The last three years I was in New York, I lived in Hell’s Kitchen on West 47th Street. In the photo below, I’m on the left with my friend, Gary McCleery, an actor. He and I moved furniture together with other actors and writers, rock-and-rollers, painters, sculptors, dancers, and divinity students.

After five years, I felt I had to escape New York, and I moved to Santa Fe. I began reviewing films for the Santa Fe Reporter and kept working on my plays. In May 1984, Willis and Sons, a comic drama set in the Adirondacks, was presented as a staged reading at the Armory for the Arts. Mary Pinto (now Mary Hays), the theatre critic for the town’s other paper, The New Mexican, interviewed me while we were in the midst of rehearsals. Then, after attending the performance, she came back stage and gave me a kiss. That was a good sign, I thought.

Three days later, Mary’s story (below) came out in the paper. Two months later, we embarked on a camping trip to Montana. Two years after that, we were married. Three decades later, we live happily in the Vermont town 10 miles from where she spent idyllic childhood summers at her aunt’s farm.