Talk to me about your relationship with alcohol. Oh, gosh, it's a complicated question. So my

relationship with alcohol started very young. I started drinking, or I had my first drink when I was in

middle school. I don't know if this is something that 12-year-olds do these days, but back in my day,

12-year-olds drank, or at least they did it in my school. And I loved it. I loved it from the very beginning,

even before I was sort of old enough to appreciate the taste of a good glass of wine or a cold

beer. I like the effect. And so I drank in high school. I drank more in college. And by the time

I was out of college, I was a barfly. So I spent a lot of time sitting on bar stools from 4 p.m. until late at night, oftentimes with men who were, because these were the sort of people who would be at bars drinking during the day, like men in their 50s and 60s. These were, these were my people. And I lived like that for a really long time.

I was a party girl. So I was a lot of fun back in those days. I gradually got less fun.

The more my drinking accelerated by the time I quit in my late 30s, early 40s, I wasn't a party girl anymore.

Most of my drinking was done solo and in secrets. But that was it.

And this was not, this was not abnormal among my, my peers and my friends. My life was lived in bars.

This is what my friends and I did. And there were, of course, consequences to this. Some of them

pretty terrible. I went to the hospital a couple times. I very memorably burned down a porch at one point. I had trouble. I see your brow is sort of furrowing here. Do you want to know how I burned out a porch?

Yes. So this was actually one of the times when I was, I thought I was being a good girl. So I stayed home on like a weekday night, which was rare to me at this period of my life. This was in my late, or my mid-20s. I spent, when I say I was a bar fly, I was at the bar almost every day. And luckily this was at a time when Papp's Blue Ribbon was a buck 50, you tipped 50 cents. So I was not, didn't have, my bar tabs were hefty for the amount of money that I was making, but still, my drinks were cheap. And so I stayed home one night thinking I'm doing the right thing. And I was also a smoker. And I, uh, and ironically, I was, I was watching, uh watching this, this fantastic television show. I can't remember

what it was called it. It was about the NY, the New York City Fire Department. Dennis Lurie was in it.

So I was drinking at home by myself, taking regular cigarette breaks and watching this TV show.

And on one of my cigarette breaks, I failed to extinguish a

cigarette. I just, like, left it burning outside. And I lived in an apartment building. I walked

outside. I saw some smoke and, like, a fairly significant hole in the wall where the vinyl

siding had started to melt. I went and got a glass of water first, tried that

splashed on. It didn't work. Went and got the fire extinguisher. Tried that. That didn't quite work.

It was still burning. And then I called 911 and they said, you know, this is 911. This is 911.

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