“My entire skill as an artist is that I have incredible sensory responses,” said Curtis, who kept stopping her stories to show off the goose bumps on her forearms. (At one point, she summoned goose bumps just from telling me how often she gets them.) Or, to put it another way: “I feel all the feels, all the time,” she said.
By now, she had walked me into her kitchen, a marble palace with pops of color that included goldenrod pillows in the breakfast nook, a copper lamp hanging above the kitchen table, a vase of slow-to-wake pink tulips, and a framed orange poster that said, “NOTE TO SELF: BE KIND, BE KIND; BE KIND.” She had baked a lemon cake for us to nosh on, and though she insisted she wasn’t showing off — “I baked because I was hungry” — she took pride in her skills as a homemaker.
“I’m a hausfrau,” she said, using her children’s ages to calculate that she had lived in this Santa Monica home for 31 years. In a city where the idle rich tend to flip houses like pancakes, that kind of tenure is unusual, though Curtis just shrugged: “I’m married to my first husband, you know what I mean?”
Though her parents divorced when she was just 3, and though her mother was married four times and her father six, their track record has not dimmed Curtis’s faith in the sanctity of marriage: The concept of commitment thrills her. At one point, when I told her I was dating someone, Curtis slipped a ring off her finger and gave it to me: “It’s that easy. COME ON!”
Both of her daughters’ weddings were held in the house’s oak-shaded backyard — the most recent in May, when Curtis officiated her daughter Ruby’s cosplay-themed nuptials and gamely dressed up as a sorceress from the video game “World of Warcraft.” After the wedding, Curtis posted pictures of the happy couple to Instagram, alongside a photo of her brandishing the sort of blade that her horror-movie nemesis Michael Myers would eagerly pull from its knife block.
“YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP!” she wrote. “The ONLY thing left over at the end of this entire BEAUTIFUL wedding, after everything was taken away was this f-ing BUTCHER KNIFE they cut the tiramisu wedding cake with!”
