Our Archived Words

Ten Years in the Making

Posted by Rhoberta on July 25, 2004

This might be the only website on the internet that was ten years in the making. At first conception it was going to be something for my beloved Elaine to be creative around while she was recovering from her first ankle surgery: Jacque Janssen had just given her a computer (!), and Elaine discovered how much folks like her could use a 'healing through humor' site. She couldn't wait to have an 'Answer Man' sort of column where she would call herself the 'Answer Crone'. Our friends Jerry Franklin and Kate Knight even bought her a domain name for it.

Soon after that I fell in love with doing massage and bodywork, and even though I'm not much of a computer person, I wanted the site to announce my offerings in these areas, but Elaine was nervous that this might attract people who were looking for sex like anything we advertised in the Guardian almost always did. So there were lots of considerations of how to keep ourselves safe.

It 'Did' Take A Village

Many excited clients and friends offered their assistance. Anne Greenwood and John Tucker once gave Elaine money for her birthday for the production of the site. Amy Rosenthal, Marni Farrell, Shaun Loftus, Nick Gragard, Ann King, Gary Ellis, Steven Holden, Claudia Johnson, Judy Ballard, and multiple others, and then once again Jerry Franklin, offered and traded lots of technical assistance and art work.

It became a joke that anyone who took this creation on as their project would soon have something that would require their attention elsewhere - having to look for a job, getting a new job, having a surgery, having a spouse having a surgery, etc., etc.! It was wild! After a while we realized that having a website for us was a journey and required from us maximum surrender.

We trekked through Elaine's health adventures, my mom's arrival to San Francisco and ultimate departure from this life, and my adventures in care-giving and being cared for.

Name The Dames

About a year ago we decided it was time to have a new name. We hit on the idea of having a 'Name The Dames' contest. Old friends and client-friends poured in their entries.

Diane Robinson sent several with 'Love and Joy', as the theme. Kristine Winber suggested 'Mom's Home'. Anne Greenwood penned a raft of choices like, 'Soul Satisfying Support Scene By Crafty Crones', 'Seer and Soothing By Soulmates', and 'Words and Wonders for Body and Soul'. More suggestions came from people like Laura Corral, Howard Nelson, Kim Malavey, and many others. We combined everybody's ideas and came up with 'Deep Listening'. We took Anne Greenwood to the winner's brunch for the sheer volume and charm of her entries. Then Leila Radan commented in an email that she would have called us 'Deep Nurturing'! Well, that stopped us. We had to pay our Web host again, because now we really had our perfect name!

The Big Finish

For the next one and a half years that included the time of the name saga, Jerry was diligently if episodically 'working' on our site. He would almost literally carve out the time from his active, successful, and happy, if not hectic 'real' life to keep chugging along site-building. This was a new kind of challenge for him and we all learned together during these trying and rewarding times.

Finally in the last month, wonder of wonders, we 'hired' someone. Jason Whitlow, designer, dancer, and bodyworker extraordinaire, to take this project over the finish line into the glorious opening of a website in REAL TIME!

We are excited, and deeply grateful to all those who travelled our journey with us in the birthing of this delight, including all of you who just worked with us over the years and thereby caused us to think that we deserved a website!

In addition we want to thank those of you who have recently given us the endorsements which we have printed on our site. We thank all the others who have given us heartwarming endorsements over the years whenever it did look like we were about to launch a site, and didn't just yet. Unfortunately, some of those got lost in a dead computer, or worse yet, somewhere in Elaine's office.

So, enjoy! Write to us! Come to visit us! Send your friends, etc., etc.

Love, Rhoberta

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