Son of a Siberian Sasquatch

I have an "ex." Well, actually, I have two (officially), but the other was a long time ago.

When I refer to SSS, it's short for the above title, and the affectionate name by which I refer to my ex. I met him in 1971, and he promised to take me away from my rotten and boring life, to the exotic wilds of Texas. Who knew we'd wind up in Gary, Indiana and Chicago for three years before we managed to get back to Texas?

We settled into Austin on July 4th, 1976. Slightly less than a year later, we had a baby. I'd had hints already that he wasn't the Prince I thought he was. But, I was a long way from home, with a child, and then another, and I enabled him in his campaign to reduce me to a contemptible creature, dependent upon him for my support, physical, financial and emotional.

And then one day I saw an ad in the local paper, asking for people to audition for a role in Neil Simon's "Odd Couple" at the local community theater. I went on down, and, trembling, read for the part. The theater was quite new at the time and they couldn't get the six men needed to produce the play, so they did a different one. They asked me to come back later in the year to audition for another English accent play, this time, Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians." The role I landed was small (Ethel Rogers, the housekeeper), but I received much positive reinforcement from the director and the cast and crew, including performing one scene live on local TV. I was never getting back in the box SSS had kept me in for the previous 12 years. He knew it, I knew it, and it took just two more years for the relationship to fizzle out. When I left for the Texas Baptist Children's Home Family Program, he had been unemployed for the better part of a year. He shot himself in the foot with every job interview. I was slowly building a cleaning clientele, and he was lying in wait behind the door when I came home from work, so he could grab my earnings and buy beer, while he relied on food stamps to feed the girls. We were evicted from two houses over that Summer/Fall, and by that time, TBCH looked really good. I had figured out that the man was an alcoholic, and a mean and sloppy drunk with it. He was also a chronic womanizer. I knew it was going on. I even enabled that! But when my self-esteem started to rise, thanks to the theater, I decided that I didn't have to live like that, and didn't want the girls to live like that, and it was time to see if I could improve the situation on my own. With some help.

Sam Bass Theater
Texas Baptist Children's Home
Jeannie Loving
Mary Lee Harris
Betty Porter

These are the people that helped me find my feet and stand on them.

Thank you all so very much!