You had to lie about being married. Did you have to lie about being Jewish?

M: No.

D: Kind of.

M: The one time we were freaked out about talking about me being Jewish was when we were getting married by a judge, but he actually didn't care what our stripes were. He just wanted us to believe in God. We finally told him we both believe in God, I'm just Jewish and he's, whatever... Congregationalist. The real truth was your dad was totally agnostic! But the judge was a lovely person.

D: He was a scary guy! Right is right and wrong is wrong, but his right and our right lined up, and his wrong and our wrong lined up, so it was okay. But you could just feel, if you crossed him? Oh, forget it.

So, describe the wedding.

M: Well, we decided that it would be small.

D: We got married in our apartment.

M: We got married in our apartment, sent out invitations, and it turned out my parents came, his parents came, and his aunt and uncle. We had about eighteen people in all in our apartment with the judge.

D: The thing was, we had negative two billion dollars to our name. It turned out there were a ton of summer shows going on, musicals and everything else, so I would work a construction job all day and then come back and play these musicals, and that's how we eventually made enough money.

M: I started freelancing and playing on pop records.

D: Yeah, there was a lot of recording stuff. There were also a million church gigs. But to give you an idea of how little money we had, the first thing I did after we got to Birmingham — you know, they take the truck away and we're in the apartment — I looked up where the Red Cross blood-donor place was, gave blood, and with whatever the money was, bought gas, and bread, and milk.

M: And peanut butter.

D: And peanut butter. That's how bad it was. That's how we started.

So weren't you terrified?

D: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

M: We both were. But I always felt that together, we could do it. That was always the feeling.