The princess and the pie with peas

The Princess and the Pie with Peas.

I was born in San Fernando Valley, California, and thank god my parents moved over to Brentwood before I became a “Valley Girl”!! I went to Brentwood Elementary, Paul Revere Junior High and Pacific Palisades High School and was raised in Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church, before trying my hand at University and attended Santa Monica College and UCLA.

I never imagined when I was living in LA that I would one night meet a man in a Blues Bar (Harvelle’s in Santa Monica) and move to a little fishing village on the eastern edge of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, but here I am.

And that is how I came to be the Princess and the Pie with Peas, because you can take the princess out of Beverly Hills, but you can’t take the Beverly Hills out of the Princess…. Or can you?????

I really, really did meet my husband in Harvelle’s. He arrived that morning in LA and took a bus downtown where his shoes were nearly stolen right off his feet. Then he went through the Santa Monica mall and met some very interesting people that live on the streets. Somehow he wandered into Harvelle’s. When he came into the club he stuck out like the proverbial. He was wearing a gold “Qantas” kangaroo on his lapel and I rubbed it. I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I did…. I rubbed his kangaroo. And THAT began a conversation that we are still having! We talked for hours.

The next morning he called and said he was going to Florida via Texas for a couple of weeks, and he would call when he got back, maybe I could show him around. He did, and he said he was going to Hawaii for the weekend. I asked if he wanted some company and after a long pause he said “Yes”. Then I asked if he was paying (cheeky), and after another long pause he said “NO”.

When he came back into town he was a bit late meeting me for lunch across the street from the dentist’s office I worked in, and we finally met up in the middle of the street on Wilshire Blvd. and Barrington Avenue, with traffic coming at us. I took him around Brentwood and the next day we went to Santa Barbara for lunch before flying out to Hawaii.

I remember sitting waiting in the lounge at the airport in Honolulu and wondering if the bag of “T-shirts” he had given me to carry domestically was full of drugs – of course it wasn’t …but it did make me wonder!

The next morning he woke and said the most romantic thing – “I know, let’s piss everyone off and get married” !!!!!! I said yes, crazy as it sound, but by 36 years old I had kissed enough frogs to recognize a handsome prince. And so we started the process of my immigrating to Australia. We met on the 21st of February, got engaged on the 8^th of March, I arrived in Brisbane on the 8^th of May and we married on the 8^th of June. 17 years ago!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And the first thing I ate in OZ was … you got it, a Meat Pie with Peas – the great Aussie icon.

So…… Have you done something crazy and spontaneous that turned out to be the best thing ever?