One evening a week, I taught students I’ve never met, how to write their first novel. My classes became immensely popular. I taught the classes every year from 1993 to 2000.
At the end of those 7 years, AOL told me that I’d taught 4,125 students in twenty-six states how to author novels. I made about $17,000 a year from teaching the classes.
In January of 1997, I started another Writing the Novel Class on AOL and a student from California screen-named “bochowder” was one of the seventy-six students in that class.
She did well. Her name was Lori.
Next, she took my advanced class and did extremely well. When I discovered that she was a middle-school English teacher, I hired her as my online teaching assistant.
I always told my students to email me with questions and Lori did. She also worked hard to land me more students.
WTNLori and I emailed each other every day, and, over a year, we began to realize that we were very much alike.
We both were writers who were actors in the theater. We loved movies and loved to read. We’re both Virgos. My birthday is August 27, and hers is August 29.
But more importantly, we revealed to one another that we were each trapped in bad marriages. She and her husband fought constantly, and she felt unloved and disrespected. My marriage was “name only” years before, and my fear of ever finding anyone else held me back from bolting.
Just as folks in the 19th century became acquainted with one another through written correspondence, Lori and I learned all about each other in daily emails. During 1997, we emailed every day, and our messages soon became more personal and honest about each other and our marriage problems.
We both grew up as only children and came of age in the sixties. Lori’s dad died at 45, I never met my dad. Lori’s mom died at 56. My mom died at 97 in 2020.
We lived in a pair of sunny states; me in Florida and Lori in California. We were both honest, hardworking people who liked to help others. We both loved writing, reading, the theater, especially musicals, old movies, and cats.
As time went on, we slowly realized we were falling in love with each other. We talked on the phone when we could and chatted in private chat rooms on AOL. We talked about the possibility of someday having a future together.
Around September 1997, I realized I was falling in love with Lori. I later found out that she fell in love with me months earlier.
She’d stayed married for the sake of her son and her adopted daughter. I stayed married because I refused to have an affair.
And by the end of 1997, we had never met in person.
Before Christmas 1997, I mentioned that I would be at the Florida Suncoast Writers Conference in St. Petersburg in February 1998. My three books were out for a while and I was something of a local, writing celebrity who taught at the conference for more than 10 years.
Remember, neither of us confessed our love for one another and we’d not met in person.
Lori stayed at the St. Petersburg Hilton Hotel, just two blocks from the Florida Suncoast Writers Conference location. When I walked into the Hilton lobby on the first day of the conference, I saw a five-foot-three pretty doll next to a man with a shaved head and sunken eyes.
We all greeted each other, and Lori and I hugged. I said something stupid to her husband Bob like, “I’ll take good care of her.” Lori handed a camera to Bob and said, "Take a picture of me and my writing teacher, to prove to our online students that we met." He did.
After Bob left, we went to the main auditorium for the opening session, and friends and fans mobbed me. As I shook hands and posed for pictures, I introduced my new friend to my old friends.
I introduced Lori to John Updike, the famous author, and keynote speaker. We ate lunch and then set up my book signing table in the lobby.
After that, I drove her around the area on a Veronica Slate tour showing her some of the real locations which figured in my mystery novels. I took a picture of her at Veronica’s house on Coffee Pot Blvd. I also showed her other spots that appeared in my books, such as the Don CeSar Resort Hotel from Extreme Close-up.
That first evening, we dined at an Applebee’s and Lori invited me to her room while she changed. It was a suite because the Hilton was overbooked. She asked me to zip up her dress. Stupid me; I missed the obvious cue and failed to kiss her.
We suffered through a lackluster ice breaker session and went back to her room and talked.
We turned the radio on, tuned to an easy listening station. She knew I had taught dancing for a while and asked me to dance with her. We danced the rumba and another one.
Finally, she looked at me and said, “Just one kiss.”
We kissed, sat on the couch, and she said, “I'm not sure you realize. I love you.”
I almost looked behind me to see if she was talking to someone else. I’d finally met the woman I dreamed of for so many years. As if a light switched on over my head, I knew that I would marry her.
Lori and I both decided we were not going to have an affair because we were both married, albeit unhappily, but we did a tremendous amount of kissing and hugging during the rest of the conference.
That next morning after she confessed her love for me, I brought her a red rose. I was downright giddy with love. The rest of the conference sprinted by. Lori and I would find every opportunity to sneak into empty classrooms and make out like high school kids, secure in our mutual decision that we would not have an affair. That last evening, dinner at Giorgio's, and we both knew we were going to divorce our spouses and get married, eventually.
As I was aware, on the last day of the conference her husband was coming to take her to the airport and return to California. Instead of going on home to Sarasota, I sat in the lobby of the Hilton with a notebook and a pen and wrote three long pages of my love for her.
I sat at a table where I could see the elevator doors, so I saw Bob come in and go up to her room. I sat there longer hoping to see her one more time even though I should not talk to her in his presence.
After a half-hour, they came down and headed to a taxi and I went home to Sarasota.
She wrote: My Dearest Love,
I know how hard this all must be for you. You are a good, kind, honest person, and, like me, you don't want to hurt anyone. I will follow your lead and do whatever it takes for us to be together. My first thought in the morning is of you, and it has been that way for a long time. In my heart I'm already Lori Crews, and should I get that chance, I will wear that name proudly. You are everything I have ever wished for, my darling. Lori."
I asked Linda for the divorce a few days later. I told her I was in love with someone else and wanted to marry her, and that I’d refused to have an affair.
Linda said, “I don't care who you marry, I’m keeping the house, a car, and the cats.”
She was as unemotional as she’d been for the last decade of our marriage. Frankly, she seemed relieved to be rid of me. We’d been married for 17 years. Not a happy time.
Lori and I chatted online in a private chat room, the day after I asked Linda for the divorce:
WTNLori: “I was so afraid when I got up this morning that you and Linda might have worked things out.”
WTNLary: “No working out possible. I am getting a divorce. The only choices: do we cooperate to make it as painless as possible or do we battle about it. I would rather live alone for the rest of my life than live with her. It’s that simple.”
WTNLori: “Okay. I will do whatever it takes for us to be together. Bob is making noises. ‘Why are you mad at me?’ I have never wanted anything more in my life. I may tell him this afternoon after his family leaves. He knows I'm in love with you; what he doesn't know is that you love me, too. He sees the look in my eyes, and he can hear my voice when I talk about you. He thinks it's one-sided. He feels safe since you live in Florida. It will blow him away to hear that you are coming to me.”
WTNLary: “I am coming to you. I love you more than life itself.”
I still do, Lori, all these years later.
A week later, I drove my purple,1996 Saturn, with all my possessions in the trunk, back seat, and passenger seat, 2,587 miles across America with Lori charting my progress on a map in her classroom and calling me each evening on an early-style cell phone she sent me.
The day I arrived in California, Lori met me on the street, and we rushed to embrace one another in the middle of empty Kling Street under oak trees, kissing and hugging like something out of a romantic comedy.
We married at Spiritworks on December 13, 1998.
My mother flew to California to attend our wedding. Lori’s cousin, Chrissie, was her bridesmaid. The church was a non-theist denomination that welcomed all LGBT folks and Mark McGee and Tina Parkhurst, two gay friends of ours were the singers at our wedding.
The Reverend Marlene Morris officiated and married us.
A beautiful song by Shania Twain, From This Moment On, came on the radio back in February 1998 after Lori told me she loved me. It became our song. Our recessional was the main theme from I Love Lucy, altered to be "I Love Lori."
For our honeymoon, we drove along the beautiful Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Cruz, about eighty miles south of San Francisco.
On the way, our first stop was a bitter, frosty night in Cambria in a funny, little motel that looked like it was lifted intact from 1955.
Lori wanted a bubble bath, but we didn't have any bubble bath material with us. So, she used regular hand soap. Unfortunately, it worked too well, and the suds overflowed the tub. It took us an hour just to drain the tub.
After we left Cambria, Route #1 took us through some beautiful parts of California such as Big Sur, Monterey, and Carmel-By-The-Sea.
After Carmel, we spent the night at a Santa Cruz Motel right by the Pacific Ocean. The next day, we spent some time on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, an oceanfront amusement park.
