My love story began in the summer of 1989. Somehow I had fallen into a career as an international model, much like I stumbled upon a job at a restaurant back home in Maryland. I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I never would have thought of modeling as something that I would ever do. I wasn’t tall and I wasn’t what I would consider pretty, if anything I was interesting looking. Regardless, in the summer of 1989 while I was living in a pensione in Milan, I fell in love with a golden guy from California. Our chance meeting and romance blossomed into something that we both wanted to make work once we had returned back to the United States. We agreed that this would be a great story to tell our grandchildren... someday.
Long distance relationships in the late 1980s were constrained by expensive long distance telephone calls and the slow pace of, what we now call, “snail mail.” I was based out of New York, and my golden guy was west coast, through and through. I flew out to California to visit when we were back in the States, and I immediately crafted a plan to move to the west coast as soon as possible. I had a car that was my own, it was a gift from my deceased father, and I had already lived abroad in three other countries. So at the very least, this was going to be an adventure.