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Continued from page 63 eat salads for breakfast. You'd be surprised what I put on 'em"; and, the winner, "You can (expletive) a potato any way you want." When one of the men pulls out something called Flavor Magazine, Winter asks if T.G.I. Friday's publishes it. Another guy, this one in a chef coat, says, "Don't sit back in your chair. She'll knock your ass over." As we head back to the restaurant so she can meet with hosts and bussers, Winter tells me to crank up the Mumford and Sons CD. "I love this!" she shouts. It's the happiest I've seen her since we started hanging out. Or maybe it was the time we watched Stephen Colbert interview Where the Wild Tings Are author Maurice Sendak and she sprayed the room in buckshot laughter. Either way, she's totally at ease. Winter asks if I can drive her past one of her old apartments, on Ninth and Main streets in what is now the Frazier History Museum. I set my recorder in a cup holder. She starts talking about her health. Her cage-fighting trainer in Los Angeles was 26. She likes the mental acuity of fighting. Tere are other benefits. "He was gorgeous," Winter says. "You know, rolling around on the floor with him, how can you beat that, right?" She came home for Derby a few years ago and found a replacement trainer, hoping to learn some moves to take back to L.A. "He put my foot in what's called an ankle bar and broke all the bones," Winter says. I've learned that things can obviously seem bizarre when writ- ing about Winter, so I'm just going to type what she tells me next: She was training one morning in the Malibu Hills with a samurai sword expert. "We started with the katana, naturally," she says. "I got so excited. And I had a heart attack that day. It felt like my ribs were being torn apart." Winter learned that the medical term is Takotsubo cardiomyopa- thy, or broken heart syndrome. "Tey don't really know what causes it. It's not clogged arteries; it's muscle," she says. "It was from being so excited about being with that trainer. I've got some sort of weird chemical thing going on. I have to have a handler a lot to make sure I don't get too wound up and have a heart attack. "You know, 50 percent of women die five years after a heart attack. Fifty percent. Dead." I ask if she thinks about dying. "It's always good to think about death. Make sure your life is good. But I've thought that since my teens, I guess." She can't get the gym out of her head. "I'm a goddamn athlete. So right now, I don't even know who I am," she says. "Tat's why I think about what ex- treme sport I can get into. Motorcycle soccer or base jumping — probably out, but I'd still like to do it." [150] LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 11.12 w inter arrives at my house at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday, an hour after our scheduled time because she had to go to the restaurant to fire somebody. She is here to do happiness mapping for my wife Brianna. In one of Winter's backpacks she has brought a single 12-ounce bottle of Bud Light, a single 12-ounce bottle of Dogfish Head Pumpkin Ale and a bottle of Yellow Tail Pinot Grigio. I give her a tour, and the thing she comments about more than anything is the painted-red staircase that descends into our basement. She also offers to take a decora- tive pot that I think is stupid and donate it to the restaurant's prize box. On the happiness- mapping front, she determines our marriage is strong but that Bri's desire to constantly ac- complish tasks and my need to, I don't know, sit around and read magazines, could lead to problems. Winter's solution: Find help for Bri because "there's no (expletive) way you're go- ing to do it." Bri goes to bed a little before 10 p.m., and Winter and I sit on separate couches and talk until almost 1 a.m. She asks if she can open her bottle of wine, which is chilling in my refrigerator. She finds a coffee cup and pours some for herself ("Great. I'm drinking. You're not"). "For almost 22 years it has been about…the restaurant, but now I'm different. Something happened," she says. "I haven't gone through menopause, but I can't help it. I can no longer not speak my mind. One of my strengths is being honest. I get great joy in being honest." Winter can't remember the last time she ate out in Louisville. When she goes to restau- rants in other cities, she says, "I eat out pro- fessionally. I'll order seven entrées, six appetiz- ées, six appetiz es, six appetiz- ers, four desserts." If she finds a seat she likes, that's where she sits every single time. Once she finds something she likes, she'll order the exact same thing on future visits. "And I leave gigantic tips," she says. "If the bill is $60, I'll leave $50 for the tip." Winter estimates she spends $25,000 to $30,000 in tips each year. I ask why her privacy is so important and 54 seconds pass before she answers. "I never valued being famous in any way, shape or form. It's never been part of my happiness. Never. I want to be the person in back that no one knows. I don't want to talk about myself; I want to talk about them and map their hap- piness. "But I also live in very odd ways. You've gotta admit: A woman who's 50 that isn't gay, hasn't had children and doesn't want children, has never been married and doesn't want to be married. It's not important anymore. It was when I was younger, but not anymore. I think I had a myth about it when I was younger. I think I'm very self-willed and wild, and I don't like to be fettered. I've styled a life that is normal to me but is very un-normal to most people." On the same test that I took, Winter's top strength is "input," which means she has a mind that's a Google search box. Mundane restaurant tasks can get in the way of her hap- piness. "In my free time, I want to pound the hell out of my thinking. I've become so bra- zenly introspective," she says. "I'm in a highly investigative, creative mode, which causes me to be laser-sharp in who I want to spend time with. I have put together ways where, at any moment, I can be taking in information no matter what happens." One of her two iPad screens always displays one of the 15 books she's reading. "I'm looking at 20-, 30-second increments," she says. "If I'm standing in line, if I'm with somebody who's texting, I'm right there in that book, man. Because by the end of my life that's a lot of time. "We're living in a time unlike any other time in history. Way beyond the printing press. Way beyond fire," she says. "We are living in an interconnected universe like we have never seen interconnectedness. It's like the Wild Wild West of the mind. Isn't that how you feel?" Describing Winter as a recluse is wrong. She is the opposite of being shut off from the world. She may have struggled to come up with a list of close friends I could interview, but I picture her brain as a giant sponge that craves being able to soak in learning. She doesn't need a lot of physical space to do that. And the moment the information hose shuts off, her mind becomes parched. In 10 days, Winter is going back to L.A., to move out of the Claremont Hotel, which is in Westwood Village. "Two hundred square feet is too much for me. And my neighborhood has become too known to me now," she says. "I'm having a hard time finding where I want to go. I've been looking. I've been to every single major and minor city in the United States. I want to see the Northern Lights. It's abstract art made in the air. I'm thinking about going to Norway this winter and living in an igloo." She's sick of her loft, too. Years ago Winter lived in the Galt House and she has considered that as an option again. "Ev- eryone's a stranger there," she says. I ask her if she's depressed. "God no, I'm not depressed. I'm going through a midlife crisis. Maybe I've been in a constant midlife crisis my whole life," she says. "I'm not sure you can map your own hap- piness. It's like a doctor doctoring herself," she says. "But it makes me think way outside the box on living. I may be unsettled, but it has a good side effect that keeps me pushing and looking and wondering. And I'm my first experiment." Reach managing editor Josh Moss at jmoss@ loumag.com.