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.”