Happy Birthday, Husband!

The Husband on his boogie board before the Red Dress Party

My Husband is an amazing guy... a world class designer, a truly talented artist, & a champion of the underdog & the downtrodden. He is superbly talented, but he is no snob. His fine art is collage (he calls them "assemblages"), somewhat in the style of Joseph Cornell, made from found objects. I am sharing photos of a few his pieces, including his giant work- Boys' Fort, which is in our back garden. In his lifetime he has been a first rate theatre designer & director, actor, husband, father & friend. I wish him lots o' love & a long happy & healthy life, on this profoundly special day of his birth- April 16th.

He is tough stuff. Literally. He suffers from Dupuytren's Contracture, a disease that slowly cripples the hands & yet he continues to produce art & paint, & build. He has Crohn's disease & is often in powerful pain, & yet cooks amazing, delicious, & interesting meals with the severe limits of what he can & can not eat.

Boys' Fort 2009

. He is tough stuff. When we first met 33 years ago, he was profoundly shy, but his shyness manifested its self as stand offish & moody. He was also so good looking as to be “pretty”. Dazzlingly talented & astonishingly good looking, & married, I very much wanted to be friends with him, but he was very hard to reach. Working together doing theatre we slowly, very slowly, started to become friends, then good friends, then best friends, all the while not telling each other that we were in love with the other. It took me 3 years to get to the point that I was able to declare that love, because he was such tough stuff.

He is especially tough stuff for dealing with me for 30+ years. One of our 1st encounters involved me hiring him to design the sets for a show that I was producing. I had seen his theatre pieces & I was intensely impressed with his work as a set designer. I approached him to design & he stated that he would indeed design this show, but he would not build it. I agreed, & I stayed up all night, nursing a bottle of Ouzo, building his 12 flats. I actually have no mechanical skills at all; my lack of talent & the liquor made for a set of really shitty flats. He was furious at me as he rebuilt my miserable work. That was how we started.

He is tough stuff for staying with me for 30+ years, through the booze, drugs, my slutty disposition, my grouchiness, the ups & downs of my life in show business, the life & death of 5 dogs (I brought home all our canines, he has never had a say so in choosing the pets, & yet he has loved them each deeply), & a mid-life crisis of confidence that resulted in a move from Seattle to Portland.

His work as a designer always knocks me out, & our home is his lab & his studio. He changes Post Apocalyptic Bohemia constanly & he continues to surprise & delight me with his work... even if he only does 9/10 of every project before moving on. Below is a penthouse in Portland's Pearl District that he designed with his good friend Kimberly Jaynes.

He is tough stuff. He eats well, exercises like a crazy Jack LaLanne, & starts his 7th decade on this planet as supremely handsome silver fox: tall & thin, full head of perfect silver hair, sexy & funny… & he is my Husband. Lucky me!