Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

Was there anything unusual about your birth?

I was born in the middle of an ice storm.

My mother was forty-three at the time and the doctors had warned her that I would almost certainly be deaf and might well have Down Syndrome. My father was recovering from kidney surgery.

Mom had arranged with a neighbor to drive her to the nearest hospital—half an hour away—and bring our car back so that my father could get his rest and join us the next day. But when the labor pains began around ten o’clock at night and my mother called Mrs. Bailey, she was too afraid to drive at night on the icy roads. My mother said that was fine, she would drive herself, if Mrs. Bailey would just come along to bring the car back after dawn. I’ve never heard any details of that drive, but they made it.

I was born about three-thirty in the morning. The call woke my father who said that for a third girl they could have waited until nine o’clock. He loved that story when I was younger, but later apologized to me, telling me that he little knew at the time just how lucky he was.

Doing meaningful work with people I love.

Competence is my favorite emotional state. It is often underestimated and ignored, but when people talk about “flow,” or “being in the zone,” a lot of what we seem to mean is that feeling of knowing what you’re doing, knowing how to do it, being able to do it easily, and being proud to be doing it. To be focused on the task, being in the moment, not wishing that you were doing something else--that is bliss.

I love to work with other people. Not any other people--probably the vast majority of people I’ve worked with have been somewhere between completely neutral and actively annoying, or frustrating. But for me part of loving someone is to love to work together. Unloading the dishwasher with my husband, reorganizing a closet with my daughter, analyzing a script with my boyfriend, designing a set with my friend, Jo--the simplest task becomes a delight with the right partner. The ability to communicate tightly, the keen awareness of each other, the ease of sharing perspectives, and the trust in each other’s capability. all of these manifest and reinforce the connections between us.

As the child of a Protestant minister in a small town, I was part of a family business. We all participated in my father’s ministry, taking leadership roles in the age-appropriate groups, helping out wherever more hands were needed, or just showing up to create a seed-kernel of participants. We sang in the choir, worked in the kitchen, organized fundraisers, staffed the nursery, participated in youth group. At home we learned how to take messages as soon as we could reach the phone and served as a dinner-table advisory board for my father’s stories of the day. We presented a public image of family harmony and achievement that reflected my father’s ability as a shepherd for his flock.

Creating meaning in daily chores is a discipline and, sometimes, an effort. It can be challenging to find real satisfaction in the laundry. It’s much easier for me when there’s an element of performance, or presentation in the delivery, an opportunity for feedback, for me to enjoy the audience’s enjoyment.

I love to cook in part because of the delight in hearing someone moan softly at the first bite, or ask for seconds...and then thirds. I rarely fail completely at cooking, but when I make something that is only adequate--something my family are content to eat, but would never ask for again-- it feels like failure.

Doing theatre weaves all of these threads together. Each person brings their own skills and talents to a different aspect of the production. Whether it’s compelling portrayals, or brilliant work with power tools, each piece is important, every person’s role is essential. Working with people I love and building community to expand that circle, makes the resulting productions not merely entertainment, but a sharing with the wider community of our audience from our vital core. But it is not in the moment of performance that my greatest satisfaction arises, but in the joy of watching a scene come together, or gasping as the lights turn on for the first time after hours of hanging them, or grinning at each other as we figure out a solution to make the set work. It is not the result, but the experience--not the product, but the act of work that I find perfect happiness.

If you could go anywhere and do anything, what would your perfect Valentine’s Day be?

Valentine’s Day, in particular, isn’t that big a deal for me. We often don’t go out that evening, because—as a friend put it—it’s amateur night at all the fine dining establishments. In general my ideal for the night is to go for a walk together, have a lovely meal one way or another, and do something story-worthy.

I’ve had a few Valentine’s Days that were particularly memorable:

My worst breakup happened in January and left me feeling deeply defeated. The relationship I’d spent three years in ended very badly when I dumped him for the guy he’d pushed me to have sex with, only to be dumped in turn three weeks later when that guy decided to stay with the girlfriend who had pushed him into having sex with me, and my original boyfriend had already moved on to the woman who left her husband for him. I ended up crashing with friends for a few months and being congratulated by people who’d never liked my boyfriend for having something I’d poured myself into for three years come crashing down.

Valentine’s Day was approaching and I was feeling really low when a friend from college, also single at the time, proposed that the two of us go out to dinner together that night. We spent a marvelous evening at Helmand, an Afghani restaurant in Cambridge, eating and drinking delicious things, bitching about men as we laughed up a storm, and eventually deciding that we would look for a place to live together. After weeks of feeling defeated and broken, that night I began to really believe I could build a new life for myself.

A couple of years ago my husband and I had rehearsal on the night itself, so we celebrated a couple of days early. We went to the Tasting Counter—one of my very favorite restaurants at the moment—and had a divine multicourse tasting dinner with sublime wine pairings. When that wrapped up we checked the movie listings and decided to see Dead Pool, which was opening that night. So we spent the first part of the evening in hushed, refined sybaritism, and the latter part howling in laughter at Ryan Reynolds’ crude antics. It was a glorious night!

But the most significant Valentine’s Day was the first I spent with Jason. We had been together only a few months and after a couple of years of being mostly-single I was still pretty tender around the idea of the holiday, not wanting to make a big deal of it and not wanting to do anything canonical. I noticed that Neil Gaiman, whom both of us liked and neither of us had seen at that point, was doing a reading at the Palace of Fine Arts that night.

So after dinner at my house we drove into the city and took our places in the darkened auditorium. Neil is a marvelous reader, particularly of his own stories, which tend to have a dark, wry humor even as they are horrifying you, or wrenching at your emotions. One of the stories he read that night was “The Wedding Present,” a story that is hidden in the Introduction of a collection of his short stories called Smoke and Mirrors, as a treat for people who read introductions.

It’s about a couple who receive an envelope at their wedding that tells the story of their relationship, magically getting longer as the years pass, but a darker, twisted alternate version where everything that goes well and right in their real lives, doesn’t, and the story-versions become increasingly unhappy with each other and with themselves. I won’t give away the ending for those who’ve yet to read it, but it’s a beautiful story of some loves being worth the pain. In the car afterward we cried together and I said that I thought we might love that deeply and Jason said that he already did. We’ve seen Neil read many times since then and it’s always a lovely experience, but that one—well, that was Valentine’s Day.

This was written a couple of weeks after Alice’s birth. Reading through it the most surprising thing is how little I remember of any of it…

On Sunday afternoon Jason was working with our friend, Jo, to get the last bits of painting done in the bathroom, while I was busy making a huge batch of chicken pot pie as part of my project to fill our new freezer. Leah had arrived from Northampton to spend a couple of days with us and Jack had come by to talk about set design issues for Arms & The Man, but had left shortly before.



Jo had just helped me to take the pot pie out of the oven at 8:30pm, when I realized I needed to pee—this was a frequent occurrence—so I ran upstairs and barely made it before there was a small gush of liquid. It was odd, but I just thought it was a new variation on having to pee all the time. I went back downstairs and felt a cramp, but it passed quickly and I thought I must be hungrier than I had thought. I had started dishing up the pot pie, when I felt myself leaking again, so I went into the downstairs bathroom, where Jason was working and, again, there was an odd gush. The dots connected and I told Jason that I thought my water was breaking, but it seemed to be happening gradually and we’d just see how it went.

We dished up the pot pie and took it to the table, when I felt things letting go again, so I ran for the john once more and this time there was a much larger gush, followed by another cramp. Back at the table, I explained to Jo and Leah what was going on. I finished my dinner and then Jason put in a call to the OB’s office, while Jo and Leah helped me finish packing up my hospital bag and I called my sisters and parents and Jason let his mom know that things were starting to happen. There was no return call from the OB after half an hour, so Jason called again and it turned out the first page had gone out with the wrong number entered. This time a nurse practitioner called back within about ten minutes.

The NP questioned me and recommended that I head in to Mt. Auburn for fetal monitoring. We finished packing up and finally got out the door about quarter to eleven. The contractions had continued to come about every ten to twelve minutes and I’d had some more leaking and another big gush. Fortunately, I had bought some Depends pads and that was mostly catching the fluid. I decided that I preferred to drive—I tend to feel the bumps less when I’m the one driving—and we made it to the hospital just before eleven. I went in through the emergency entrance, while Jason went to park the car, but the main admissions desk was still open, so they sent me upstairs to fill out the paperwork there and Jason met me at the desk.

We got our paperwork and bracelet and headed up to the Birthing Place on the fifth floor. I went to the bathroom again and then went into an exam room. The nurse on duty—Pam, who led our childbirth prep classes—got me hooked up to the monitors and then the OB on call, Dr. Sylvia Fine, examined me externally and guessed the baby’s weight at a little under seven pounds. They had some trouble getting a good recording of the heartbeat and contractions, but everything seemed to be going fine. Then I started throwing up and they moved me over to Birthing Room 1, where I was able to shower off and get better recordings. Pam had me try the birthing ball, but I found the vibration of it exacerbated my nausea and gave up on that pretty quickly.

At that point they wanted me to stay, but I was eager to go home, so after an initial IV of fluid and antibiotics, they let us leave about 2am. The contractions were coming about every five minutes, but I wasn’t actually feeling about half of them, so I still had about ten minutes of feeling fine in between them. On the way home, the nausea was hitting more strongly and the contractions coming harder and faster. We had hoped to watch Battlestar Galactica and get a few hours of sleep in our own bed, but I was unable to focus on the TV and I started heaving pretty continuously.

After about ninety minutes of this—poor Leah, having to listen to my distress—I decided I’d been wrong to think I wanted to be at home and we headed back, with Jason driving this time. During the time at home, I had started asking him to count while the contractions lasted and I found that really helped me, especially as we bounced along the bumpy Cambridge streets.

Pam, the nurse, teased me a little for coming back so quickly, but I just said that now I knew that I wanted to be there, which was good to know and would make things easier for me and she shut right up. She is an older woman—thirty-six years as an obstetric nurse—with a no-nonsense manner, but very compassionate when needed. While I was throwing up, she held my head and patted my back and made me feel about as comforted as possible. Very quickly I requested anti-nausea drugs and waited until the Zofran took effect before deciding that even without the nausea, I still wasn’t dealing well with the pain of the contractions and wanted an epidural.

I was amused to read the Entertainment Weekly’s Shaw Report (their version of “Hot or Not”) this week and find that silent births are “out,” hiring a midwife is “five minutes ago,” and what’s “in”? Yup—epidurals. I feel so trendy now, but at least I was ahead of the curve!

The insertion of the epidural catheter into the fluid sac around my spinal cord wasn’t painful, although it did feel quite odd, and it was definitely a relief. From all accounts—and the staff’s feedback—my epidural was particularly good, in that I never lost control of my lower body. It felt numb and I couldn’t feel the contractions at all, but I could still sit up and roll over more than the staff seemed to expect. I think that if some emergency had required me to get up and walk, I could have done it with some concentration, but was just as happy not to have to. Having the urinary catheter in was a relief, as well—after weeks of having to pee constantly, I could just relax and forget about that particular function. I got a little too relaxed when the epidural was first kicking in—my diastolic dropped down to 24—so they gave me some ephedrin via IV and when that didn’t have much effect, the anesthesiologist hit me with a syringe of the stuff and that picked things right up.

That was all done by about 6am on Monday morning and then came several hours of lying in bed, watching the sunrise over Boston and the rush hour traffic building and ebbing. Because I have moderate sleep apnea, any time I began to really drift off to sleep, my oxygen level would dip and a beeping alarm would start up and if I didn’t grab the mask and take some deep breaths, the nurse would pop her head in and remind me. But when I was awake, it was fine. So I would take off the mask to talk to someone, or have some ice chips, and then drift off and the alarm would go and… That made it difficult to get much solid sleep.



The shift changed at 8am and the team that would actually deliver the baby came on. The OB on call was Dr. Amy McGaraghan. She was being shadowed by a Harvard Med student named Katie, who not only attended all of the doctor’s time with me, but came by to interview us about our experiences with pregnancy, which passed the time very pleasantly. My nurse was a pleasant, younger woman named Chris, who grew up in New Hampshire, had lived for several years in San Diego, and recently returned to New England, so we had a pleasant time chatting about the differences between the coasts.

There was a little excitement on the ward, accompanied by much screaming, as two women both came in around the same time, both 10cm dilated on arrival—too late for pain meds. Chris and Katie both rushed to assure me that I shouldn’t let the screaming scare me, as it wasn’t going to be like that for me. I was too relaxed to worry much, but it added to the difficulty of sleeping. Jason slept through most of the morning, waking up occasionally to check on me and read to me, but I encouraged him to get sleep while he could. He ordered a breakfast sandwich from the cafeteria and pronounced it very tasty.

We were able to use our cell phones in the birthing suite, which was a nice surprise, so I talked to my sister, Beckie, a couple of times to keep her updated and we agreed that she would come over at lunchtime and see how things were going.

The various external monitors continued to not provide as clear readings as the staff wanted, so we agreed to switch to internal monitoring—one inserted alongside the baby’s head to record my contractions and the other attached to the baby’s scalp to watch her vital signs. I began to be very amused by all the tubes and wires trailing out of my lower half and to be just as glad I didn’t have to see or feel them.

At some point late morning, the doctor checked me and I was 8cm dilated and she recommended a dose of pitocin to pick up the pace of my contractions. That worked like a charm and we called Beckie to say that she should plan to stay once she got there. She arrived about one and the contractions were starting to be much stronger. As the epidural ebbed, I began to be able to feel them more and more. The doctor was in the OR doing a c-section and sent word that I should not start pushing. Katie and Chris had me do a little “practice” pushing to see if I could get the hang of it and that went well enough that we didn’t do it for long.

Beckie arrived and settled in and eventually the doctor came in and the real work began. We tried various positions and I found that I was most comfortable on all fours—basically in child pose—and that being on my side felt really awkward and ineffective. Being on my back was also fine, but not as effective at that point as they wanted. I moved around, pushing with the contractions, for what I guess was about two hours. Eventually I ended up on my back again, with Jason holding one leg, Katie the other, and Beckie holding my hand.

The last twenty minutes hurt. A lot. The room was pretty crowded at that point, with Jason, Beckie, Dr. McGaraghan, Katie, Janet (the nurse who replaced Chris at the afternoon shift change), the pediatrician and the pediatric nurse all standing around and saying encouraging things. The one time I swore during the process was when it felt as though everyone were jabbering at me to the point that it was making it hard to focus and follow the doctor’s instructions, so I told them all to shut up. At another point, I suddenly started crying, and everyone but Jason said “what’s wrong?!” and he said “it hurts!” It’s good to have someone who understands me!

For a while we were making good progress, but we kept getting the crown of her head just poking out and then slipping back between contractions—I just couldn’t hold it long enough to pop. So the doctor asked if we’d be ok with her using the vacuum suction thingy and we said sure. She attached it and used it to hold the baby’s head in place between two contractions and on the third, out came Alice at 4:24pm.

The last push, to get her body out, was easy and then the pediatric folk set to work on cleaning her off—they got Jason to cut the cord, which he hadn’t been planning to do, but was glad to have been involved in the process—while the doctor got the placenta out. That thing was enormous! After that there was apparently some bleeding that they were concerned about for a few minutes, but it let up and seems to have been ok. I was pretty exhausted by this time, so it was all a little blurry. The doctor checked for tears, but found only abrasions, three of which were bleeding enough for her to tack up with a stitch. All the tubes and wires were removed, except for my IV tap, which they left in just in case I were to have more bleeding and need fluids or drugs.



They brought Alice to me after the weights and measures routine and the three of us took a good look at each other and I was able to get her to latch on and nurse for a few minutes right away. Then Jason went off to the nursery with her for her first bath and testing, while Beckie stayed with me. Janet had me up on my feet pretty quickly and seemed surprised that I was able to walk. It took a bit of concentration getting to the bathroom, but by the time I came back, it felt much more normal. Beckie packed up all our junk and Janet popped me in a wheelchair for the trip down to my recovery room, on the other end of the floor.







Jason came back with the baby and we began to settle in. We ordered some food to be brought up for all of us—chicken soup and a grilled cheese sandwich were very tasty after twenty-four hours of fasting—and before we could finish, the rest of the aunts & uncles arrived, singing “venite adoremus”. OK, not really, but that was the theme of the evening. By about 8pm we said goodnight to everyone and settled in for our first night as a family of three.

What qualities do you most value in your partner?

I think the single most important quality for me is happiness. Many people seem wired to find the negative in every situation, to worry about what might happen around the corner and down the road, and to rehearse every grievance until it's wrung of every drop of anger and indignation. I can't live with that--when I try, I spend way too much energy trying to cheer the person up, find the bright side, make their life easy in hopes of their finding happiness with me, which many people just aren't going to do. Realizing this was a major breakthrough in my relationship history and made me value Jason's essential good humor enormously.



A deep sense of commitment is also key for me. I was raised by parents who were married for life and being able to make and live that kind of partnership was something that I was always looking for. Jason sometimes says that for him the best thing about being married was letting go of the decision--it was made and he no longer has to wonder whether or not to marry, because he did. This plays out not only in just not separating, but in showing up every day to make our lives together good, in being willing to work on our communication and find ways to enhance our connection and our mutual ease and happiness.



Being openly loving is also very important. We sometimes call it "The Love Game," taking joy in finding ways to say and show that we love each other every day, finding new games to play together, new inside jokes that reinforce our connection. I see other couples who seem to revel in something different, in teasing each other with dislike, and while I get that joking about it might release steam, or disarm the negative potential of the relationship, that's not a comfortable way of interacting for me. Physical affection is an important part of this--we touch each other often, we hug many times throughout the day, and the best part of every day is holding each other as we fall asleep.



I don't think I could be partnered with someone who didn't share a basic curiosity about the world, an eagerness to try new things, travel to other parts of the world, try new foods, or share cool articles about science and interesting insights about the human condition. We can spend hours together talking about everything and nothing, because each of us is interested in how the other sees the world and in sharing what we see with each other.



A willingness to be a full partner is another essential quality. Jason and I have different strengths, but we are working together toward the same goals. We communicate freely about our priorities. We share values. We are here for each other, whether that's maintaining a balance in chores, or figuring out how to parent equitably. We're not using each other to get what we each want, we're cooperating to get what both of us want, and each other's happiness is vitally important. We love working together and are able to spend the bulk of our time in the same space. I've heard it said that in all relationships there is one who loves more, but our love is intense on both sides and very well balanced. I feel incredibly privileged to have found a partner like this.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, it matters enormously to me that we enable each other to be our best selves and give each other the freedom to do that. Given what interdependent lives we lead, I think it would be impossible without the counterweight of respect and independence that suffuses our relationship.



In swimming lessons, we always had to have a buddy. It was your responsibility to know where your buddy was, to stick together, and when the whistle blew, to find each other and keep each other safe. That's one of the things that marriage is--a hand to grab in the deep water when the whistle blows. It's good to have a buddy.

What was your Dad like when you were a child?

Dad was 47 years old when I was born, so in some ways he always seemed old to me. He and my mother had been married for almost twenty years at that point, and in the same job and home for ten years, so they were very settled in their lives. I was a complete surprise and threw a wrench into things in many ways, but he always let me know that he was delighted with me and wouldn’t have changed a thing.

My father was 6‘4” and seemed tall enough to touch the moon. When I was just six weeks old he fell on the ice and broke his arm—thankfully on the trip after he had carried me in from the car—so some of my earliest memories of him are “The Elephant Game,” which I only understood much later were the physical therapy exercises he did to restore strength and flexibility to that arm.

Dad was the minister and in our church, Sunday School came before church and once I was too old for the nursery I was expected to sit through the adult service next to my mother. I grew up listening to stories about myself from the pulpit and having him say “God Bless You,” in his beautiful bass voice when I sneezed in church.

He was very affectionate and much more emotionally open than my mother was. He would openly weep at romantic movies and loved for me to sit on his lap and snuggle with him. He could also get very angry at times—until I was an adolescent that was more directed at my sister than at me, but his loud voice made it seem that he was yelling even when he had no intention of doing so.

Like many families of the era, Dad was the “fun” parent, the one who took us for ice cream, or to McDonald’s, or out for a late movie on Thanksgiving night, while Mom set the chores and kept the rules and made us stop playing for dinner, or bedtime. I’m told that in earlier days he was perfectly able to cook for himself and Anne, but by the time I came along there was some combination of more money and learned helplessness, but he still took charge of the grill for backyard London Broil in the summertime.

Since we lived in the parsonage, just across the driveway from the church, he was around much more than many fathers. He worked in the mornings at his office in the church, came home for lunch, then spent the afternoon calling on parishioners who were sick, or going through other crises. When I was little he would take me along when calling on families with children, and by the time I was in junior high I would often go along with him once a week when he went up to the hospitals in Albany. On Sunday afternoons we would drive down to see my grandmother in the nursing home. Many of my best memories of him are of conversations we had in the car together.

He was never athletic and not much of a sports fan, though he always enjoyed watching the baseball game. He was a Rockefeller Republican, voting for Democrats in the presidential elections and trying to keep his more liberal leanings confined to the Christian life he lived largely for others. If he hadn’t felt a call to the ministry he would have been a history teacher and was a scholar of the Protestant Reformation and a big fan of historical fiction. He loved to read and happily encouraged me to read any book in his library that caught my eye. He tried hard to teach me the habit of reading a daily newspaper and though that never caught, he did make me see current events on a national and international scale as relevant to our lives and worthy of my attention.

Although I think I’m actually better than he was at telling stories, I learned it from him, the art of observing the world for the purpose of distilling its meaning and finding its lessons. He had a hard time letting go of the details and sticking to the point, and so I also learned from him the joy of digressions, of conversations that start on one topic and drift over the course of hours into far different regions. I still find myself wanting to tell him things and to hear how he would incorporate them into his Sunday sermon.

Has your relationship with your siblings changed over the years?

In some ways my relationship with my sisters has changed profoundly, but in other ways not at all.

The three of us are all nine years apart. That is, Beckie was born when Anne was almost nine and I was born when Beckie was almost ten. Anne left for college the year I was born—my baptism was scheduled for the day after her graduation, since the grandparents would all be in town for that. Beckie left home when I was nine.

When I was little Anne was more like an aunt, in some ways—an exciting occasional presence in my life. She came home for summers when I was very little, and for holidays. When we were out alone together people automatically assumed that she was my mother. She bought me books and fed me strange things and took me exploring. Whatever interest or hobby she developed, she shared with me—I fondly remember the grave-rubbing phase and the hiking phase. She taught me to cook, mostly by telling me to make it up and assume it would be fine. In the summer Anne & George would take me along with them to Block Island and we would climb the bluffs and body surf in the waves.

My parents made a real effort to promote a relationship between us, sending me to stay with her for a week at a time, starting while she was still living in the dorms at Wellesley and I would have been no more than three. By the time I was eight they would put me on the Peter Pan bus and let me make the journey to Boston on my own, where she thought nothing of handing me T tokens and telling me where to meet her after work. She introduced me to science fiction and gave me Our Bodies, Our Selves, and taught me to be a feminist. I adored her and thought she was the coolest person in the world.

Beckie and I were much closer on a day-to-day basis while we were both at home. In most of my baby pictures it is Beckie who is holding me. My first word was “baby,” but my second was “Becca.” When she came to bed I would pound on the wall until she came to get me to snuggle with her—while my mother accused her of “never leaving that child alone!” Finally they put an extra bed in my room and Beckie slept there—the only way to keep me in my own bed. My mother still made most of our clothes in those days and Beckie had to endure my being dressed in scaled down copies of her clothes. We would watch tv together every afternoon when she got home from school—One Life to Live and General Hospital, followed by Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, and The Electric Company, before Dad got home and switched to the news.

When I was little and our grandparents were still alive, we drove to North Carolina and back at least twice each year—with me sprawled out and napping on Beckie in the days before carseats for toddlers. She got dragged along on the family vacation to Disneyworld, while I tagged along on trips to visit the colleges she was checking out. She had to endure my painfully honest comments chiming in at the most awkward times throughout her adolescence.

Anne’s relationship with our parents was always turbulent. The values that she embraced as a young woman in the 70s were very different from their Depression Era morality. My mother was always ready with a judgmental or dismissive comment and my father was very emotionally open and willing to go toe to toe with her in arguments that shook the house. Anne always wanted me to be on her team, to recognize our parents’ shortcomings and join her in criticizing and rebelling against them. I think that by the time I hit puberty, alone in the house with them, that—along with everything else—made me feel awkward with Anne and we grew more distant. And with Beckie also out of the house, I had somewhere else to go.

I spent much of Beckie’s college years hanging out with her at Smith. As a tall, precocious kid, I was generally assumed to be one of the more baby-faced freshmen and spent many long weekends and breaks roaming the campus while Beckie worked, or studied, and tagging along with her and her friends to movies, concerts, and lectures. When I wasn’t there I ran up huge long distance bills calling her almost every afternoon.

After Beckie graduated she moved to Boston. The plan was for her to stay with Anne and her partner, George, for a few months while she found a job and an apartment, but Beckie ended up living with them for nine years. During that time I visited often, so I was spending more time with Anne again.

There are lots of fun stories of the Hunter Sisters from those days. One time George made the mistake of referring to the musical “1776” as “forgettable,” so we sang the entire score from top to bottom, it having been a favorite to sing on car trips. Or there was the time that TV Guide said that record companies mistrusted MTV’s promises to play their videos at certain rates, but since there was “no way for them to tell,” they were having to take MTV’s word on it. “There’s no way to tell” entered our family language for easily-verifiable information.

While the gravitational pull of Boston was strong, I attempted to elude my fate by going to college in New York, but after two years there I bowed to the inevitable, moved to Boston—living partly with my sisters that first summer—and transferred to Wellesley.

While I was there, first Beckie and then Anne & George, bought condos and moved apart. Anne & George went into a big Indian cooking phase, at the time that my IBS was making Indian food really difficult for me to eat, so I spent less time with them. Beckie was living alone for the first time and especially once I had graduated we spent a lot of time hanging out together.

It's funny, because the big age difference between us always seemed so important when we were younger--in many ways it was defining of our relationship. But by the time I was about twenty-five, it really didn't matter any more. We were all working women, living in apartments, managing our relationships...shocking as it seems, we'd grown up. Though I do have to remind Anne from time to time not to tell stories about how awful I could be when I was little!

In the mid-90s, Beckie got married and I moved to California to try my luck on the West Coast, so we necessarily spent less time together. Then I met Jason and we married and moved to London, where both my sisters visited, and I had a cheap calling plan, so we spoke often. When we decided to move back to Boston, Beckie did us the enormous favor of finding a house and dealing with the purchase. Not long after our move back, we founded Theatre@First with Beckie and worked together closely on that.

When our daughter, Alice, turned three, Anne announced that she was exercising her big-sister right to have her come stay at least one weekend a month. Alice loves staying with Anne & George—much as I did when I was younger. It’s sometimes funny to hear about their adventures together, because they are similar in many ways to my time with them. Every summer they take her along for a week on Block Island, just as they did when I was a kid.

During my parents' decline, we all had to pull together to help care for them and make decisions. It was such a relief that we were all on the same page about the big issues. My therapist, listening to me talk about dealing with my mother's medical care--because I'm the one without a day job that could easily take her to appointments, that part fell to me--asked once if I felt like my sisters were doing enough and I said "We each do all that we possibly can, and most days that's enough. And if it isn't enough, it's still all that we can." Having that kind of mutual support made that awful time bearable.

Both of them are getting ready to retire and it will be interesting to see what changes that brings to their lives and our relationships. I talk to each of my sisters at least a couple of times a week and see them once a month, or more. We still celebrate holidays together--usually at my house.

In some ways nothing has changed--Anne is still the rebellious older daughter, Beckie is still the peacemaker, and I'm probably still the brat. In other ways, it's all changed--we're none of us young any more, even if they forget sometimes. But in the most important ways it's just what it always was--we're sisters, we grew up in the same family even if our parents were pretty different over time, we share a common history and language and connection that is different from anything I share with anyone else in the world.

What is the best meal you've ever had?

I have had a lot of wonderful meals and several spectacular ones and have cooked a few showstoppers, though I have the advantage of being able to make food exactly to my own taste. I’m not sure anything will ever equal the taste of my mother’s fried chicken with rice and gravy and there are few things as perfect in this world as a really good grilled cheese sandwich and there are times that I would pay any money for Mary’s suan la chow show or the duck with winter greens from Y Ming. I love to eat and to dine—different things, both beautiful—and it’s really all about the moment.

But one of the most special meals I’ve enjoyed was at Guy Savoy Paris, on Jason’s 29th birthday. Here’s how I described it at the time:

Located on a side street north of the Arc de Triomphe (though it has since moved) Guy Savoy is an easy place to miss, with its sliding door looking like a wall of wood and glass. Inside is a secluded, modern dining room with lots of wood and metal. While lovely, it felt somewhat sterile to me, like the executive dining room of a very high end law firm.

The meal that followed was just incredible, characterized by bold combinations of flavors used to create remarkably subtle overall effects. We began with a glass of champagne. First we were handed an amuse bouche of a small crostini with a slice of duck liver pate. That was followed by a bite of a watermelon and radish confection. Then we were brought a plate with one bite each of a lovely marinated and grilled tuna, a skewer of tomato and squid, and a tiny bowl of carrot soup with star anise. Neither of us generally enjoy anise, but the flavors combined so perfectly that we were both quite impressed.

Somewhere amid all this showing off by the chef, we got to order. We declined the E170 tasting menu and went a la carte instead. Jason ordered the grilled mussels with morel mushrooms in a light butter sauce and I asked for the house specialty of cream of artichoke soup with shaved black truffles and parmesan cheese with a mushroom-stuffed brioche with truffle butter on the side. We were therefore surprised when our waiter brought two portions of the mussels. I explained the mistake and he apologized, left the mussels with us and brought us each a half portion of the soup as our next course.

With our first courses, we were enjoying the sommelier’s recommendation of a half bottle of Meursault, a white varietal unfamiliar to us, but destined to become quite a favorite. With our mains, we split another half bottle, this one of Bordeaux. I was starting to write down the names when the sommelier offered us the labels, which he brought us in a Guy Savoy souvenir folder that we will add to our memorabilia to remind us of a fabulous gustatory experience.

For mains, Jason had a lovely roast lamb, carved tableside, over greens with tiny hunks of bacon, with a cheesy spinach and mushroom side dish. Mine was pigeon, poached to keep in the juices and then grilled to crisp the skin, served with pureed peas and spinach and drizzled with a sherry vinaigrette. On the side I was brought the pigeon gizzards in a napoleon (layers) of beet chips.

After those were cleared away and we declined the cheese course, they brought us a plate of petit fours, including a sliver of chocolate with a square of gelatin topped with currant, a berry meringue filled with berry mousse, a vanilla pastry shell filled with something creamy, and a candied fruit (one of those things that looks like a tomatillo, but is sweet—or so other people tell me; I find them so sour they send shivers down my spine, although that reaction was mitigated by the caramelized sugar coating this one), each one bite-sized. They also handed us a small caramel crisp encrusted with macadamia nuts and pink praline. For dessert (no, that wasn’t dessert, apparently) we split a millefeuille, layers of puff pastry filled with a vanilla cream, with just a few strawberries, currants and raspberries on the side. We declined coffee, protested that we were really quite finished and asked for the check. Before we could have that, they brought us two more small bites (which our waiter very sternly told us would help our digestion), one of Earl Grey sorbet (which was a revelation to Jason—he was close to tears) and a tiny sliver of apple tart. Whether it was those, or just the impeccable balance of the meal, we were both surprised to find ourselves only pleasantly full, not bloated at all.
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It is funny and a little humbling to me now how very little we understood about this level of dining, the gauche mistakes we made, and the opportunities lost. But the staff were very kind to us and we have learned so much since then, but that meal still stands out. A few years ago we were excited to try Guy Savoy’s new establishment in Las Vegas and terribly disappointed by the experience. Perhaps we will return to Paris one of these days…

Did you ever get lost as a child?

I can't recall that I ever got lost, in the sense of not knowing where I was, but my parents frequently lost me. At the mall they would sit me down in the children's section of the bookstore while they did their other errands and I would read happily until they came back. At least once that was after getting in the car to head home and realizing they'd forgotten something! We would get separated in crowds and they'd panic at not being able to find me, but I usually had just gotten distracted and was back along their path. My dad used to say that since he was generally the tallest person in a crowd, I should easily be able to see him and keep up with him, but it also meant he had the longest legs!

One of my favorite times of being "lost" was at the Washington Monument. We'd had a long day of touristing and then spent far longer than I had the attention span for touring the exhibit at the top. It was time for our group to descend, so we all got into the elevator and I scooted to the back and sat down on the floor. Mom got on, saw Beckie and said "Do you have Elizabeth?" I said "I'm here," but no one heard me. Beckie said no, so Mom asked Dad. I said "I'm here." Dad said no, and asked Beckie, who said no, and I hollered "I"m here! I'm at the back!" The doors closed and the attendant asked if anyone had any questions. One smart alec said "Only one! Who's Elizabeth?" and everyone laughed.

What was your dream car?

My oldest sister's first car was a green VW bug, rumored to have been previously owned by Tina Louise, who played Ginger on Gilligan's Island. It had no air conditioning and spotty heat, but I loved climbing in the back of that thing and heading off on adventures with Anne and her partner, George. We would go spelunking at Dungeon Rock in the Lynn Woods, or off to Block Island for a week in the summer. There was a whole phase where they were into grave rubbing and we'd spend afternoons picnicking in graveyards, taking rubbings of the more interesting gravestones on rice paper with hard wax crayons.

So perhaps it's not surprising that for many years my dream car was a VW bug. And not just any bug, but the convertible yellow one with leopard-print interiors that I occasionally saw tootling around Cambridge over the years. I don't remember anything about the driver, but I thought that car was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

I spent a lot more time in the back of bugs while I lived in Mexico. All the taxis were VW bugs painted black with yellow roofs. There were no meters--before you got in the car you negotiated the fare to your destination with the driver. Taxis were very cheap by my standards, so I ended up taking them a lot. I got into a conversation with one driver who said he wished he could speak English, because so many American tourists came to town and asked him questions about sites along their route that he couldn't answer. We worked out a deal where he made me a cassette tape of what words and phrases he needed and I dubbed in between the English translations. Apparently this was more helpful than I had thought, because for a while any time I got in a cab they asked me for a tape and I not only sold at least a couple dozen of them, but could generally count on free cab rides whenever I needed them.

I never have owned a bug, but I came close with my last car. The new MINI rolled out while Jason and I lived in London. We loved the "MINI Adventure" commercials, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH5MQLgpY7Y

They weren't for sale in the US when we moved back, but as soon as they were we got a gold one with a black roof. I loved driving that car--not only was it fun to drive and ridiculously easy to park, but I enjoyed how often people would roll down their windows at stoplights to tell me how much they liked it and ask questions about it. We drove it for twelve years, until our daughter's legs got so long that she had to sit cross-legged in her car seat to fit behind Jason.

Now I drive an Audi A3 e-tron, the hybrid electric. It drives well and is pretty cool from an environmental perspective, but on the outside it looks like yet another blue hatchback. I find I miss driving a car with personality and hope that by the time Alice goes off to college, MINI will be making electric cars once again.

Or maybe I'll finally get myself a vintage convertible yellow VW bug.