Bo: The one thing about our relationship that has been true since the day we met, from when we first got married to now after 17 years, the one constant that we’ve always had is that we’re always building something. We’re building a thing all the time.
Dawn: Yeah, we’re fighting for something together.
Bo: That’s right.
Dawn: Yeah.
Bo: And whether that’s the play or Eloise or Axel or Lyla or our relationship or the movie—even our home. If you think about our house, we’re building it all the time. We’re making improvements and making it how we want it to be. Our careers, our company—it’s the same exact thing. We’re constantly battling to build this thing. I think most couples try to keep those things separate from each other. I think that’s a mistake. I like building stuff together. I don’t like being separate.
Dawn: No. And I think we’re really lucky because we work together and we love working together. That’s just something that kind of happened because you wrote the play and you needed someone to believe in it and fight for it and that was me. I wasn’t acting as much and I said well I’m going to produce it and let’s do this thing and not everybody has that. All the struggles that we’ve gone through together in that area has made us stronger. We’ve been able to share those moments. Where maybe some couples are having struggles at work but they don’t necessarily want to bring that home and share that. But you need your spouse and your family to support and to help you through that.
So like you’re saying rather than keeping that separate, make it all one, and be a team. You’ve always done so much better when you’ve had a team, almost like a coach and a player, and that’s kind of how we’ve always been. We have this saying, “It’s just you and me baby.” We would be in the back of these theaters and it was just us. There was nobody else really believing in Bo’s story or what we were going to do. We’d have a packed house of a couple hundred people out in the audience and it was just us, alone, backstage getting ready for another show, never knowing if there was going to be a next show. There was nothing. We just fought for it.
Bo: Yeah, and there’s another thing too. I think a lot of people get very safe and secure in thinking that they’re not going to risk anything. We’ve never been interested in safety and security.
Dawn: I have.
Bo: Have you?
Dawn: I would have fantasies, like what would it be like if Bo wore a suit and went to work every day. Or I’d hear other wives say, “My husband’s traveling for business.” And I was like, that’s so cool. I wonder what that would be like if Bo traveled for business.
Bo: Don’t we?
Dawn: You do now. It’s funny to me because I remember wanting that so bad, just to have that security because we had no money and we had babies and we were fighting for this play. There were so many ups and downs. We were entrepreneurs and doing it together. I just really wanted to be home and go, “Oh, my husband is traveling for business.”
Bo: That was your fantasy?
Dawn: That was my fantasy.
Bo: Good luck with that one.
Dawn: Yeah. Now we travel for business. We go together.
Bo: Well, I think the security and the safety comes in the relationship. Regardless of how bad I am on stage, or if somebody fails here or I don’t do a good job there, we always have the security of the family. We’re still together. We’re here to make each other’s dreams come true, which is another thing too, especially now that the kids are involved. We’re constantly harping about how our jobs are to make the others’, in the family, dreams come true and that’s really how our business has been too. For the people who work with us, our job is to make their dreams comes true. Our job as a family is to make each other’s dreams come true. Now that doesn’t happen all the time because the kids are like, “You’re ugly,” “You can’t sing,” “ You’re lousy at playing guitar,” or whatever it is and we’re constantly reminding them with, “Hey guys, you’ve got to make each other’s dreams come true. You can’t be against it.” And they go, “Okay,” and they do whatever.
But I think that’s great for every family. What if your family’s job, and only job, was to make each other’s dreams come true? Same goes for marriage—what if your job was to make each other’s dream come true? That’s a pretty cool job. And then you add the kids into that mix. Now you’ve got four or five people fighting for something. Those dreams are assured to come true if that’s the case and you have that many people fighting for it. The trouble is no one talks about dreams or no one has any because they failed before. So have we—that’s all we’ve done. I just think it’s a good way for people to address their relationships and raise their kids.
