From bookkeeper to accountant to waitress to bartender to office manager to owner of a real estate investment and development company, all the while bouncing from Huntington Beach to Seattle to Tampa and back to Seattle: it´s been a long and busy ride for Barbie W.

Barbie, who is winding up a two-year term as chairman of the Seattle Intergroup Board of Directors, says life has never been better. And the "better" only started eight years ago, on Aug. 5, 1997, when she gave up a case of beer a day washed down by a pint of peppermint schnapps.

"You couldn´t smell the schnapps on my breath," she explained. But did it kill the smell of a case of beer? But in my mind, it did. I was a big blackout drinker."

The pressures all came together in her life in August 1997. She broke up with her boyfriend about the same time she was arrested for driving a car with Florida plates. She knew she was in trouble when that happened. Four years earlier, she´d fled to Florida to escape the DUI charge she´d acquired here, and was certain now that she was going to jail. A friend told her, though, that she might get a deferred sentence if she could show the judge that she was in treatment.

Barbie didn´t believe she was an alcoholic because she didn´t drink every day, but an intake counselor at a treatment center begged to differ. "You´re a middle to late stage alcoholic," the lady said. Barbie told her she was full of it, but agreed to go to outpatient counseling at Highline Recovery Center. To her utter amazement, came the awakening.

"There I was in a room with 12 other people, and all of a sudden, I said, "My name is Barbie and I´m an alcoholic.´ It was like someone threw a switch. I got it instantly, and sat there for two hours and cried like a baby. ´Til then, I´d had a million excuses: job, boyfriend, everybody was messing up but me.

"It still sounds odd to me to have such an epiphany, but there it was. I haven´t had a drink since that day. I was told to go to three A.A. meetings a week, to get a sponsor, to read the Big Book and to get a service position. I did ´em all. So I was the literature person for one meeting with less than 30 days of sobriety."

She was office manager for an acrylic manufacturer at the time. She kept the job and spent the rest of her waking hours in A.A. meetings and related activities. The latter included a group called Magic Works Alumni, based at Highline Hospital, where recovering alcoholics learned to have fun without booze and do good at the same time. "One of our things was feeding the homeless," Barbie said.

"I did service at every meeting I attended. I found it kept me accountable because I had to show up to do my job. "

That DUI was still hanging over her head. Six months into sobriety, she decided it was time to face the music. "It was the scariest day of my life," Barbie said. "I knew they´d slap me in handcuffs and throw me in jail. But I was willing to go to any length."

To her surprise, the court gave her a break. Of course, she´d already done what she could to help herself. She presented the judge with all her meeting attendance slips and letters from all the groups about her service work. The result was deferred prosecution and a requirement of two years of treatment and regular reporting to "Deferred Court." Barbie was serving on the sponsorship committee when somebody noticed her accounting background and suggested "I make myself available for Intergroup treasurer." She was elected in 2001, and for the next two years, spent many hours helping Jill B-D., who was then Intergroup manager, install an updated accounting system. From there, Barbie moved on to a two-year stint as Intergroup vice chairman, and was elected chairman in 2004.

In her role in Intergroup´s top elected position, Barbie has had many occasions to thread her way through the organization´s byzantine politics. It´s a job that takes a lot of tact combined with clearheaded firmness, and Barbie does it well. How come?

"I got some of my people skills from my older sister. I was her accountant in her mobile notary signing service (one more in that endless string of jobs). She had amazing verbal and people skills. I learned a lot from Jill, too—how to talk to people diplomatically, how to keep track of what is going on by careful listening. But I´m still working at it. Being a fear-based human being, I´ve had to do a lot of work on my rough edges. It´s a process for me, a character defect I work on frequently.

"Life as board chairman has been an eye opening experience. My job is to facilitate the group conscience being heard. It´s not my job to tell people how it´s supposed to be. But I do sometimes wish there was more controversy than there is so that we´d have a better idea of what the groups are thinking about."

Barbie was born in Mineola, New York, one of six children of a contractor father who somehow got crossways with the Goodfellas. As a result, the family made a hasty exit to Huntington Beach, California, where Barbie grew up. She was big on Disneyland down there, but not much for the beach except at night. "I couldn´t tan, and besides, I was rather a large girl."

Drinking and driving as she grew up, she collected a batch of speeding tickets and decided to follow a friend to this area to solve the problem. "I was back and forth between here and there a couple of times," Barbie recalled. "That was always my life. When life wasn´t going my way, I moved on." She lost a bartending job in Southcenter for drinking too much of the owner´s booze. When she got her DUI in 1992, she called her dad in Florida to borrow the $1500 retainer for an attorney.

Her dad said she could relocate in Florida for that amount of money, so that´s what she did, and spent four years there. She got the alcoholic´s dream job when she became office manager for a Tampa shipping firm. "Everybody there drank on the job. My first day, I was offered a beer to relax." But the nights were lonely, so she ran up $400 phone bills calling friends and family all over the country.

In October 1996, an old boyfriend lured her back to Washington to help him in a child custody battle involving a teenage girlfriend. This "sick, co-dependant" relationship lasted a year or so, ´til she got arrested for those Florida license plates.

Life has been a steady climb upward since Barbie found sobriety. As she grew in sobriety, she has grown in her personal life too. She is now engaged to be married for the first time, to a fellow A.A. board member, on Oct. 15. She bought her first house in 2003, never having owned anything but a car before that. Now she´s in the business of buying fixer uppers for resale in the Bonney Lake area. She likes to hire people in the program to do the work, and her favorite buyers are recovering alcoholics with credit problems. She sells to them on a "rent to own" deal while they rehabilitate their credit ratings.

"I´m combining service work with my career. God has been good to me," Barbie said.

Barbie was asked about two recurring issues in this program: 1) drugs other than alcohol and 2) foul language in meetings. "I think we need to leave the larger problems of drugs to other programs. We have a singleness of purpose, talking about recovery from a hopeless state of mind and body. As for bad language, (she smiles at this point), it´s my experience that it´s just a form of communication, especially for people in early recovery. I´ve cleaned up my own a lot, and I´m still working on it. The longer people are in the program, as they find spiritual awakening, their language cleans itself up."

Before we go, we must deal with that name. Barbie is no nickname. It was a family compromise. Her dad wanted Jo for her middle name, and her mother wanted Bobby for her first name but couldn´t abide "Bobby Jo," so "Bobby" became Barbie. Barbie denies the Barbie doll had anything to do with it.

Interviewed and written by Dick S.