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I was born on Labor Day, and if that wasn’t a silly enough way to start out in life, I spent the next 18 years supported by a man who wrote Archie comics for a living. I spent 12 of those years under the tutelage of a variety of nuns, to which I attribute my affinity for lesbians. I was unsure whether to look forward to a future of hanging out with other zany teenagers at the Choklit Shoppe, or praying to be blessed with the stigmata. My childhood was comfortable, secure, mildly affluent, and left me with a deep sense of absurdity.

My father infused me with both his subversive atheism and the artistic passion that he put aside in order to raise children in the suburbs of eastern Long Island. Between my father’s three siblings and my mother’s two, I grew up with 11 first cousins and 12 first-cousins-once-removed that I saw regularly; that’s not counting the 4 California first cousins that I grew to know later, or the 4 first cousins in the mysterious Virginia branch of the family. I don’t see them all nearly enough, and can barely keep up on the names of all the first-cousins-twice-removed, some of whom are already out of college and ready to grace the family tree with another generation.

While in high school I dreamed of being either the next Max Ernst or the next Kurt Vonnegut or the next Joni Mitchell, depending on which muse I was flirting with that day. In retrospect, it’s a good thing I never attained much in the way of fame, as the most famous graduates of St. John the Baptist are all characters whose tragic lives have been dramatized on the big screen. The young man who spent years in a Turkish prison in Midnight Express went to my high school. A girl in the class ahead of me was gunned down by her psychotic brother along with the rest of the family, the event which inspired the dubious franchise The Amityville Horror. Most recently, and most sadly, the co-pilot of Flight 93 was an SJB Cougar.

My biggest claim to fame, blessedly, has been to be the cover girl on a couple issues of Television Broadcast magazine. I feel safe that nobody will be making a movie of my life, and I will avoid the annals of St. John the Baptist ignominy.

After high school I attended art school at SUNY New Paltz for 3 semesters. I loved the Hudson Valley, but the college and I were a poor match. I left New Paltz with a love of open spaces, a realization that Fine Arts was not my calling, and a friendship that would become a marriage 31 years hence.

After some bouncing hither and thither in the fashion of rootless 20-year-olds, I settled in San Francisco. To date, I spent most of my adult years in the Bay Area, and it is the locale with which I identify most strongly. I left my heart not only in San Francisco, but in San Carlos, Half Moon Bay, Palo Alto, Los Gatos. Little bits of my coronary tissue are scattered from one end of the Peninsula to the other.

It is there that I embarked on a career that has shape-shifted with technology and the economy, from the early days of computer graphics in broadcasting to the dot-com startups, with some paddling in the backwater of interactive television in the middle. I had stock options that died on the vine, had my net worth doubled overnight with a buyout by Microsoft, and went through the roller coaster of an IPO that ended with stock at 3 cents a share. I’m not sure what I learned from all of that, except that job security is an illusion, and that I’m glad to be living somewhere that 14-hour work days are not the norm. I’m still catching up after 20 years of sleep deprivation.

It was also in California that I kayaked with sea lions and hiked under redwoods and learned to ski on the bunny slopes of the Sierras. I learned to love the smell of the meadows under a hot summer sun, the taste of oyster mushrooms picked that afternoon, the taste of cappucino with a splash of Vov. I watched the most spectacular of perseid meteor showers while lying in the thin air of the high desert near Mono Lake. After 7 years in the South, I still miss life west of the Rockies.

I moved to Durham, NC in 2001 to be hang out with a cute guy I met in my Communes and Alternate Technologies class in New Paltz back in 1976. We got married in 2007, my first and hopefully only wedding, a mere month after my 50th birthday. I moved my widowed mother here a couple of years ago, and after years of living on opposite ends of the continent, we are able to enjoy dinner together on a regular basis. I have two intensely creative stepdaughters, and two very silly cats. I run a design studio I named after my hat.