Transcription of Commitment #64
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 64, Commitment. Airing for the first time on December 2, 2012 on WLOB and WPEI Radio Portland, Maine.
In today’s show we feature three committed couples. Our first guests are civic leader Elliot Cutler and Dr. Melanie Cutler. We also have musicians Carolyn Mix and Darcy Doniger founders of Two Note Botanical Perfumery, and photographer Kevin Brusie, and film maker Sharon Paul Brusie.
As we move into the holiday season we thought it would be nice to focus on what keeps people together. A little bit of something that gets a lot of attention from popular film. It’s a romantic notion. We all like to fall in love but what keeps us in love? When we move in and out of love, which happens over the course of a lifetime with someone, what keeps us coming back? Our conversations today, we believe, will give you some insight into this process. We hope you enjoy our conversations with Elliot and Melanie Cutler, Carolyn Mix and Darcy Doniger, and Kevin and Sharon Paul Brusie.
As our listeners may remember we spent some time talking about the topic of family transitions in a recent show and I thought it would be very interesting, and actually my friend, Genevieve, former co-host Genevieve Morgan, also thought it would be interesting to talk about transitions of the family in a different way with people who have transitioned themselves but have continued to stay married through thick and thin, through I guess good times and bad. Hopefully not too many bad times. Actually one relatively public figure and one figure that I think is seen around the community a lot that may not consider herself quite as public, and this is Elliot Cutler who is a civic leader and well-known for many things within the community and Dr. Melanie Cutler who is a psychiatrist. We really appreciate your coming in and talking about your own interesting marital transitions which have kind of required you to have an ongoing commitment to each other.
Elliot: Good to be here, and they do.
Dr. Lisa: Very nice to hear.
Melanie: Many transitions over many years.
Dr. Lisa: Let me talk a little bit about this and you as individuals. I think a lot of people, Elliot, are familiar with you so I’ll start with Melanie.
Elliot: Good idea.
Dr. Lisa: For those people who are listening who haven’t read the Maine Magazine profile of Elliot, they can go back and look at that online and that gives a lot of information, and we’ll let you talk too.
Elliot: That’s all right. I do enough of that.
Dr. Lisa: Well, you know you’re probably used to it. Dr. Cutler, how did you get yourself into this whole situation?
Melanie: The marriage, you mean? Is that the situation you’re referring to?
Dr. Lisa: I’m going to go with yes. That situation, yeah.
Melanie: Elliot and I met almost 40 years ago and we were both in law school. He, purportedly, he tells the story to everyone. I’m not sure it’s more apocryphal than real but that he followed me around into the law school library where he had never been.
Elliot: It’s true.
Melanie: And the rest is history.
Elliot: I checked you out and never returned you.
Melanie: What was interesting about our legal careers early on was that, Elliot very much wanted to come back to Maine when he finished law school and when we decided to get married there was that initial commitment. I agreed, despite it not being my expected career path, to look for jobs in Maine. We did that and after a very difficult and disillusioning search decided not to come to Maine. We went to New York because not a single, actually not a single woman that I’m aware of was offered a job in the legal community in Portland in 1974 when I finished law school and I was among one of a few, I think well-qualified women. None of whom was offered a job. Rather than looking further for some token position, Elliot actually said “This is not what we should do.” I had a great job offer in New York. He found it easy to procure one and off we went. That was really the reason why we didn’t come back to Maine in the 70’s. Then it was our careers both took off in various directions. We were in New York for a while. Then we were in Washington and it wasn’t until I was finishing medical school and needed to apply for residency positions that we had a good opportunity to come back here many years later. Lots of water over the dam between then and now.
Dr. Lisa: Let me ask you, Elliot, what was it like to be with the woman that you followed into the law school library and went into the legal profession together with and then have her kind of say “No, I’m going to go back to medical school and I’m going to do something different.” What was that like?
Elliot: Well …
Melanie: He was the catalyst.
Elliot: Yeah, I guess that’s fair to say. I was the catalyst for it. Melanie was a very successful lawyer. She was, she’ll deny this, but she was probably the leading antitrust lawyer, young woman antitrust lawyer for generations. She was head of the energy section and the antitrust division. Just, she was a really good lawyer and she hated it. When our son was three, I think, she said “I’ve had it and I’m going to stay home with Zach.” But staying home was not a career path that was going to last very long for her.
Her father, like my father, had been a doctor and she had really always wanted to be a doctor, not a lawyer, but her father had discouraged her from that thinking that it wasn’t a good career for a woman at the time. He may have been right then but by this time it was the right thing to do and so I encouraged her to go. I said take some pre-med courses at American University and just see how it goes because she had never had any of the sciences that she needed to go to medical school. I think you got straight A’s didn’t you, in pre-med courses?
Melanie: I think I got a B in physics.
Elliot: You got a B in physics. Anyway, she did very well and she applied to medical schools and she went to medical school and that was a major transition because we had two young children. My job entailed a considerable amount of traveling and she was in medical school which is a really hard road to hoe. We got through it. It was a pretty good test, I think, at that time.
Then, I had always wanted to come back to Maine and as Melanie said that was an opportunity to do her residency here and we did and so we came back here in 1999.
Melanie: I figured as old as I was at the time that I was finishing med school if I didn’t do residency here I was going to have no credibility in this community. In retrospect that may not have been true but it seemed very important to get back here and it was an opportunity to do that.
Elliot: You know that was just one of many transitions because when we came back here I merged my law firm into a big international firm on the condition that I could commute back and forth between here and Washington which I did for several years. Then, the firm asked me to go to Beijing to open our office in Beijing. We moved here. We loved living here. We built this house we loved. Melanie was …
Melanie: I had just finishing fellowship training.
She was building a practice and here along came this opportunity to go to Beijing which she said “We got to do this.”
I had said, “Look, if we go to Beijing we’ll spend more time together because I won’t be traveling as much.” I used to travel every week for my job. Not only Washington but to Spain or to California or wherever I had to be. I said “Look, if we’re in Beijing we’ll be together all the time. Won’t that be great?” Well, that’s not the way it worked out. We spent three years in Beijing. One year I made 14 round trips back to the United States. I was in Europe. I was all over the place in Asia and so it didn’t work out quite the way we’d intended but it was still, I think for both of us, a very rewarding experience.
Then just as we were coming back and looking forward to spending time together in Maine, I decided to run for Governor.
Melanie: I think one really important thing, I mean Elliot deserves credit also for the fact that while he agreed to Beijing for his firm he conditioned his agreement to do that on my finding something worthwhile. Having just finished medical training I was not about to throw that over and that ended up being quite easy and I had a wonderful job in Beijing for those years. I was, as it turned out, the only western trained psychiatrist serving the expat population during that time out of the big American joint venture hospital there. That was fascinating. I would never have had that opportunity, but the theme pact throughout our marriage has been … it was meant to be let’s take turns. He came to New York for me because I couldn’t find a job here. Then I went to Washington when he was offered a job there. Then, ultimately, he wanted to come back here but so did I and then when he wanted to go to Beijing, we found a way to make that work. I think had we not managed those kinds of compromises and transitions that we would have had a very difficult time because we were both pretty driven and pretty ambitious and also mindful, frankly, of the role models we were setting for our kids.
Elliot: I think also that you, when you set out on a course like this and the notion is you’re going to take turns. Well, it’s not like a game of checkers. I mean the turns don’t come on some regular pattern and you say “Well, now it’s your turn and then it’s my turn.” That’s not the way it works so you have to adjust, as Melanie says, and you have to adapt and you can’t keep score. You absolutely can’t keep score because if you keep score someone is going to be resentful and that’s not to say there haven’t been times when we’ve, one or the other of us has been p.o.’d or resented the other or been faced with a choice where there was no good answer, but you can’t keep score. You just got to keep saying this was what we set out to do and we’re going to figure out how to make it work.
There’s another piece to this though that ought to be said. Yes, we’ve made a very strong commitment to each other and to our children, but our ability to do this, to fulfill these commitments, to survive the challenges, to adapt and move on is also a matter of luck. We’ve had opportunities that others aren’t as lucky to have and so the challenges with which we’ve been confronted and with which our children may be confronted are challenges that are somewhat easier for us to resolve and to overcome than for other people. I’ve always believed that opportunity is the secret sauce and if you don’t have opportunity no matter what your skill level is, no matter what your innate talents are the challenges can be that much greater and sometimes crippling. For us to sit here and talk about our successes in maintaining this commitment, and I don’t want to get too political here, but we’re very lucky. We are really, really lucky and other people ought to have the same kind of opportunity.
Dr. Lisa: You said, “not to get too political”, but I think we can’t really pass up the chance to talk with Melanie very briefly about what it was like to be married to somebody …
Elliot: It won’t be brief.
Dr. Lisa: OK. I’m just interested. I mean you have your own career. You have this family. You a place in the community. You’re your own person. What was it like to be with somebody who was running for political office?
Melanie: What is it like?
Dr. Lisa: Yes, I guess, what is it like
Melanie: He’s playing the role he’s playing. I have a lot of ambivalence, did have a lot of ambivalence about it and still do. I firmly believe in what Elliot was trying to do, is trying to do, so I wanted in every way I could to support him without in anyway undermining my own kind of integrity and authenticity. Elliot, without regard to the politics is a much more extroverted person who plays to the external audience and who cares greatly about what’s going on in the world and I’m much more of an introvert, and even the work I do is much more introspective and requires, frankly, a huge degree of privacy and confidentiality in order for patients to feel safe, in order for me to do the work, so I was extremely worried about the impact of his campaign potentially on my work and it did become an issue to some extent. I felt that I had to discuss it with patients in case they should, for example, hear me or see me publicly and weren’t aware of any of this and that was a little uncomfortable but it was also important and good learning.
I’m sure that we’ll face the same thing going forward. I do worry about what’s the ultimate impact on my practice.
Elliot: That wasn’t an announcement.
Melanie: Well, you’re out there in the public sector doing what you’re doing now, it doesn’t matter whether you’re running for office. Constantly having to draw that line and walk a balance is a challenge and it’s a daily challenge, frankly. I’ve made peace with it. I actually didn’t intend to get as involved in the campaign as I ended up doing last time but I was so passionately interested in some of the issues both in terms of health care and in arts that weren’t getting. I didn’t have the full attention and manpower that was needed to do a good job that I got drawn into doing more than I intended and I found that it was gratifying, important, worthwhile, and that I enjoyed it more than I thought I would and that I thought I could balance it, and again, one never knows if there’s some rationalizing going on in order to make it OK to do what you want to do. It just has to be something that you take a day at a time and there may come some kind of watershed moment where there’s a difficulty that we have to work through and I don’t know. I’ve stopped worrying about it, frankly.
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Dr. Lisa: There’s two things that I get out of this, one is that it feels like each of you have had to stretch at various times beyond the boundaries of your comfort zones as individuals and also as a couple, and two is that you continually agree to sort of re-up. That you say OK, we’re going to keep talking about this. We’re going to renegotiate. We’re going to try to figure this out. You don’t look at your relationship as a static thing.
Elliot: No. No one should assume from what we’re saying or what they imagine that it’s a piece of cake. I mean we’ve had some crisis in our lives and in our marriage and we’ve had challenge and we’ve had arguments and we’ve had disagreements but you have to just keep working at it and you have to be forgiving.
Melanie: I think the two most important things to longevity are a sense of humor and an ability, willingness to compromise. It’s funny even in my work I tell my patients … it’s kind of ironic: I think long married or couples or couples who’ve been together whether married or not for a long time have a tendency to assume they can read one another’s minds and that explicit communication isn’t necessary. Indeed I know lots of people, myself included, who will sometimes feel that well, if you don’t know me well enough by now to know what it is I need or want or am thinking then this is a disaster.
Elliot: You’ve said that to me.
Melanie: If you can’t fulfill these needs of mine without my having to ask for them then what is this relationship all about? Actually, that’s such a juvenile approach to a relationship. Really you have to be explicit. You also have to know what you need and be willing to ask for it and to say it. I think this tendency to mind read or to think you can mind read your partner just because you’ve been together for a long time, that notion of predictability is a terrible mistake. It’s very important to keep communicating. It’s scary. Even for long-coupled partners to constantly put that on the table, I think.
Dr. Lisa: Do you have any final thoughts for people who are listening as we’ve been thinking about family transitions. Family transitions sort of outside of marriage was a past show. This is family transitions within a marriage. Well, within a coupling. Let’s just call it coupling. Any relationship. Any final thoughts?
Elliot: Sure. Marriages are like Maine’s roads. They’re bumpy but they take you to beautiful places.
Melanie: I can’t top that.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I would very much agree with that. As an almost lifelong Mainer myself, I’ve been on many of these roads and it sounds like you have navigated the bumpy roads quite well so I appreciate your coming in and talking with us today.
Elliot: It’s good to be here. Thanks for having us.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. Well, it’s good to have people out in the world doing things that they each believe in and also believing in a relationship so strongly. We’ve been talking with, we’re going to call you civic leader, Elliot Cutler.
Elliot: Call me anything, it doesn’t matter.
Dr. Lisa: And his spouse Dr. Melanie Cutler.
Melanie: Thank you.
Elliot: Thanks.
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Dr. Lisa: Today’s show on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is about commitment and about what it takes to sort of transition through a life with another person, hopefully by your side, sometimes long distance but still with you in spirit. I have two women in front of me. Lovely women who own a store down just across the street in the Old Port called Two Notes. They are also musicians and also have been long time partners. This is Darcy Doniger and Carolyn Mix and I’m so pleased that you’re in here talking about commitment.
Carolyn: We are so pleased to be here, Lisa. Thank you for having us.
Dr. Lisa: I should put out there for people who are listening that I went into your store. I had a bit of a cold and I got a … I think it was lavender and eucalyptus bath salts and Darcy said throw some of this on the floor of your shower and it’s going to help clean up you sinuses. I couldn’t really smell it very well but I used it for a few days and it actually did. It actually was quite helpful. It smells great.
Darcy: Sometimes I tell the truth.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. Well, it was the truth for me. Let’s talk about this. You have so many different ways in which the two of you have sort of intertwined your lives and you’re sitting across from me and you’re even intertwined now which is beautiful to see. This is something … it’s been a conscious decision, I think, on your part and something that you kind of keep reevaluating and keep doing because you play music together. You have a business together. You have a life together. Why did you make this big decision, sort of when this whole thing started?
Carolyn: That’s a great question and one that I’m not even sure that we’ve contemplated much. It was just more instinctual than anything and when we fell in love with each other we both truly believed that we were soul mates meant to be together. When we took that leap we just started running and we’ve never stopped. We also happen to be extremely creative spirits and we feed off of each other everyday. Every idea, every conversation we have is just something that perpetually leads to the next step and for the most part we have so much fun with that. We thrive off of each other’s energy. I think it’s also an energy thing. We’re very inspiring to the other person.
Darcy: Carolyn is a wealth of ideas. They never stop, so my job in this relationship is to try to actually make them happen because she’ll come up with another and another and another and that’s both musically and in the business. Actually in our life in general. I sometimes tease and say Carolyn is the substance of the two of us and I’m the fluff. She is the melody. I’m the harmony in our music. She is the genius behind everything in our shop and I make it look pretty.
Carolyn: Well she more than makes it look pretty. She makes it happen. I like to say that all of my ideas would be sitting dusty inside my medicine cabinet if it weren’t for her bringing them to life. With the business I had been dabbling in aromatherapy and natural perfumery for many years before I met Darcy and I would just make gifts for friends, for weddings, I had a few perfume commissions, and largely I did it for my own health reasons and just enjoyment. I love scent. I only love natural scent. I love things that exist out in the woods and the gardens and when she caught wind of what I was doing I was making a perfume for a friend’s wedding. We were flying to Seattle for a wedding and I was consulting her on the phone and we were picking the notes and she became absolutely intrigued by it and our flight out to Seattle.
Darcy: Seven hour flight was to convince her to turn it into a business.
Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah, that was very early on in our relationship and Darcy has a very entrepreneurial spirit. I come from a family of entrepreneurs and I think it was only natural that that was the next step in my life. I was a full time musician when we met and unfortunately was suffering from some health issues due to music. Some physical issues around playing the violin which is a very challenging instrument, physically. After this idea came to life we kept breathing on it and it kept growing and, I don’t know, six months later we had a storefront, started developing product.
Darcy: Yeah, the musical connection in what we’ve created at Two Note is often referred to as kind of having all of our passions under one roof. I think that in general that’s the way we’ve designed our life. It’s not to be together every minute but it’s to have a life that is designed to bring out the best in each of us and actually challenge us to work together always, even when separate. Even when it’s my part of the business or my part of our musical career is completely independent of Carolyn. It still affects her. Everything I do in a given day also has an effect on her, and you either love or hate that. For me, it’s the best of me.
Dr. Lisa: That’s why it’s interesting that you referred to substance and fluff because when you were in the store, and I think I’m on Carolyn’s side on this, I would say that it really is more as you’ve described, this melody and harmony in the store. You said that Carolyn was more the melody. You were more the harmony and I’m a singer and I tend to also sing harmony but I don’t ever consider myself just the fluff. I consider myself fairly integral to the piece, so it does sound to me like this interaction is very musical in some ways. It’s sort of there’s a counterpoint that occurs. There’s a timing that needs to happen, so it’s interesting but this also must require a constant sort of reading of each other.
Carolyn: Oh, that is interesting. Yeah, and I think we’ve tweaked it over the past seven years. In our first year of business we were literally spending 12 hours of every day together trying to make the business happen and now, fast forward to seven years later, you’ll rarely find us actually together for long periods of time because we are doing our counterparts.
Darcy: Yeah.
Carolyn: To the family, to the business, and to music and one person may be doing the entrepreneurial thing at the shop and the other person is most likely at home practicing.
Darcy: The response always to my fluff comment, and by the way I have no lack of ego, because fluff is necessary and that’s everybody’s reaction to it. Is always well, but you need the fluff. I am necessary and the melody is emptier without a harmony beneath it, so I’m really comfortable with that role. I don’t think it makes me less than, but I love being an accompaniment.
Carolyn: I’d like to talk about scent and attraction a little bit and couples that come into our shop. We are, after being in business for almost seven years I think I will end up writing a book one day because the stories are fascinating. Around what people are attracted to, to wear themselves in relation to what they think will be attractive to their partner and sometimes those are very different and couples will have a disagreement in the shop.
I always ask people when they’re trying on a scent to ask themselves two questions. A, do you like the scent of it and B, would you like to smell like that? Two very different things. We don’t usually want to smell like apple pie but we may like the scent of it. I try to work with couples. We try to work with couples to find something that resonates between the two of them rather than, you know we could wear scents for different reasons. Maybe we have a daily wear that we like to wear that makes us feel energetic and stimulated when we’re working during the day but maybe we have something more sensual and romantic for date night. That’s what we’ll talk about and talk with couples about.
I think I find it interesting that by and large here in America we’re always trying to cover up scent and we’ve also dichotomized scent in a very gendered way so there are male scents and female scents. So much more often than not I have women kind of whispering to me “This may sound weird but I really actually prefer men’s scents to women’s scents.” We like to say that we don’t blend for gender per say, and I truly don’t. When I’m inventing a perfume it’s not about that at all. It’s telling a story of sorts. I’m not thinking that men will wear it or women will wear it and there have been many instances that we’ve actually had a couple, a heterosexual couple, fall in love with the same scent. Actually a same sex couple, this has happened many times as well.
In natural perfumery, our chemistry plays a huge role unlike a synthetic. CK1’s going to by and large smell the same. You will recognize it on a man, a woman. They were designed that way.
Darcy: It’s designed to be recognized when it walks by you. Everybody can say oh, that’s Chanel No. 5 or that’s CK1. It might fluctuate a little bit from person to person but by and large that’s the marketing behind it. It’s so that it’s recognizable and you go buy it. The thing about our fragrances is that they are so unique to you. Carolyn will often say in the shop, “You’re the third note. You change everything.” Once that fragrance is on you it becomes uniquely yours because you chemistry then does its thing, so we have, let’s say, two couples come in, a couple actually. Two people. One may be of sort of Irish, fair skin, cooler body temperature and somebody Mediterranean like me whose body temperature runs high, oilier content to my skin. You put the same fragrance on the two of us and you would never, never know.
Then there’s the whole memory trigger that scent has which can also change the look on someone’s face when they smell their partner. If it smells like their mom, not so good. I mean we love mom but not a sensual thing. Then the same thing can happen, they smell something on their partner and it could be either that it actually just brings out their own scent, that scent that they love so much about that person. Not covering it.
Dr. Lisa: The biological.
Darcy: Yeah. Yeah, playing off of it, not covering it. Not becoming sonata on you but what sonata does when it blends with your chemistry and what does it bring out in you? The salt in your skin, the smell that you get behind someone’s ears, you know just these sort of beautiful things that are unique to each person that I think we work with or at least the perfumes work with as opposed to just sort of blanketing.
Carolyn: That’s part of the musicality of it too. Is that there is that resonance. I think that there are wavelengths happening there between a person’s own chemistry and the chemistry of the plant material. I don’t think that you get that when you have hundreds of chemical compounds that are synthesized to create a modern-day fragrance. I really like that difference and I like educating people about it.
The scent industry is ruled by something called trade secret and when I say the scent industry it’s the entire fragrance industry including things like fabric softener and dish soap and any major brand you can think of that is associated with scent or cleaning. I like to say that we’ve invented the scent of clean. If we think about the smell in a fabric softener that’s not something that actually exists in nature and many of the synthetic scents these days are actually a by-product of the petroleum industry. Those by-products create very sweet scents and that’s what you will find can be manipulated into many different modern commercial fragrances and because the industry is ruled by trade secret anytime you see the word perfume or fragrance that can literally mean 400 different chemicals. We will never, as consumers, know what those are because legally the companies don’t have to reveal them.
I like to try to pass that information along. That’s where “products with a conscience” comes into play with our business and our life. Our identity, we feel like we need to be doing our part with our business, and we love our brand. We love the creative aspects of it, but that’s where the ethical aspects are too.
Darcy: Yeah, and also the uniqueness because we don’t want everybody who leaves the shop to smell the same and that’s what I think all those other products are designed to do. Getting back to attraction, if we all smelled the same we’d be confused. There has to be something about that person. Sure, they might be wearing a little something. It’s kind of like an outfit you know? We accentuate. You wear something that you feel beautiful in and that might accentuate certain things about you. It’s not a suit that when you take it off there’s an entirely different being underneath and that’s what we want our fragrances to be. That you can still detect what’s unique about you and it’s different on every person. The individuality part of it is something that’s really important to us.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that if people continue to resonate with each other’s scent, their authenticity, their living with a conscience, do you think that that’s part of what enables people to stay committed to one another as a couple?
Darcy: Oh yes. For me, yes. Yes.
Carolyn: For me as well. Yes. I think that more in touch you are with yourself and your spouse on those levels, on those wavelengths, absolutely the greater chance you have of sustaining your relationship and I think that we’re living in a society with a 50% divorce rate. We happen to be a gay couple but we’ve been together for going on seven years. We would love to get married legally and I think being in the position we’re in has caused us to think a lot about what it means to be committed in business, in our personal life, in our musical lives, and going from that place rather than a place of taking each other for granted which I think I see. Culturally, in society, I think there’s a lot of things being taken for granted. Our health being one of them. Our relationships. Maybe our families and …
Darcy: And next new things. Next new thing. Whatever the next new thing is and that’s why I think you can just lose the person, the essence of what you fell for if it’s just always the next new thing. That whole sort of scent thing, so much in life can change about a person. Their size, their hair color, their job, where we live, but no matter what in this very sort of sensual, primal way she smells the same to me and that can take me back to day one in a way that nothing else can. Sometimes we all love to go back to day one. The minute somebody walks in the room it changes and that can still happen seven years later. Some of that is not just the visual it’s the smell.
Dr. Lisa: Well I think this is a perfect place to end this with you. I know we could talk for such a long time on the subject because you have so many different ways of looking at this. You’re so thoughtful about the way that you approach this and the way that you live your lives and approach your business, so we thank you for coming in and talking to us about commitment.
We’ve been talking with Carolyn Mix and Darcy Doniger of Two Note and also local musicians as well. Well, local and probably more than local musicians here in the state of Maine. We’re very fortunate to have you in the studio and living in Portland with us.
Darcy: Thank you.
Carolyn: Thank you, Lisa.
Speaker 1: We’ll return to our interview after acknowledging the following generous sponsors.
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Dr. Lisa: Today’s show is about commitment and we’re talking with couples who are committed to each other in different ways. I met Sharon and Kevin I think about two years ago on a rooftop at a party for a mutual friend. At the time we didn’t know each other very well but Sharon and I had sort of crossed paths and sort of knew of each other so you’ve been in my consciousness, let’s just say.
When I thought of couples that are committed to each other I thought of you in part because you’re not just married. You’re married and you work together and that’s its own set of very interesting I don’t want to say challenges, but maybe I will.
Thank you for coming in. We’re talking to Kevin and Sharon Paul Brusie. We’re glad to have you here today.
Sharon: We’re thrilled to be here.
Kevin: Pleasure to be here.
Sharon: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: It’s interesting for you because you were just saying to John, our audio guru, that you’re usually on the other side of the microphone and the other side of the editing situation, so you do this for your … in part for what you do for a living.
Sharon: Absolutely. Yeah, it feels like there’s a trust process. There’s developing some sort of trust because we want to be open and honest and reveal who we really are, so let’s see how far that goes.
Dr. Lisa: I think there is a lot that can be revealed because I know that you do something very similar to what I do and you kind of collect stories. The two of you do. Kevin, you’re a photographer. You’ve been a photographer for a long time and Sharon you’re a filmmaker and part of what you do is kind of collect these stories from other people whether it’s still or motion photography and kind of send them out there into the world. Is this something that drew the two of you together?
Kevin: Not initially. I mean we did meet on a photo set but that’s not really … we came together I think … I think it was just one of those things. We had met eight years prior back in 1994, but I was married. Sharon was in a relationship. She was on a photo set with me and we clicked. There was lots of people around, all kinds of things going on, but there was something about her that stood out and she stayed in my memory. Eight years later I literally just bumped into her and she had said at that point she was thinking of me because she needed new head shots or something. Then we went out to dinner and haven’t been apart since.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been married for how long?
Kevin: Ten years.
Sharon: Yeah, ten years in January.
Kevin: Ten years in January.
Sharon: Yeah. Yeah. We got married on a lake. He had built a post-and-beam in Rangeley so we got married out on the lake. My friend, my best friend from childhood became a notary, married us. The kids were the music and the flowers. The dog was the ring bearer. You know, we kept it very simple because it’s our second marriage for both of us.
Dr. Lisa: Well tell me what that’s like. What is it like to try to build sort of another life after you’ve had one life with a prior spouse? Now you’re getting together building a second life or maybe even it’s a third or fourth life or at least this is this life together for the two of you. What has that been like for you?
Kevin: Well, may I?
Sharon: Yes.
Kevin: I think that in the first marriage, when that ends, when you step back from it and you get away from it you kind of look at yourself and you say OK, something didn’t happen right there. Whether it was you married for the wrong reasons or you weren’t as true to the marriage as you needed to be within it. Then you stop and you kind of look at yourself and say if I’m going to do this again I have to really do some self-examination, where was I screwing up? No matter what happens in a failed marriage both parties have to take responsibility for it. And I looked at my side of that and I knew that if I was going to try to be in a committed relationship again I had to do the work and I also had to be willing to work before and within the marriage.
One of the first things that Sharon and I did when we got together, I think it might of even been before we were married, was we went to joint counseling just because we knew we had screwed up before. Let’s get help before we have problems. Figure out how to communicate, figure out how to make it work, and it’s never perfect. It takes work. Then we continue to go to workshops at Carpalo and do things like that to really make sure that we find the most effective ways to communicate and understand each other.
Dr. Lisa: You mentioned children.
Sharon: Yeah. Actually when we came together and now I’m about to meet these two young ladies, very young, that’s when I actually felt like we should seek counseling because I thought we’re joining forces together and how do we go about doing this? I feel like Kevin and I came together kind of on a similar ground, with similar visions, and similar … the energy and desire to really want the best in something so I think when you come together there’s some clarity at that point. It doesn’t matter what age you are but you just want to bring forward some clarity so that you’re setting out for the same goals in mind, so we did. We both agreed. It wasn’t like I had to drag him to counseling or vice versa, so it’s been a real … as much as we face what we face as two human beings together we have this great blend and that’s how we’ve also been able to bring that into our work as well.
Dr. Lisa: Well tell me about that. Although you’re both in kind of the visual and artistic field you’re both very different individuals and probably have a pretty different idea as to what your visions are.
Kevin: One of the very interesting things is that when we first started working together in the visual world we quickly recognized that our visual aesthetic was almost identical so we … any conflicts that come up with working together are never about the visual content. It’s … for me … I still remember our first time when we went out to do a video shoot where was I her guy doing the camera work. She’s the director and it was going to a client who had been one of my long term clients so now I have to be in a different role. We stood out in the parking lot having a discussion, for those who can’t see the finger quotes are around that, about who was going to be in control. It really, it took a lot for me to relinquish that control to recognize that OK this is her party and I’m working for her now, which as a still photographer for 20 plus years I’m out there and it’s my show. Everything … I’ve got assistants and stylists and it’s all my responsibility so now … it was interesting. I learned to trust.
Sharon: Shall I add something? Yeah, trust is a key and also I will really say that neither one of us are on a head trip. It’s not a controlling … I think that’s another area where we blend together very well. We both have our own individual strengths but we don’t have a need to sort of combat with the other to say “I’m in charge. It’s my game here.” Maybe I took on a role that he wasn’t accustomed to and I took on a role I wasn’t accustomed to also but we don’t feel like we have to outdo the other. We might be competitive in some area. I don’t know, in backgammon. No, we don’t even play backgammon.
Kevin: No. Monopoly. You do not want to play Monopoly with this girl or her family. It’s cut throat.
Sharon: Seriously, we really, we have a way of respecting one another and I think that’s also key to success in this working.
Dr. Lisa: Does it also enable you to be more honest with other people? The fact that you have this other person in your life that allows you to be authentic?
Kevin: I think so. I think for myself one of the lessons that I learned early on and through a relationship with Sharon is that I didn’t need to be something bigger than who I really am. I could just be myself in my silliness and in my imperfections and just roll with that and not have to try to be something better or something like that. I had somebody who would accept me for who I was. I come to the table with all kinds of baggage from my childhood. We all do, and I think that my childhood in many ways was very serious. I think maybe I compensate by being very silly a lot of the time. That goes back to that whole whatever you were saying earlier about just “life’s too short to get all wrapped up and to be … just try to make the best of every moment.” Don’t worry too much about what’s going to happen tomorrow. What‘s behind you doesn’t really matter. Just be in the moment, make the best of it, and find somebody to do it alongside you like Sharon.
Dr. Lisa: This is such a wonderful place to kind of end all of this but I want to send people who are listening to look at your work. How can people find out about the work that you’re doing in the community? I mean I hope they’re all going to meet you eventually someday because you’re both wonderful people and you have this great story, but if they can’t how do they found out about the work that you’re doing?
Kevin: Well …
Sharon: So … No, go ahead.
Kevin: Sharon’s website is wonderdogsfilms.com and most of the films that she’s done are up there and can be viewed. Some of them are scattered around YouTube and Vimeo and other places like that, right? Then my website is kevinbrusie.com. That’s B-R-U-S-I-E.
Dr. Lisa: And also Facebook? Do you have a Facebook?
Sharon: I don’t have a Facebook business page. I’ve been told that would be a smart thing to do. I kind of go in Facebook and step out of Facebook, but I think that yeah, I think it’s a great thing to put ourselves out there. Especially because we are visual people. Yeah the website and …
Kevin: I do have a Facebook page. Kevin Brusie Photography but I essentially just repost my blog posts up on Facebook where I ramble on about things photographic and not.
Sharon: Hopefully some more film festivals will be in the near future. You know, to get it up on the screen and make a difference, right?
Dr. Lisa: Well I absolutely agree, so I welcome all of the people who have been listening to our conversation to go to Kevin’s Facebook and Kevin’s website and your website and find out a little bit more about you and it’s really been a pleasure to have you spend time with me this morning.
Sharon: Thank you very much.
Kevin: It’s been a pleasure being here.
Sharon: Yeah. We enjoyed it very much.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’ve been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 64, Commitment. Airing for the first time on December 2, 2012. Today’s guests have included civic leader Elliot Cutler and Dr. Melanie Cutler, musicians Carolyn Mix and Darcy Doniger founders of Two Note Botanical Perfumery, and photographer Kevin Brusie, and Sharon Paul Brusie, filmmaker.
For more information on our couples visit doctorlisa.org. For regular updates on upcoming shows and also our take on the world of love and commitment, like our Facebook page and add us to your daily feed.
We hope you have learned a little bit about what makes some people stay committed to one another in a loving relationship, and we hope you’ll give us feedback as to how you’ve been able to stay committed in your own loving relationships. Send us an email through our website doctorlisa.org or otherwise just let me know how you think. Stop me on the street. I really want to hear from you.
Thank you for being committed to our show and to committed to … Thank you for being committed to our show and to the sponsors of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Please let them know that you value the time that they’ve taken to make this show possible.
This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for being part of our world. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors. Maine Magazine, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin at ReMax Heritage, SeaBags, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists, Marci Booth of Booth Financial Services, Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial, Apothecary By Design, and The Body Architect.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today visit us at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle through ITunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.