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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (May 18, 2017)
MAY 18, 2017 // 9 a lot of respect for women entrepreneurs because I know how hard it is to run your own business. My business is all men, top to bottom; every person I work with is a man. I can handle that most of the time, but I have a lot of respect for (women) who have perseverance, who just keep going. Maybe my description of a bad-ass woman would be a woman who keeps going — who doesn’t become bitter from all the outside infl uences that are always trying to change you, or put you in a box of what society expects. Maybe a female boss or a stay-at-home mom. I was a stay-at-home mom for ten years, and it drove me crazy. I don’t bake cookies. I don’t fi nger paint. I was surrounded by all these women who were constantly trying to organize me into being this idea of being a stay-at-home mom. I loved being a “stay-at-home mom” so I had the freedom to go do anything I wanted and my kids could come with me. Be who you are. Don’t change because society expects you to act a certain way. CW: You talk about when “s– gets real” as some of the funniest parts of life. Why is that? DK: Because you’re humbled with the mistakes that you’ve made, or the realization that you’re a hypocritical fool. When s– gets real is when you have those confrontations where you’re trying to speak your opinion, and maybe you’re wrong or you’re right, but you’re trying to be authentic. Even in my personal hypocrisy, I’m trying to admit it out loud and be like, “You can’t put statistics about global warming on your social media site and then drive your car every day to work.” We have to admit out loud that we are all fl awed. CW: You wrote an essay about meeting your husband in Cannon Beach in the 90’s? DK: It is a really nice story, and it’s movie-worthy because it’s pretty rad. I was going to school in Califor- nia, and my husband was going to U of O. He would go to Cannon Beach during the summer because he had friends that worked for a landscaping company. There were help-wanted signs all around town, and being young and in college, we thought, “We’ll just get a job here.” We had no idea that you can’t fi nd anywhere to stay during summer. My friends and I were living in her Volkswagen van in town, and every night the cops would wake us up and kick us out. One night, the cop was like, ‘Hey there’s a pull-out outside of town you can park at, outside of city limits.” We never had showers, so we’d go to the public restrooms and dump cold water over our heads. There were groups of college-aged people around town doing this. There was this one other van I walked up to one day, and my husband was in it cooking. His van was super set up; ours was lame. I was really impressed with his van and his cool set-up. So I got to know him that summer. He fl ew kites on the beach for Once Upon A Breeze. That was his job, fl ying 12 to 15 kites at once, wearing a t-shirt from the kite shop. I’d sit down a chair on the beach and watch him. I crushed from afar; that’s how ridiculous I was. We both went back to college at the end of the summer but would write let- ters. We had a missed moment in Cannon Beach. But it was three years later, I was hitchhiking with a friend in Washing- ton, and he pulled over and picked me up. And I was like, “Oh my God, this is trouble.”
