Together 24-7
By Geoffrey W. Melada
Photography by Becky Thurner Braddock
Catherine Zeta-Jones stars in a 2007 movie called No Reservations in which she plays the head chef of a trendy New York restaurant who falls in love, quite unexpectedly, with her sous chef, played by Aaron Eckhart. They stew, steam and dice each other as they compete for top honors from Gotham's gourmands, until, finally, the act of working side-by-side on a shared passion brings them together. By the end of the film, the two rival chefs are hand-feeding each other tiramisu in the kitchen of the new restaurant they've opened together by the San Francisco Bay.
How cozy does this sound? The movie makes you want to run out and start a business with your significant other. But is it really so easy to mix the personal and the professional? More people are doing it than you might think. One source is Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding - and Managing - Romance on the Job, a new book by Stephanie Losee and Helaine Olen, which claims that half of all Americans date on the job. Of those inter-office romances, note the authors, one-fifth of them become long-term relationships.
As Valentine's Day approached, Pittsburgh magazine contributing writer Geoffrey W. Melada sat down with five area couples who live and work together to learn the secrets of their success. A diverse group that includes doctors, lawyers, artists, techies and farmers, the duos opened up about the joys and challenges of working together. On one point they all agree: This lifestyle is not for everyone.
North Fayette Township-based sculptor Ron Desmett, who works with his artist wife, Kathleen Mulcahy, stresses that there are no neutral observers of his marriage. Invariably, people come down on one of two sides: "One camp says, 'I wish I could do that. That is so sweet,' and the other camp says, 'I could never do that.'" Regardless of which side you take, it's hard to disagree with Desmett's claim that unions like his challenge people's notions of what it means to be a couple. Now meet five couples who are meeting that challenge - and seem to be living and working together happily ever after.
Kathleen Mulcahy & Ron Desmett
Facing each other across a desk they share in an office full of inspired clutter - sketches, blueprints and photographs - Ron Desmett and Kathleen Mulcahy plot to set a fire on the grounds of a major Pittsburgh university. Not to worry. Their business is art, not arson.
This husband-and-wife team of artists, who share a passive solar-powered home studio situated on eight rolling acres of farmland near Oakdale, is busy designing a 7-foot-tall sculpture made to look like flames in stainless steel and glass. It will adorn the entrance to Duquesne University's new student center on Forbes Avenue. This commission, set to be finished in the summer of 2008, represents one of many joint projects for the longtime couple.
New Jersey native Kathleen Mulcahy was teaching glass sculpture in the fine-arts program at Carnegie Mellon University in 1977 when Ron Desmett, of Akron, Ohio, arrived on campus as a graduate student in ceramic sculpture. On two separate occasions, they "met without meeting," as Mulcahy puts it. The next time she encountered Desmett, however, something clicked in her mind, and she suddenly remembered seeing him at art shows all across the country. "It's a miracle that I was given a third time to see you," she says, beaming at Desmett, who has just brought her a cup of green tea from their kitchen. "What are the chances?"
The chances weren't great that the two would stay in Pittsburgh. Unlike today, when works by glass artist Dale Chihuly fill Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens and draw record crowds, there wasn't much of a glass scene here in the late-1970s when they arrived. When they got married, Mulcahy and Desmett decided to change that, firing up their own furnaces in 1981 and encouraging other glass artists to move here.
Although Ron Desmett, 59, had come to CMU to study ceramics, not glass, he knew as soon as met Kathleen Mulcahy that he wanted to work with the now 57-year-old glass artist. "She needed a partner. I didn't know much, but I was good with my hands." Their first joint exhibit, "Crossings," a critical success, was displayed in 1982 at The Pittsburgh Plan for Art on Craig Street in Oakland, and it proved to the pair that they could work together despite dissimilar personalities (or perhaps because of them).
"We work differently," Ron Desmett explains. "She is the detail-person, the research-oriented one." He's more impulsive, she insists, constantly dreaming up new figures or, as in the case of his black, lidded vessels (literally glass blown into the hollowed tree trunks of rotting walnut trees), rethinking old ones.
While they do create individual works, often they will collaborate on a single piece. "We have a wonderful repartee. We trust each other implicitly," says Mulcahy. Indeed. "Sometimes [early on in their careers] we would forget who finished or started a piece," says Desmett, noting that their process makes some skeptical. "People will ask: 'Whose work is this?' They have a hard time believing it's an equal collaboration." Their work, he claims, "is challenging other people's notions of what it means to be a couple."
That is not to say that working with each other is easy. As artists, they are particularly passionate. When they fight, "We hold nothing back," Mulcahy stresses. But, she adds, "We let it out and then it's over. We never go to bed angry." They agree that some debate - call it "glass-nost" - is healthy. After all, she says, "We're trying to get somewhere with this work." Her husband agrees, adding, "We both want it to be good."
Their work has been in such demand lately that Mulcahy and Desmett have lost track of time, joking that they forget even major holidays. To unwind, they bought a couple of brightly colored kayaks. Why not row together in one? "We thought about getting a two-seater," Desmett concedes, "but we'd probably kill each other."