How I Met a Nearly-Naked Kevin Costner in His Living Room

Did I ever tell you about the time I met a nearly-naked Kevin Costner in his living room? Here's how it happened.

Let's hop in the Wayback Machine to 1995 when Adam and I quit our jobs, left everyone and everything we knew behind in Texas and moved to Boulder to start his audio/video/home theater company. We didn't know anyone in Boulder and in keeping with exactly what everyone except us had predicted, that turned out to be a teensy bit of an obstacle. Boulder was pretty cliquish back then. Like, middle-school cliquish. To get on a building project you had to know somebody or at least know somebody who went to school with somebody or had been to the same protest rally as somebody and we did not know any of those somebodies.

So for the first year or two we mostly found work four hours away in Aspen where they don't give one tiny fuck about whether you're a local or not because virtually no one is a local there. (Oddly enough, it turned out that Adam actually did have local ties to Aspen but that's another story). We actually did so much business there that to save travel time and money we bought an RV and rented a permanent space at an RV park outside of Aspen as a "satellite" office. (An RV park from which I later got us banned for life but that too, is a different story).

One day, Adam had a meeting in Aspen with the representative of a very famous client who was building a vacation home on an idyllic piece of land with an idyllic lake and a view so glorious it made angels weep with joy. Adam was not allowed to know who this client was nor would he ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to speak to him. ("Not that the client is a him, I just had to choose a pronoun," said the not-at-all-ludicrous representative). No communicado was problematic since our specialty was customizing the entertainment system to each client's particular needs but hey, it was a paying gig and Adam was a manipulative little bastard who knew that he could eventually worm his way to the client. Spoiler: he did.

It took all of five minutes to find out who the client was. Adam signed the contract with the representative, walked to a sandwich shop a block away for some lunch and was congratulated on getting the Costner job by no less than three complete strangers. If news travels fast, secrets travel faster.

At first all communication happened only through the representative. Slowly, as Adam gained trust, he was allowed to speak to people closer and closer to the inner circle and finally to the man himself. Mr. Costner was really great. Very easy going, funny, always joking around with Adam and the crew. He followed Adam around and asked a lot of questions like, "Cool drill - can I use it?" To which Adam would always reply, "Fuck no! Put that down. I don't have that kind of insurance!" When they would run into each other in town, Kevin would always say hello and sometimes buy Adam lunch, thus breaking down the very strict Aspen client/worker bee barrier and eliciting gasps from onlookers. It was a good relationship.

Meanwhile, I was not allowed to be anywhere near Mr. Costner. Or his job site. Or Aspen. I wasn't allowed to speak with anyone related to the project in any way. No phone calls. No written correspondence. I wasn't even allowed to use KCs name when describing the project in our company newsletter. (I very cleverly disguised his identity by describing it as the Dances with Wires project - subtle). Inexplicably, everyone agreed that I absolutely could not be trusted to function like a sensible, sane person in an Oscar-winning actor's presence. I felt this was particularly unfair since I was the one who had manifested him into our lives in the first place.

See, I watched Dances with Wolves incessantly while I demonstrated one of our amazing home theaters at the Denver Tour of Homes for ten hours a day, seven days a week for six wretched, grueling weeks. We had to screen a top quality movie to showcase our incredible audio/video so I chose Dances with Wolves because it's a classic and yes, because Kevin Costner's naked butt. I saw it 37 times. The movie, not his butt. Although I guess actually, both. I can still say "My name is Dances with Wolves" in Sioux: "chumani tutanka ohwatchie mi ay ello" (phonetically spelled and I have no idea where the real breaks are in between words). Obviously, it was my single-minded, laser focus on Mr. Costner which ignited a force in The Universe - The Secret - and brought him to us. But did I get thanked? No, instead I was banished and forbidden.

Then one day, as fate - no, The Universe - would have it, Adam and I were attending Camp Jeep near Leadville for a mini-vacation and Adam got a call. It was Mr. Costner. He was having technical difficulties with this system and could we please send someone to help? For most of the year, Leadville and Aspen are about two and a half hours apart because you have to go waaaaaay around the mountains but this was July which meant Independence Pass was open. Which meant we were by far the closest team who could help. Which meant I got to go to Kevin Costner's house. Hah!

As we traversed Independence Pass, winding our way across the highest paved road in North America, a very curvy, two-lane (sometimes less) highway, Adam lectured me on the finer points of not being me. "Don't say the first thing that pops into your head. Don't say the second or third things either. In fact, wait for the seventh or eighth thing and then re-examine it a couple more times before you speak it."

Finally, we arrive. Ring the doorbell. The door swings open and standing before me is Kevin Costner. He's wearing nothing but a very short pair of shorts and hip wader boots while balancing a bowl of cereal in one hand. He reaches out his other hand to me and says, "Hi, I'm Kevin." I swear to God the only response in my head was, "Yeah, no shit," so I did as I had been coached and waited for the next thing to pop into my head. But nothing popped. Nothing at all, just an endless mantra of "no shit, no shit, no shit...." which I suddenly found irrepressibly funny and I burst into a fit of giggles. In his face. While I was still shaking his hand. Perfectly normal and sane - what had Adam worried about?

KC brushed it off because he is awesome and explained that he was dressed like that because he and his son, Joe, had just come in from fishing. He introduced me to his kids, Joe and Lily, and I joined them on the sofa to chat and watch some TV while Adam and Kevin went off to do guy stuff and troubleshoot electronics. After a while I excused myself from the kiddos and went to find Adam. He and KC were in the bedroom and Kevin was standing there, considering the various solutions being proposed for whatever electronic issue we were there to fix and he was sort of absentmindedly stroking his still bare chest. Adam cleared his throat, and pointing towards the stroking, asked, "uh... you want to be alone there, Kevin?" Realizing what he was doing, Kevin laughed out loud, then started really exaggerating the caresses. "Maybe we'd figure this out faster if I got dressed."

Oh no, please not that. In my mind you will always be just the way you were then, nearly-naked Kevin Costner, clowning around with my husband in your bedroom. And that's how it happened.