys and one day you’ll have three of your own.

The smart boyfriends learned quickly how to appease my father by watching football with him or by offering to do our chores of cleaning out the gutters and raking the lawn. Some would get too drunk at dinner parties in order to get the courage to talk to him and others would remain sullen and disturbed that they had to deal with such an obtrusive obstacle.

My first love was Jason, the most spiritual and wonderful boyfriend that I could ever have wished for. My father had a hard time accepting that his baby was madly in love at the age of 18 to a 19 year old. He gave Jason a hard time but he was strong and kept loving me regardless of the obstacles.

I tried to resist the attention that started coming my way after Jason went to college but what was a nineteen year old to do? My mother’s words of wisdom became the soul of my existence. Relationships are like traveling, the more men you meet in your life the more life experiences you will have.

I imagined that living in New York City would be the ultimate place to meet some of the most interesting people in the world so after college in Boston I moved to the Big Apple. It was there that I fell madly in love with Brett . His love for me was equal to his love for partying and he plunged me into the psychotic world of obsession.

We would go to Dockers, have chilled white wine and oysters on the half shell and he would maul me in the middle of the dark, New York City street and then we would go out dancing all night together. He made me feel more alive than I had ever been. If he wasn’t happy at a party he would throw me over his shoulder and take me to Raoul’s, his favorite watering hole.  Passing all the people romantically eating their meals at the sidewalk Café’s, he kept me slung over his shoulder pleading for him to let me down. I was careless and blinded by love and was in complete denial that Brett was unable to stay loyal to me.

Everybody has a Brett in their life. I just happened to allow the relationship to drag on for six years since he kept coming back. It was never boring with him and he could make me laugh like no other. He sang African songs in the shower and he was a charmer. All of the women in my family adored him. He was bright and as silly as we were juggling tomatoes over the Indian carpets and playing scrabble with my mother until the wee hours of the night.

The reality came crashing in on me one day when Brett stepped out of the apartment for a cup of coffee. My sister called reluctantly giving me the bad news, rumors were flying that Tom had taken another woman to a hotel for a fling, a few nights back.

As I rocked myself back and forth on the floor of my apartment our relationship flashed before my eyes. Just days before his alleged affair we had been walking through Central Park completely wrapped up in each others arms. He loved me, this I was sure of, but he was a wounded boy seeking attention from anybody who would give it to him. I looked up and saw  his watch and school ring laying on the table. It occurred to me that he was at that moment doing something illegal. Three hours later he returned from getting his coffee, stoned out of his mind. Man that Harlem coffee must be strong. Booted!

I fled from Brett and the city and moved in to an A frame cabin leftover from the minors in the 1800’s in Aspen, Colorado. I had the room with no heat which suited me just fine since I was never there. I worked for National Geographic Photographers and went out dancing every night. This was living. Who needed Brett anyway?

The party life in Aspen does not leave one lonely for long. After leaving Brett high and dry in New York City I started dating someone four years younger than me, but who was counting. In my foggy haze I spotted Max inhaling shots at the crowded bar at Aspen’s most raucous dance dive, The Tippler. He was wearing a cool black leather motorcycle jacket and had mischief written all over him.  The song, “Groove is in the Heart”, by Deee-Lite was playing. With my body lit up with energy and my head swimming in tequila, I was ready for another adventure and asked him to dance with me.

It was refreshing to date an engaging California boy with a charming ability for self-humor and Aspen provided the ultimate playground for our romance. We hiked or skied all day and returned to warm each other up in my freezing room in the cabin. John turned me on to Social Distortion and the Lemon Heads and I introduced him to Alan Ginsburg.

Six months after I spotted Max embraced in the arms of another women in the bar where we had met, there came a knock on my door. Standing in front of me was Brett and my knees buckled.  I listened to his pledges of love for me and let him back in. Big mistake! Soon after, I was waiting up all night for him to come home from his DJ’ing job at the most prestigious night club in town, The Caribou Club. How blind we can be.

Once again, my sister had to break the truth to me but it was worse this time. My whole family had witnessed Brett kissing a cocktail waitress, from the club, on a street corner. I went home, put on my pointiest cowboy boots I owned and kicked his pretty little white ass forever out onto the streets. Good riddance!

The next day my boss at the Dance Institute asked me why Brett’s BMW was heading West out of town filled with boxes. I told him that he was going back home to his lily white town in Connecticut and we would see him no more. Of course, he returned to torture me for a few more years. He was attracted to me like a rat attracted to cheese.

There were many more after Brett and my poor sisters endured them all; the French boyfriend with black teeth who wrote me love letters that I could barely understand, the spoiled, wealthy boy with a communication problem who went away for the weekend to Crested Butte and never came back, my neighbor who repelled down to my balcony on his climbing rope with his guitar slung across his soldier, the intellectual New Yorker who found me as an irrisistable drunken bat holding up my corner of  the elevator on Halloween. Everywhere I turned there was always somebody willing to entertain me.

I decided to move and get more serious with my life after a traumatic traveling experience to Turkey with a part time boyfriend from San Francisco. I walked the pier in Turkey looking for an out but when one was offered to me I thought better of it and decided not to become a statistic in the headlines of missing American woman in foreign countries. What was I doing with my life? Aspen was too trivial and transient. The boys were untrustworthy and shallow.

Into my life walked Wade. His handsome face and beautifully soothing pine green eyes seemed so familiar to me. Strangely, I did not know immediately that he was the one. This I cannot explain. I used to laugh when people would say, when you least expect it, it will happen. I was always expecting it. Who wasn’t? always searching for love?

Just a few of my favorites