Hello, Sunshine

Well, viral is an exaggeration. But fifty thousand people did tune in for the first one. And after we posted about five of them, they caught the eye of a Food Network producer, Ryan Landy, who saw in this unabashed small-town girl the opportunity to bring cooking to a new generation. It wasn’t just my recipes he liked, he would later say in the first profile of A Little Sunshine in New York magazine, it was the feeling. Small-town girl turning into city woman. My East Village apartment was rustic and homey. My fiancé in his jeans and button-down was handsome without trying. And while I was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans, my hair swept into a bun, I looked like you’d want to look with your hair swept into a bun: friendly, sincere, girl you wanted to be friends with pretty.

A Little Sunshine, he said, was aspirational for young, ambitious New Yorkers: twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who didn’t shop for clothes anymore, who bought pieces; who turned 800-square-foot apartments into glamorous, mid-century homes; who through sheer force of will (and eighty-hour workweeks) turned relationships and jobs into the family and career they wanted. But these women, in their efforts to become the women they thought they should be, sometimes lost sight of the women they used to be—the women they truly were. Here was someone being who she truly was. And being embraced for it.

My grainy videos made people feel like I was their most authentic friend. And, from day one, the fans (how weird, at first, to think of fans) craved that authenticity. They wrote emails, they wrote letters, they wrote in the comments: Who knew that in the kitchen I would rediscover a piece of myself? #justadentistsdaughter. (She was a hedge fund manager who’d won two Midas Awards and lived in a ten-million-dollar loft on Hubert Street.) We put her testimonial on the top of the webpage.

This woman, all these women, who had their fifty-dollar blow-outs and Pilates lessons and green juice in the morning, now, every Sunday, instead of takeout, they had A Little Sunshine. It was cooking as a way of escape, cooking as a way of joy. Cooking as a way to make their boyfriends and husbands feel wanted and make them feel like they were more than their busy jobs. It was cooking as a way to spend time with Sunshine Mackenzie—a pretty (but not too pretty) girl who, just like them, was taking a little time away from trying to be everything to everyone to stay true to herself.

It was a great story, right?

If only any of it were true.

The day I turned twenty-six, I wasn’t uploading anything to YouTube. I was working at a bar and grill in Red Hook. At the time, it was one of the only bar and grills in Red Hook—a small community at the tip of Brooklyn, named after the hook at its end that stuck out into Upper New York Bay. Nowadays, it was nearly as hip and pricey as the more convenient and yuppied-out Brooklyn neighborhoods near it—but at the time, it was still fighting its gentrification—an IKEA going in, artists purchasing town houses, a Michelin-starred chef setting up shop in an abandoned Chevron station. Most important, while completely inconvenient to everything in Manhattan, Red Hook was relatively convenient to the graduate school where Danny was getting his master’s in architecture.

Of course, over time, Red Hook had become more than just convenient. It had become a plan. There was a brownstone off Pioneer Street that we couldn’t begin to afford. It needed a gut renovation, landscaping, indoor plumbing (no joke). But we loved it all the same—its small backyard, an exposed brick wall that ran the length of the living room. Danny had become friendly with the owner, who had several equally dilapidated properties around the neighborhood. He was considering selling to us, if, in exchange, Danny would renovate the brownstone as a show property: an example of how the other properties could be lovingly refurbished. Danny agreed that he would build out those properties as well, if buyers were interested.

So, in theory, it was to everyone’s benefit. I loved the idea of having a home—a real home that I wanted to come home to (something I’d never had). Danny needed clients. The owner wanted to cash in on Red Hook’s burgeoning popularity.

I was tending bar to pay our rent, and Danny was moonlighting at an architecture firm in Tribeca on the weekends to pay for everything else, including our down payment. We weren’t going to be able to celebrate my birthday together that night. We weren’t going to be able to celebrate my birthday until we each had a corresponding day off—which looked like it was going to be sometime in August.

Ryan walked in around 10 P.M. I’m sure of the time because a drunk couple—two regulars, Austin and Carla—were arguing at the bar. Right as the front door opened, Carla poured their pitcher of beer over Austin’s head.

“Sorry!” Austin said. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or to his girlfriend. I knew he didn’t mean it.

I perched on the floor, wiping up the sticky, yeasty mess, staring at the clock, counting the minutes until closing. So I didn’t quit. So I didn’t fill another pitcher of beer and throw it right back at th

em.

“You’ve certainly gone and made a mess of things now,” Ryan said.

This was the first thing he said to me, sitting on the corner barstool, wearing a pinstriped suit. I looked up at him, taking a final swipe at the floor.

“Not my mess,” I said.

He shrugged. “If you’re the one cleaning it up, what’s the difference?”

I smirked, preparing to ignore him. Sometimes they ended up here—smarmy guys in fancy suits, their wives asleep in their Park Slope town houses. They usually arrived with a woman they didn’t want to be seen with anywhere else. I looked toward the door, half expecting someone to join him.

“It’s just me,” he said, as if reading the thought. Then he flashed me his smile.

Ryan would later say that I smiled back at him, welcoming him, but I doubt that’s true. I don’t remember having any interest in even serving him a drink—this guy talking to me from his height of the bar stool, my low of the floor.

“Guess I’m a little overdressed for this place,” he said.

I shrugged. “All the same to me.”

“Well, I didn’t feel like heading home just yet. I just lost my job.”

“Oh . . .”

“Yeah, well, officially, I resigned to pursue a secret project.”

“And you thought you’d find it here?”

I worked on tips. You would have thought I’d try to keep the sarcasm in check. But I had beer on my knees and I didn’t feel particularly badly for a guy who could sell his suit and make more than I was paid in a month.

He laughed. “No, I thought I’d get drunk here. And I’ll start looking tomorrow.”

“So what can I get you?”