I Bought My Divorce At A Charity Auction

At A Charity Auction, No Less

I recently celebrated 31 years of marriage and 30 years sobriety, so I am happily married and relatively content with life and living. We share a wonderful daughter, age 28, who is pursuing her dreams in Hollywood. However, I was not always happy and content.

My first marriage began in December 1967 at the Tarrytown House in Tarrytown, New York. My first bride, Susan, was a summa cum laude graduate of William Smith College, smart, warm, caring, an aspiring actress, and working for Fawcett Publications in Manhattan. I was just a loud graduate of Hobart College, where I found all of the bars, then my first job had me trying out teaching unsuccessfully in the mid-Hudson Valley.

I became a case worker in New York, decided I needed a “professional” education if I were going to be able to help people. It is a long story, but we found ourselves in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where I was a clinical social work student at LSU for two years. Susie worked in advertising and developed a solid career. She also began studies for a PhD, which she eventually did complete. God, what a smart woman, except, of course, for marrying me.

I found a job totally outside my training. Rather than clinical social work, sort of a junior psychiatrist, I worked with a statewide agency developing regional and statewide plans for improved emergency medical services. Heady stuff: public policy, research, surveys, grants, and lots of time traveling around Louisiana. Yet again, I knew the bars all too well.

Susan and I drifted apart, no animosity, no ill will, simply no longer a fit. We let our families know we were separating and anticipating being divorced. Despite the amicable nature of our split, it was a wrenching, God awful experience. What a feeling of shame and abject failure, but it was what it was. We were going our separate ways.

And then I attended a charity fundraiser in Baton Rouge. I came away with two successful bids: first, an oil painting, a nude, done by Don Wight in 1973. Bought it for $50. It is worth in the neighborhood of $1,500 today and sits in the back of my closet. Second, the piece de resistance and the real story: I bid on and won a lawyer’s offer of his services for “a will or an uncontested divorce.” I am perhaps the only person in the country that paid for his divorce this way. Susie and I flipped a coin in his office to see who would be the “bad guy” and I won (or lost), and we went on to completing the divorce with both of us living in different states, Susie in Michigan, and me in New York..