Had my husband lived beyond November 2018, today would have marked our forty-second anniversary. Ours was not a typical pairing, me, pretty fresh out of college and he in his late fifties. We met at the McCarter Theater, where I’d come home from a year abroad in Venice, lured by my good friend Susan, to a job as a dresser, then wardrobe supervisor on Play Memory, by Joanna Glass, directed by Hal Prince. It was in its pre-Broadway tryout in Princeton, New Jersey, and the cast was all New York based actors: Donald Moffat, Jo Henderson, Valerie Mahaffey, Jerry Mayer, James Greene, Edwin J. McDonough, Steven Moses, Rex Robbins, Marilyn Rockafellow and Curt Williams.

I met Jimmie, Jerry and Edwin during the course of their quick change out of the poker game into whatever the next scene was, and I facilitated a shoe change for Jerry, a hat and sweater hand off with Jimmie and frankly I don’t remember what with Edwin. Still, when people ask how we met, I’m forced to say “I was his dresser” which I know connotes something far more racy than the actual work interchanges were.

This is what Jimmie looked like when I met him. He was dishy and yes, thirty-three years older than I was.

He had a resume that had I known it would have intimidated me from even making friends. And yet, I knew immediately that Jimmie was unlike anyone I’d ever met. He was so grounded, calm and intelligent, seated in his third floor dressing room at the McCarter, where I’d climbed the stairs to deliver a bouquet of helium balloons from his then girlfriend. He was usually accompanied by his german shepherd, Jasper, who lay trustingly at his feet while Jimmie inked through the New York Times daily puzzle in his t-shirt and jeans, feet resting casually on the makeup table. Jasper remains the iconic dog for me when I think of all the dogs of my life. He was lean and friendly. Jimmie told me that he’d been stopped in the line at the bank on the upper west side by a woman who said, “He looks like he could do math.” Jimmie made me laugh; he was a runner, and so we ran together, frequently in Central Park, his long legs gamboling ahead of me. He was good for my health.

The show moved from the McCarter Theater to the Annenberg Theater in Philadelphia, where a group of us ran on a daily basis, and hung out at a local bar after the show. Jimmie and I sought each other out at the bar, and spent hours talking quietly about politics, art, theater and anything else we wanted to talk about. He was so easy to converse with and his kind eyes and great listening skills made me start to fall for him. Our first date at Bookbinder’s was comedically awkward and yet sealed our fate as a couple, and when the show closed, Jimmie and I worked together again, this time with me on the props crew of A Christmas Carol, again at the McCarter Theater. Again, thanks to my friend Susan.

Introducing him to my family proved a challenge, as his age put off my Dad and his wife, though my Mom I think could see that intervention was not going to be helpful. She was a wise woman. Jimmie and I met in late September of 1983, and were married on September 1, 1984, so things moved “apace” as they say. I moved in with him in his one bedroom apartment on the upper west side shortly after the New Year, and remember how I marveled at how “adults” didn’t just take off their clothes and drop them on the floor but hung them up in the closet, or put them in a hamper. How could I have spent four years in college, a year in Venice and still not have known that? Jimmie continued to work on the very short nine-day run of Play Memory at the Longacre Theater. Jasper and I walked down to the theater from 70th Street to meet him after the show came down. He was always working and I took work where I could get it, working at 2nd Stage as a props shopper, then sound operator, and we played poker and ate out with his friends, and generally enjoyed being together. I met his family, his two sisters, Kate and Claire, who were living on Cape Cod and running a bookstore there, and whom we visited every summer.

We married in a little church one street away from our apartment, and rode there in a limousine which had to stop short of the church because there were two large dumpsters parked in front. The reception which we paid for was at a restaurant long gone from W. 72nd St., called Paulson’s which had been our pre-marital hang out. Bruce Davison used to wait on us when we went there with Yvette Schumer, Jimmie’s manager, and she ordered with her gravelly voice: “Bring him a martini! We’ve got a live one!”

Work brought us to Los Angeles, first a production of The Iceman Cometh, which toured to Washington, D.C. before coming to the Huntington Hartford Theater on Vine (now the Ricardo Montelbán Theater). We stayed at the Magic Castle Hotel and again, Jasper and I walked down Hollywood Boulevard to pick up Jimmie after the shows. We ran together at the Hollywood Reservoir and then flopped sweatily down on our bed under the blades of a large ceiling fan in our suite at the Magic Castle Hotel. Eventually, we moved to Tarzana to rent a house there, and after Jimmie got his TV series, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, we purchased a small house in North Hollywood. I started working as a stage manager at the Pasadena Playhouse, Mark Taper Forum, and eventually the Geffen Playhouse, and Jimmie was working steadily on his TV shows, and some Regional Theater productions.

We adopted our son Christopher in 1993, and life as parents definitely suited us. Chris was a rambunctious child, and the inadvertent difference in our ages plus the irregularity of work as an actor meant that Jimmie was frequently at home to care for Chris while I worked and vice-versa. I take responsibility for introducing Chris to ice hockey at a young age. We went over to an ice rink in Van Nuys and watched some five-year-olds doing drills on the ice and Chris looked up at me and said, “I want to do that!” He’s never looked back and the 13 years between his being a mite and aging out of hockey were filled with team affiliations, lessons, travel, and general fun for his Dad and me. It was something we both genuinely treasured, our time with Chris and his teammates. The years rolled by, and we traveled for work, for hockey, and to visit family.

Chris grew up. He eschewed college and instead went to work for my brother, Larry, a commercial fisherman in San Francisco, and he loved the freedom and camaraderie of that work. He took a hiatus to Spain for about a year and worked over there.

When he returned to San Francisco, he met Whitney who was teaching in San Francisco. After a short time, he followed her to South Lake Tahoe when she took a short hiatus from work. Jimmie and I were thrilled when they announced that they were expecting, and we were in Tahoe on our first grandchild’s natal day and their ultimate wedding.

At this point, after so many years of marriage, the distance between our ages was catching up and I guess you could say that I was now good for Jimmie’s health. He turned 80; we celebrated at a party in NY. At 89 he played Nag again in a production of Endgame at the Kirk Douglas Theater, and I was reminded of the one-car early days in Los Angeles when I drove him to the studio where they shot Molly Dodd now as I drove him to Culver City for some of his performances. He wrote a memoir, and we celebrated the publishing of that book on his ninetieth birthday.

The final years were filled with close care and ultimately, great loss when he passed away quietly at almost 92. We had been married for 34 years and until the last few weeks after he had taken a fall, we continued to celebrate the fates that had brought us together so many years before. I continue to celebrate that incredibly lucky meeting. And Susan, depicted above with Jimmie.

Since his death, I like to think that I am paying tribute to our marriage by keeping focused on our family, my writing, occasional work and his memory. The memories of the pain of declining health and the difficult stages of the end of life has passed, I’m happy to say, and what is left is the bounty and richness of our lives together. Happy 42nd Anniversary, Jimmie!