Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
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look cool. I'm gonna be the new La-Z-Boy godfather." Tis frustrates Winter because she wants to surround herself with only what she loves, utensils included. She prefers $2 six-packs of forks from Walgreens, a plastic spoon and a $700 serrated, "samurai steel" knife. "I use that fork, that knife and that plastic spoon," she says. "We don't use that much stuff in life. Everything you have you should love. Or get the (expletive) rid of it. "Do you have a favorite pen?" she asks. "I use these," I say, holding up a traditional blue BIC. (When I was a kid, I remember Jerry Seinfeld saying he liked them.) "Do you hate 'em or like 'em?" "I like 'em." "So you like 'em or love 'em?" "I don't know if I could love a pen." "Oh, come on, Josh." "You have a pen that you love?" I ask. She does: a black, felt-tip Paper Mate Flair, preferably with a ribbed barrel. "So that's what I needed to buy one thousand of," she says. "But you're young. It took me years to find a pen I love." She changes directions. "Let's talk about our conversation the other day. I feel guilty about it. Te reason I talked to you the way that I did was because I have a drive to break rules and do the unconventional. I want to do huge experimentations of things that have never hap- pened. For me it's like, 'Let's collaborate on an art piece.'" "Maybe we can," I say. "I just don't know what that is yet." We talk for another hour, mainly about the 17 years she has spent as a "happiness coach." We decide to let her "map" my happiness, which she also does for her employees who are interested. "If I'm go- ing to let you in I want you to let me in," she says. (Tis will eventual- ly include her visiting my house to map my wife.) When I tell her I'd like to spend time observing her first, she says, "No mother (expletive) way I'm going to do that. I'm going to map first." lighting. People who eat at buffets don't pile their plates with as much food as the portions at Lynn's. No kidding: On a recent Saturday for breakfast, the biscuit that comes with my scramble is as big as the thesaurus I'm using as I type this story, which makes me get all philo- sophical and wonder if it can still be categorized as "biscuit." In early October, I walk from my house to Winter's loft. She greets me at the rear entrance of the building, which opened as a school in the early 1900s. Te medical boot is gone and her right foot also now sports an UGG slipper. We climb to the second floor, and I follow her as she limps to her place at the end of the hallway. "I've had too many bad casts, so (expletive) it," she says. "I've been in hospitals so much. I never want to be in a hospital again ever in my life." Her restaurant is an acid trip. Her home: A not-so-ugly lamp stands on a painted-red wooden end table, which is between two of the La- Z-Boys. Two more La-Z-Boys are in the other room. She has stacked little circular cases of jewelry-making materials on a rectangular table. (Te only piece of jewelry I've seen her wear is a big diamond on her right ring finger, which she says was a "gift from a close friend who's a relator" — a happiness-mapping term to describe somebody who prefers deep relationships.) Tere must be at least 500 books on the shelves, and two of the outward-facing covers are Te Pop-Up Kama Sutra and Stephen Colbert's I Am a Pole (And So Can You!). Te large- format printer is for Winter's photography. In the tiny loft upstairs, a mattress stands vertically against a wall. Her refrigerator contains nothing but condiments, most of them expired. She says she hasn't been to the grocery in more than a year. "I live like a frat boy," she says. "I had a mustard sandwich about a month ago because there was nothing else in there." She lives with Patty Schnatter, who is the chief operating officer at Lynn's Paradise Cafe, and for the past four or five months a Mexican restaurant down the street, Ramiro's, has been delivering their dinner. ("Avocado salad, no bacon, extra onions, the burrito sauce…." Winter says.) Here's how she describes her relationship with Schnatter: "Kind of like how Winter wants to surround herself with only what she loves, utensils included. She prefers $2 six-packs of forks from Walgreens, a plastic spoon and a $700 serrated, "samurai steel" knife. y ou've been to Lynn's Paradise Cafe. I know because I've seen Winter's rough math: some 7,000 customers a week for more than 21 years. Tat's eight million, give or take. She had 11 employees when she opened to a four-stars-out-of-four review in the C-J. Now there are almost 90 employees, 15 of whom are sala- ried. "I have more managers on God's green earth than any restaurant should ever have," she says. Winter says she lost $12,000 that first year in business, but sales have grown every single year since. Lynn's Para- dise Cafe does a little more than $4 million annually in sales. Here's an attempt to describe the restaurant in a way that would make Winter happy: It's as if a rainbow (expletive) another rainbow and out popped Lynn's (expletive) Paradise Cafe. (She occasionally apologizes for cussing, which is even funnier when put into historical context. I found a LEO piece from 1995: "Lynn claims she is trying to fix her cursing habit." Seven. Teen. Years. Ago.) Inside the din- ing room there are disco balls, Magic Pants-wearing mannequin legs protruding from a wall, two huge trees with who-knows-what? (is that a Tyrannosaurus rex?) hanging from their branches. Te chairs at the original Formica dinettes are mismatched. Her ugly lamp contest at the Kentucky State Fair is responsible for some of the restaurant's other people visit a friend's vacation house? Kind of like that concept on a more permanent basis. We both live very minimally. It's com- pletely weird, and people could only label it as lesbian and it's so not that. We're so straight." Winter did happiness mapping for Schnatter, the mother of two children, and it convinced Schnatter to get out of a dysfunctional marriage. On a wall is a framed "Map of the State of Happiness," complete with a "Swamp of Sexual Frustration," "Canyon of Pimples and Pubic Hair" and a "Valley of False Hopes." Winter first saw the piece, by Louisville artist Raymond Graf, in the mid-1990s at a local "art rave." Winter stared at it for more than an hour because two months before, while walking in a frigid Seneca Park, she had decided she wanted to "map happiness, whatever that meant. My spirit or whatever was ready to move on to something massive and unknown." Graf had listed its worth as "priceless." Winter traded a deer-antlered lamp for it. She says she has mapped 5,000 to 10,000 people and has never charged for her services. "It's what I love to do," she says, adding, "We have certain T1 lines, highways in our brains. We're born with our strengths." She takes a swig from a large, ever-present bottle of Smartwater and swallows an extra-strength Advil to quell the pain in her foot. 11.12 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE [61]