When Lee C. brought her swinging lifestyle to Seattle from Nevada City, California, she got quite a shock.

She needed to replenish her booze supply, so she headed for the nearest Safeway. After a careful search of the shelves, what, no hard liquor for sale? Barbaric! Lee was used to the California distribution system, where every hole-in-the-wall business sells all the liquor you can buy. Along with plenty of liquor stores and drug stores, of course.

"Well, Washington may be more conservative in its distribution system, but I soon discovered there´s no less boozing. It just takes a little planning to stay supplied."

Lee, a Navy brat, had followed her parents here from Nevada City, where she´d worked as a waitress fresh out of Humboldt State University in Arcata. "P.E. was an easy degree, so that´s what I went for, but I graduated without any employable skills," she said. "My God, what a party town. Everything was wide open."

Why Nevada City? Because her father, a Navy reconnaissance pilot, never got out of the habit of a nomadic life. The family had lived all over the world and all over the U.S. while he was on active duty, When he retired, they settled in Arcata while both parents earned degrees at the university. Lee says it was "one extreme to the other for him-Navy pilot to midlife hippy." Then it was a move to Nevada City, and ultimately, to Seattle.

During their stay in Arcata, Lee went to high school and learned to drink and drug. "I started with marijuana, but my drug of choice was always alcohol. But that was a marijuana town. Smoking grass in the high school parking lot was the thing to do." From Arcata, she spent two years at U.C.-Santa Cruz before returning to Arcata to get her degree.

"I came back ´cause I loved to play soccer." She was a fullback. "We played intercollegiate, but we never did very well ´cause we drank a lot. I was hung over for most of our games."

Lee says alcohol in her life wasn´t all bad. "It gave me peace. I´d known since I was in the sixth grade that I was gay, but I never came out. I was filled with shame and depression. Booze made me feel like one of the crowd."

She stayed in the closet all through high school and college, with liquor easing the pain. It was not until she was working in Nevada City that she was able to confront her sexuality. "It was 1981. I met a nice woman there and we came out together. I was 23. I told my parents, and they weren´t surprised. They just wanted me to be happy."

Once in Seattle, she held a myriad of jobs-waitress, office manager and even sold time share vacation plans. "That job was a haven for drinking people," she recalled. But the boozy lifestyle was taking its toll.

"The bottom came out from under me in 1985. I was despondent and depressed. There was an empty hole inside of me. Why? Why? My mom took me to lunch and suggested I see a therapist. No one thought the problem was alcohol. But the therapist told me I should think about stopping the drinking, and to come back next week.

"When I saw her the next week, I yelled at her. ´How am I going to be in the bars without alcohol? That´s my life, work and bars, work and bars.´ She just said, ´Try to let go. I can´t help you if you keep medicating against help.´ Medicating? What the hell?"

But the seed was planted. That very same week, Lee was ironing-a hot iron in lieu of a burning bush-when the thought crept in that "I don´t have to do this anymore. I can stop this now." She promptly poured all her beer down the sink, "and boy, that felt good. I was laughing as it gurgled away." When she told the therapist what she´d done, the therapist introduced her to a member of A.A., who took her to a meeting. "When I walked in, some of the people I´d known in the bars greeted me, and some said ´About time.´ I wasn´t offended. I was reassured to see them there."

There followed a dry drunk period when she couldn´t hold a job. After nine months of that, a friend suggested she go to treatment. So for 44 days, she learned about herself at the now-defunct Residence XII in Burien. (Residence XII in Kirkland is still going strong.) "It was 44 days of having the denial beaten out of me. We stayed on Step 1 for a very long time. We talked about life, about my relationship with my parents, about the truth of what happened when I drank, of how relationships begin and end. Basically, it was a very thorough and a very grueling first Step. I will always be grateful that I went there. It was a boot camp approach to Alcoholics Anonymous.

"When I got out, I had a pretty good year of sobriety. But I was visiting my mom one day when I drank one of her low-alcohol near beers. I never thought anything about it, and it wasn´t until years later that I remembered what I´d done. I confessed to my sponsor and we mutually agreed I should change my sobriety date. I never had anything to drink but that near beer, but that cost me two years off my sobriety date. My final sobriety date is July 4, 1987."

She still had a ways to go, though. The depression hung on, with thoughts of suicide, despite Res XVII and many meetings. "I have to say it was not ´til I started doing rigorous step work that I found permanent relief from my depression "

In 1991, Lee took a geographical to Honolulu "to get some sun," and there rediscovered her love of theater. She performed in a number of plays, and also worked as a puppeteer. "We did children´s theater for two years: ´Don´t drink, don´t drug and wear your helmet.´ And we put on miniature rock concerts for the kids."

Lee says she loved A.A. in Honolulu. "Everyone knew everyone. It was a very tight group of people."

But she tired of all the sunshine eventually and came back to Seattle to work for the Northwest Aids Foundation. It was there that she found her true calling, radio broadcasting. She went on air to promote the Aids Foundation´s fund-raising bike ride, and discovered radio was "a really fun environment." She started as a gofer, became a producer for talk radio and worked in the newsroom. She was a producer for two stations before she went on the air on her own. "As an on-air personality, I was very out. Many people wrote to me to thank me. Letters that would say, for example, ´If you´re gay, it can´t be that bad for me." But then, "like any good radio personality, I experienced another rite of passage." In other words, her position was eliminated and she was on the street. (Since this interview, she has made another connection and is back in broadcasting.)

Lee has been doing service work for Intergroup while she figures out her next move. She has been secretary for District 14 (Vashon and West Seattle), and GSR for her home group. She also has a sponsee."At meetings, I make sure that we always greet new people and make them feel welcome. And oh yes, I like to be the coffee maker every couple of years."

Lee´s greatest gift from sobriety was the change in her relationship to her mother and father. Until she became sober, she said of her father, "we were virtual strangers. In the last 15 years of his life, we had a very special relationship. That has been my biggest reward."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.