[Editor’s note: This essay first appeared in the “Chapters of Our Lives” issue of PREMIUM Magazine, which featured personal storytelling.]
“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.”
George Bernard Shaw, “Major Barbara”
The Social Security Administration office in downtown Santa Ana is tucked inside a tall, smoky glass edifice that defies you to find its front door. Park in the lower depths and wend your way up to a covert side entrance. There, a blasé security guard waves SSA supplicants to a direct elevator to the fifth floor.
Inside the SSA, it’s a Kafkaesque, scaled-down DMV. There are rows of utilitarian chairs, all bolted down. Service windows run the length of the back wall. No art, no color. This was it: I had made it to the final checkpoint for a new Social Security card. Having completed the application online, all I had to do now was produce the certified court order and a pound of flesh. After nearly an hour sitting in those inhospitable chairs, the clouds parted, angels sang, and I was summoned to Window No. 9.
Nice Guy at Window: Why do you need a new Social Security card?
Me: Legal change of name.
Him: Reason?
Me: Marriage.
Him: Date of marriage?
Me: August 16, 2008.
Him: (looking up for the first time) That’s 16 years ago.
Me: It took me a while to decide?
Beware the things you swear you’ll never do. Changing my surname was one for me, and now I’m the proud bearer of a clunky hyphenate. There was also a work shift I didn’t see coming. I went from film scripts, post-production parties, and negotiating deals in the entertainment industry to the legal representation of mobile home park owners throughout California.
Goodbye, Hollywood. Hello, front lines of the property rights and affordable housing battles.
***When we were first dating, my overly modest future husband would sometimes refer to himself as a “trailer park attorney.” He didn’t shuffle his feet or say “aw, shucks,” but the self-effacement was palpable. He was and still is a hard-working and well-respected attorney who graduated from a top law school (Fight on, Trojans!). He has served as legal advisor to the legislative committee of the statewide Western Manufactured Housing Communities Association since 1996. He’s at the top of his field. Yet he described himself as a trailer park attorney with something bordering on apology.
Terry meant no disrespect toward the manufactured housing industry. On the contrary, it was his way of anticipating and deflecting the prejudice our culture still harbors toward mobile home parks. My future husband was accustomed to the unrelenting hostility toward this sector. He’d been fighting the battles so long that it was second nature for him to brace for the hit.
The risk-taking providers of this source of desperately needed affordable housing still fight the unfair epithets of a “sin industry” like alcohol, firearms, or cigarettes. (The social stigma that clings to manufactured housing has been written about here, “Trailer Park Confidential.”) After decades in the industry, Terry tended to beat outsiders to this seemingly inevitable smear. He spoke as though the disdain for manufactured housing — and government’s myopic attempts to undermine its providers — somehow made his legal practice less important. In fact, the opposite was true.
Attorney Dowdall’s modesty may have also been chivalry, as though downplaying his endeavors would gracefully burnish mine. I’d been fortunate to turn my admiration for writers and artists into decades of working with them in a variety of capacities — creative, journalistic and legal. I had been involved in some engrossing projects for stage, opera, film and more, and had the privilege of getting to know some great talents, not to mention droppable names. But the showbiz industry I had come to know in recent years did not glitter. It was often nasty, sometimes brutish, and usually venal. Some exceptional people notwithstanding, I found it to be a business replete with inflated egos and gratuitous meanness. After decades, the veneer was wearing thin. It was starting to feel as though there must be something more consequential to do than burnishing fictional plot points.
From where I was sitting, Terry’s focused endeavors were meaningful and more important than mine. Mobile homes remain the cheapest, quickest and overall best way to provide affordable housing. There is a greater than ever need for those in government and elsewhere to realize the potential of manufactured housing. Yet the regulatory asphyxiation in California makes it all but impossible: no new parks have been built for decades.
What I saw was an attorney striving to advance one of the most consequential domestic issues of our time. They say you can’t fight City Hall, but he was doing it regularly, often contributing as a “friend of the court.” He was, and still is, fighting for an industry being regulated out of existence. Where the government was overregulating parks, Terry was trying to keep them open.
And what was I doing? Still lingering in la-la land, playing make-believe.
***
Growing up in San Diego public schools, I somehow got the idea that I wanted to be an attorney. Although there were no lawyers in my family, I saw my future self as an advocate. Pre-law and the arts were my dual passions in college, and it wasn’t clear which to pursue first. I opted to study dramaturgy and criticism at the Yale School of Drama. Law school would come later. Eventually, my entertainment law clients were in film, TV, streaming, books, journalism, opera, theater, new media and more. I mainly negotiated deals, drafted contracts and resolved disputes.
I had been working for comedy legend Garry Marshall — one of those Hollywood exceptions — when Terry asked me to marry him. The late Mr. Marshall (“Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Pretty Woman,” “Princess Diaries”), king of sit-coms and rom-coms, was a big fan of happily ever after. Yet I had struck Garry as the Person Least Likely to Marry.
When Terry popped the question, Garry gave everyone the day off. (Postscript: when we tied the knot some months later — privately, no wedding — my parents sent Terry a thank you card. Seriously. Apparently, they had agreed with Garry about the Person Least Likely to Marry.)
You may ask what’s in a name, but I kept my maiden name for a reason. It was a pragmatic choice to stick with Breslauer, hard as it was to spell, because work would continue to come from established connections. Staying in the field of arts and entertainment also seemed practical. This juncture might have been the moment when I contemplated a future in which I would work for Terry’s firm, Dowdall Law Offices, A.P.C., but he and I didn’t even consider that possibility at the time.
I am likely not the first middle-aged bride who didn’t want to jump onto her new husband’s professional coattails. I’d made it to my mid-40s, bought a house and a horse, and still wanted to pull my own weight. It was a matter of integrity. Also, I was loath to leave behind decades in the arts. But it also went to the heart of what I felt was best for our marriage. It was going to be hard enough to learn to use a collective pronoun. Sharing clients might have been too much.
No doubt my parents’ second-wave feminism was operating in the background. It was telling the newly married me to continue to be my own person rather than an adjunct to my spouse. In retrospect, I should have been suspicious. After all, this was the same 1970s feminism that had gotten me in trouble before, such as the time I started lecturing my junior high Home Economics teacher about women’s lib. I recall arguing to the class that learning to make grape jelly was oppressing us all. I was summarily excommunicated from Home Ec and sent straight to wood shop instead.
The idea was that Terry would have his clients and I would have mine. And this worked well, for a while. As time wore on, however, I couldn’t help but take more interest in his practice, which he undertook with great fervor and dedication. He truly cares about the uphill property rights battles he and his clients face. He cares in a visceral way. Meanwhile, I was finding it increasingly difficult to put my heart into another TV show skirmish. Defending egregious assaults against trailer parks was starting to look more impactful than a 20 percent increase for a theater contract.
I was noticing how these property owners face every issue and type of law you could imagine, from Constitutional takings claims to the squabbles of a small town. Then too, there’s the unexpected, such as the elderly gentleman who was opening his living room drapes daily to perform stripteases for the park denizens setting up camp chairs in the street to watch. Or city councils that claim to be advocating for cheaper housing while driving the providers of that housing out of business. Or parks so dangerous that even first responders refuse to enter.
In 2011, I joined Dowdall Law Offices, A.P.C., which Terry had founded in 1993 with a folding table and a fax machine. Terry’s years of 24/7 workweeks paid off in a highly respected boutique firm and had also given him a heart condition. To join him, I’d have to step up my game. The alternative might have been to incorporate as an independent solo practice. But his and hers law firms would’ve doubled overhead for no good reason.
Over the years, I learned mobile home park law. It is more complicated than entertainment law. There is massive government overregulation to be deciphered, and the laws themselves are recondite, internally contradictory, and worse. Rent controls end up driving prices higher and bringing on blight. And the parks that are able to hang on lose ground with each passing legislative session.
These issues, and the battle to address them, drew me toward this practice area. There are better solutions for all involved, but these solutions are seldom discussed in public discourse or media. Partisan disdain squelches collaboration.
Together, Terry and I decided that I would shift even further in the direction of mobile home park law and take on more managerial duties. My name change was not unrelated to that transition. To be honest, it saved having to disclose my relationship every time I got on a client call. Welcome to the family business.
And yet, that wasn’t the real reason I added Terry’s last name to mine. It was more about who I had come to be, in the context of our marriage. My early resistance had to do with clinging to the familiar. Changing my name, and changing my practice, has revealed more possibilities than it has foreclosed, and it goes to the heart of what’s meant by community property. Couples commit to evolve together, and these changes have brought me that much closer to those childhood aspirations, formed so long ago in San Diego. I wouldn’t be who I am now without Terry, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.