She was a bewildered, scared nine-year-old immigrant kid from Norway when she arrived in Seattle in 1960.

Astri T., her mother, sister and two brothers came to join the father of the clan, a Norwegian ship´s captain in the merchant marine who´d come a year earlier looking for a different lifestyle. Astri said the dream was a normal home life where he´d come home every night to be with his family instead of months away at sea. It was going to be the American dream in the Land of Opportunity. It didn´t work out that way. He tried carpentry and tree surgery, but within two years was shipping out to sea again.

"Dad was always the life of the party, Tarzan, a fun guy," Astri said. He was also a brawling boozer who lost his captain´s license and was demoted before his untimely death at the age of 49.

"Dad was my role model," Astri said. By the time she was in the fourth grade, she was brawling with anybody--especially boys--"Girls weren´t worth my time"--who made fun of her Norwegian accent. "I was using violence to feel powerful." Fighting remained an integral part of her life until midway through high school, when the boys got too big. By then, she´d discovered another kind of interest: boys, along booze, cigarettes and drugs.

When she was still a little girl, she was struggling to learn English, pretty much on her own till she made friends with a neighbor girl. Just by talking to her, the girl became her main teacher. The girls learned a few other things together too, like how good a cigarette tasted and how to "tap a pack" without the owner detecting the theft. (We won´t describe the technique here. We may have under-18 readers.) By the time she was in the fourth grade, Astri was stealing her mother´s cigarettes regularly.

When she was in junior high, Astri made a friend for life who much later played the crucial role in bringing her to sobriety and sanity. But in those junior high summers, the girls spent nearly every day at Greenlake pursuing their common interests--"boys and drinking and brawling. I was 14 and she was a year older; I thought she was worldly and wise. We drank whatever we could get our hands on-mostly beer and wine, but whatever was offered. You can´t be too choosy when you´re 14.

"We called ourselves the Greenlake Broads, we and a couple of other girls. Before long, we took up shoplifting to resupply our wine. Drinking with my friend at a party, I had my first blackout though I didn´t know what it was at the time. I found myself standing naked in a bathtub with other girls screaming at me to lie down in the icy water to get sober before I could go home. I finally did, got dressed and climbed through a window when I got home. It was not till I was in Alcoholics Anonymous that I realized that that and many other incidents were blackouts. Like when I thought I was asleep while I was driving home." Amazingly, Astri never got a DUI.

Astri went to high school in Redmond, and managed to get her diploma despite discovering marijuana and speed to go along with the booze. She was feeling more American by this time, and her language skills were improving. (She speaks unaccented English now.) "This was the late ´60s. Peace and love had hit the land. The teachers were turning into hippies." She also became pregnant, a fact she discovered on a family trip to Norway.

Astri is mercilessly honest about that event. She says she feared having a baby, not because she didn´t want to raise one, but because it might be born with a birth defect. "It was how that would affect me that I was worried about." But she had the baby, who was a healthy girl and who is now a registered nurse at a Seattle hospital with a child of her own and no alcohol problem. Sometimes the Higher Power is there for us even when we don´t know it.

At the time, though, her father´s response was to kick her boyfriend/father-of-the-child out of the house, so Astri ran away from home and the couple lived in a car, supporting themselves "through the kindness of strangers" and by shoplifting. But before the baby came, they were married and began what Astri thought would be that elusive American dream life-she stayed home to cook and clean while he went to work. He soon lost his job and, at the behest of her old Greenlake buddy, they moved into a housing project in White Center, where her friend was already living. Lucky for Astri.

Astri got a job in a laundry while her friend took care of the baby. Astri was limiting herself to speed in those days, in deference to her daughter. "I didn´t think of it as a drug, even though something always happened. We had a going-away party at a tavern for my brother, but when it came time to go to the airport, I told him I would stay at the party. He was really hurt."

The marriage ended in 1975, "and that´s when me and my friend really started partying. My mom was taking care of the baby; really, she was raising her. We were drinking, partying, having guys over ´cause that´s how you get booze. But one day, my little girl told me she didn´t like my drinking, so I quit for a month. Then I started going out so she wouldn´t see me. That´s when the disco thing started. I thought I was the Disco Queen. Platform shoes, lots of makeup. I thought I was a hot little thing."

But it was pricey too, so Astri decided she´d do her partying at home after her daughter was asleep. "She saw stuff no little girl should see," Astri said ruefully. Then she met "the most beautiful man I´d ever seen in my life" who treated her like a lady and protected her when she went out cruising the bars. Sadly, that love affair ended the same week her beloved father died in 1976. Broke again, she moved back in with her mother in Redmond.

Unable to find a job, she decided to go back to school, at Bellevue Community College. The partying continued, but she made it through the year and then decided to take a road trip to Kansas City for reasons she prefers not to discuss. When she got back, her old friend didn´t want to go out anymore. She had joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and began urging Astri to give it a try. "She was really good with word pictures, and finally I made a deal with her: go out with me and I´ll go to an A.A. meeting with you.

"She was drinking coffee in the bar where we met. I got drunk, but it wasn´t any fun without her, so we went to that meeting, at the Aurora Fellowship. I was so drunk I don´t remember anything that was said. I kept going back with my friend to try to teach her why she shouldn´t be going there-´It´s a cult, and all they do is go out and get drunk after the meeting.´" Then she discovered the dances at the old Big Hall at 11th and Union, and the experience of being asked politely to dance and escorted back to her seat with a "thank you" from her partner. "That was weird to me. I had never been treated like that.

She and her lifelong friend went to the dances every Saturday night, Astri always drunk till she realized there were sober people there and tailed off from the booze and the marijuana. But she still had one wild one left in her, a four-day drunk where "the usual things happened, nothing special." At the end of the four days, hung over, shaking, she had to go back to work in the county jail as a personal recognizance screener, determining whether people could be released without bail. (Twenty-six years later she is still working in the jail and was recently promoted to victim defendant specialist representing women who have been prosecuted for domestic violence. "We have found that most of these women are long time victims who have finally fought back.")

"Sitting there listening to those stories, I realized they were talking about me, and I didn´t want to go that way. I went to the Aurora Fellowship when I got off work, and for the first time, said ´My name is Astri, and I´m an alcoholic.´ I thought everyone would be surprised, but instead they just said "Hi, Astri.´" That was Aug. 18, 1979, and Astri has not had a drink since.

Good things started to happen after that. She had another daughter, now 24 and doing well, and has a granddaughter who she treasures. She raised both her girls as a single mom, and has become a homeowner, something she never expected to happen. She lives in Shoreline.

She makes three meetings a week, including one she helped found, For This Day, which meets at noon Saturday at Fremont Fellowship. It´s a non-smoking (!) Big Book study meeting. She sponsors a dozen women, some very new who call her every day. She never misses a conference, and helped plan one coming up Oct. 21-23 on sponsorship. She answers phones at the Intergroup office once a month and "a whole bunch of other stuff in the program."

She and her old Greenlake buddy are still the best of friends, both sober and both working the program every day. What more could be said about the wonders of friendship and fellowship?

Interviewed and written by Dick S.