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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Delphine Bowers 
February 5, 1998 
Cassette 4, Side 2 
 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:06 
Okay. 
 
Delphine Bowers  00:06 
And you know, he has diabetes too, and his diabetes is more advanced than mine. And he doesn't 
drive anymore, and she drives him every place. She goes with him when he goes to the doctor, 
and she takes care of him in ways that-- she's a, I mean, she's a neat freak and a clean freak. So, 
she can really, she really goes after a house and goes after doing things right and making sure 
that the food is right, and that kind of-- I'm not like that, we're so much alike. We, she cleaned in 
the office last weekend, and Al helped her. The place looked really different, she said there were 
four buckets of water that were nearly black. And I said, "I'll never be able to look her in the eye 
again." And he said, "We can't see the dirt." I realized he was right, but my eyes are so bad that I 
can't see things. But it's also true that even if I could see it, it probably wouldn't bother me much. 
And it's just what he needs. He's still my friend. The main thing is that, that we did, we talked a 
lot about it as we were entering the relationship, and said that the relationship was not meant to 
be a lifetime partnership. That's not what we were doing. We were very good friends who were 
enjoying each other sexually, and that we wanted, above all, for the friendship to survive, and it 
has.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:46 
That's very admirable.  
 
Delphine Bowers  01:47 
It is admirable, but it's been extremely hard, because he and Jack are the only people that I've 
ever been sexual with. And I, you know, like it was very nice to be in a relationship with 
someone who was kind. And I'm pretty much over it. Three years is a long time to get over it. 
But actually, we were probably together for six, so three is not too bad to get over it. And I'm 
almost to the point of being open to another relationship. And that's interesting, I didn't think I 
would. So that's when I, I allowed myself to believe that the Aurora House was the family that 
I'd never had, that those therapists were my friends. And that I went to, you know, all the parties 
that they gave and was friends with everyone, and then, in one fell swoop, I lost my family, I lost 
my best friend who had nothing to do with me. And that happened, actually, before, well, I knew 
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what was happening. It was the way I reacted, she reacted to it. But it wasn't because she thought 
I was evil to be with Al.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  03:24 
Was she part of that Aurora House?  
 
Delphine Bowers  03:27 
Yeah, she was part of it, but she's at odds with most people there. That's another story. But I lost 
my family, and my best friend, and my office, and my lover, all at once. And I got real crazy. 
And my support group, there's a woman in the support group whose name is Judy [?Hausman?]. 
Judy is, is Orthodox and-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  03:58 
Jewish? 
 
Delphine Bowers  03:58 
Jewish. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  03:58 
Orthodox Jewish. 
 
Delphine Bowers  04:00 
And she said, "I know there's a temp-- I know a temple that I think you'd like," because she'd 
heard about Ted Falcon and the Bet Alef. And she said, "I'll take you." I mean, I had hardly ever 
been to a Jewish service, I mean, that's how-- and I, and I really liked it. I thought, this is for me. 
And that's, that's how I started going to Bet Alef and that's interesting. You ought to try it 
sometime. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  04:30 
Yeah. 
 
Delphine Bowers  04:32 
Although I think you might like a Eitz Or better, that's another, it's renewal, and I like it too. Ted, 
is not renewal, he's very clear that he's not renewal, but it means he's, he wants to be 
meditational, which means it doesn't fit into any category. And he's, his background is reform, 
but to reform Seminary. And renewal comes from Orthodox, so I don't know. I'm probably going 
to affiliate with both of them. So I haven't decided exactly what I'm going to do, I am affiliated 
with Bet Alef. And so that has been very important to me, and I, I used to sit all by myself at 
services. It was, you know, I would not ask if I could sit with someone, I'd sit by myself and cry 
a lot. It was reminiscent of being in the Episcopal Church, except that there was a difference. I 
have friends and I'm happy.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:50 
Was the difference for you knowing that you wanted to learn?  
 
Delphine Bowers  05:59 
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Oh, yeah. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:00 
I mean, going back to what you said about the Episcopal.  
 
Delphine Bowers  06:03 
Well, I wanted to learn about the Episcopal Church too, and I'd been to an Episcopal boarding 
school, so it wasn't anything for me much to learn. I'd been steeped in it, but I still couldn't 
believe it, and I'm not having those troubles with this. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:17 
Good. Do you feel culturally Jewish at all? 
 
Delphine Bowers  06:22 
Yeah, I feel very Jewish culturally. And I think that it's probably, I was going to say, I think Aunt 
Rosa was real sneaky. I think she sneaked a lot of stuff in there. And then I went back and saw 
those cousins in Nantucket, and it's very interesting. They are, they're culturally Jewish, but they 
don't practice in any way. And when I went to visit years ago, years and years and years ago, 
when I was 17, or had just had my 18th birthday, David and Buddy's parents had a Christmas 
tree. So, they may have been culturally Jewish, but they still had a Christmas tree. And there are 
a lot of people like that, so. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  07:18 
What are some of your favorite things to do now, for yourself? 
 
Delphine Bowers  07:22 
I like to read, I like to play my recorder, I like to go to early music things, I like just to visit with 
people. When I go to France, I keep looking to see if I have it this morning, one of the things I 
did was to look to see if I had an answer to the email I sent last night, but it would not likely 
come this morning. Because I'm going to go see Vicky and her little girl, Rachel, lived across the 
hall, and she's gone to the Netherlands, to a place called Maastricht. [?Just getting a?]--  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:08 
I know Vicky.  
 
Delphine Bowers  08:10 
How do you know Vicky?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:12 
From writing class. 
 
Delphine Bowers  08:14 
Oh. Well, Vicky is my daughter across the hall.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:19 
Oh, okay. 
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Delphine Bowers  08:20 
I'm gonna go see her.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:21 
Oh. 
 
Delphine Bowers  08:23 
I didn't know you had been in it that long.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:24 
Yeah. 
 
Delphine Bowers  08:28 
She's a real, real neat woman. And she and I are close friends. She was, she's always up real 
early, and if I woke up and couldn't sleep, I could go over and have a, I'd shuffle across this hall 
in my, I sleep in sweats, with my Polartec boots and my sweats and no teeth, and have coffee 
with her. And I'm real fond of Rachel. And so I'm going to, she's going to come and meet me in 
Paris, going to rent a car, and we're going to, I think we're going to meander back to Maastricht.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:08 
Wow. What is-- How do you spell? 
 
Delphine Bowers  09:10 
Maastricht. M-A-A-S-T-R-I-C-H-T. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:13 
Okay. 
 
Delphine Bowers  09:15 
That's where she's getting her PhD.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:18 
That is so wonderful.  
 
Delphine Bowers  09:22 
And she hasn't made any close friends. I don't think the Dutch are very into their feelings. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:33 
It'll be a relief for her to have you come visit then.  
 
Delphine Bowers  09:39 
Oh, yeah, it'll be a relief for me too, because, like, it's as dear as [?Gerta?] is and as much as I 
care about her, we're so different. I was telling her about the brain lady and saying that, because I 
get such a kick out of it, that they are a couple of dogs that come see her. And they don't come in 
when she's doing, well, maybe they do, but I'm not aware of it, when she's doing the electrode 
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things, when I'm facing the TV, but she, when I'm writing my check and making my next 
appointment, she takes out the dog biscuits and feeds them, and we admire them, and so forth.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:07 
So that's something that you love too, are animals.  
 
Delphine Bowers  10:18 
Yeah. And Gerta says, "I wouldn't want her to do that on my time." And I said, "Why not?" And 
she said, "Well, what good is it to you?" I said, "It's love." [?She doesn't think they should get 
it?]. [To the cat] Yeah, you wouldn't like the dogs, would you?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:50 
Thank you for telling me those stories.  
 
Delphine Bowers  10:52 
Well, you're welcome, and I don't know what we're gonna do about this to clean it up. You can 
decide what to do.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:58 
Yeah, I'll talk about it in class today.  
 
Delphine Bowers  11:03 
Yeah, because it's, it's, I couldn't leave it out. It's been a very important part of my, my journey, 
was to look and see that I had, time after time after time, tried to make something that wasn't 
there out of something else. I tried to make a mother out of my stepmother. I tried to make a 
husband out of Jack, of course, I didn't know how to be a wife either, and I need to be real clear 
that, that the destructiveness was mutual. And I tried to make a family out of the Aurora House. 
And nobody's ever said to me, "You know what? I want you to know that I don't like what you're 
doing. I wish you were not working with Al, and I'm, you're my friend, and I still love you." 
Nobody ever said that. It was just like they were all scared. They were all scared that they might 
be guilty by association and lose their licenses. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:13 
And basically it's because Al got together with-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  12:17 
Well because--  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:18 
--the woman after a year and a half instead of two years. 
 
Delphine Bowers  12:21 
Mm-hmm. Well, for them, they said, most of them believed that if you ever got together with 
someone that had been your client, it was wrong. And I know for a fact that Elaine has advised 
people, "Oh, go ahead and do that. So and so did it and got away with it. It'll be all right." And 
she got very high and mighty because she was afraid for her license, because there was a case 
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somewhere where someone got sued, and everybody in the building was, was under whatever 
investigation and everything else because of association. And I'm sorry, you got to put your 
money where your mouth is, but I just was not about to, to throw out a friend that I, was very 
good therapist. I mean, he's very good and he's very different from me, I'm not going to do that 
because he's dumb about his sex life. And I also believe that, that, I mean, of course this is 
[?good lessons for him?]. Everybody learns lessons from this stuff. And he did what he was 
supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do. So the real associations are people that you-
- You don't have a lot of intimate friends, you can't make everyone into an intimate friend. And 
the other thing is to learn how, this is a new one for me, to learn how to recognize and to take in 
love, where you find it, instead of discounting it and saying, "Oh, they're just being nice, they 
probably don't really care."  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  14:27 
Those are two big lessons, [?very powerful?]. 
 
Delphine Bowers  14:36 
And that those were nice friends in the Aurora House, but they were not deep, lasting friends. 
We did the same kind of work, we saw a lot of each other. They liked having an older person 
around, but they were not about to risk their licenses. And the other thing is that none of them, 
Elaine told me about-- Lee had been trying to get me on the phone, and we'd been playing phone 
tag. And I said to Elaine, "What, what is Lee wanting to call me about what's going on?" And she 
said, "Oh, well, I can't tell you. I'll have to, he wants to tell you himself." And I said, "Well, it's 
not going to happen because we just don't connect. So what's going on?" And she said, "Well, 
you you'll find this very hard to hear and hard to believe," and then she told me the story. And I 
said, "I don't find it hard to believe and hard to hear. I knew that there was stuff going on all 
along, and I can't imagine why you didn't divide it?"  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  14:36 
Did he lose his license?  
 
Delphine Bowers  15:14 
Oh yes, he lost his license and he also was sued, and there was a big settlement, but we, it was 
not made public how much it was.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  15:14 
Did the woman sue him? 
 
Delphine Bowers  15:16 
Oh, yeah. Now, I do believe that she certainly had played her part in it, but this the-- I haven't 
made parenting contracts for years because I heard someone at a conference get up and say, 
"Well, I'm Kathy [?Arside?], and I have X number of children," and identifying herself by the 
number of contract children she had as a therapist. And I don't want to get into that, that's too 
easy to be competitive about that and to have your, that be your identity. No, not I. So, I stopped 
doing it right then, and I think that was 1987. So I only did that for a very short time, and I lost 
clients because some of them really wanted contracts with me. And I said, "No, I'll do regressive 
work with you in group if you want it, but it'll be each time under contract, and I'm your 
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therapist, not your mother. You have a mother, and you have big gaps and big holes where you 
didn't get what you wanted and needed, and we can work to fill that in, but that will not make me 
your mother." And so people really wanted a momma, and I see it as really working on people's 
vulnerabilities. They stay [?in the client loop?] for years and years and years longer than they 
would. And I think it fosters dependence and, lots of trouble with it. Why, I had already started 
to withdraw from that community by not making contracts. I also would have nothing to do with 
insurance. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:00 
How do you mean?  
 
Delphine Bowers  18:01 
Well, saying I was being supervised by someone and having them sign off so that I could get 
insurance money for my work.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:11 
Oh, I see.  
 
Delphine Bowers  18:13 
I wouldn't do it. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:13 
That's smart. 
 
Delphine Bowers  18:14 
Well, it's very smart. I understand that Lee is now being investigated for insurance fraud, and 
that all of the people who had him supervising them were also being investigated for insurance 
fraud. And I was, I'm very glad that I didn't do that. It just didn't seem right to me. Do you have 
more questions? 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:48 
Well, I think we're pretty much done with this, almost done with the tape for today. 
 
Delphine Bowers  18:54 
I'll be interested in what's left to talk about. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:57 
Pardon? 
 
Delphine Bowers  18:57 
I'd be interested in what's left to talk about next time.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  19:00 
What do you think is left to talk about?  
 
Delphine Bowers  19:02 
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I don't know, you'll think of something. [Jenny laughs]. 
 