PORT ST. LUCIE PEOPLE
The DEVELOPMENTAL SPECIALIST
BY ELLEN GILLETTE
42 Port St. Lucie Magazine
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ELLEN GILLETTE PHOTOS
While Wendy Cozine has always enjoyed home visits with the infants and toddlers she helps with early intervention, working from home and doing virtual
visits because of the pandemic has been rewarding, too.
Tiger Beat teen magazine. Easterseals. The Palm Beach
Post. Bat mitzvah. Fort Pierce Police. Community
theater. England. Jan’s Place. New Jersey. A SoHo
penthouse. Volunteering. The ukulele. Brooklyn. India. Japan.
Special Olympics. Use Your Words writing group.
If there was a diagram showing where each of the above
items — and many more — overlap, Wendy Cozine’s photo
would be in the center. She describes her traditional Jewish
home in New Jersey as similar to living in a John Cheever
novel. A favorite memory is going into New York to visit her
father’s office in the World Trade Center.
“My dad took the train to work,” she says. “There were
cocktail parties. They sprinkled English with Yiddish.”
Cozine’s mother worked at a portrait studio.
“She could sell anything,” Cozine says with a laugh. “Once
the photos came out damaged and she convinced the family
it was a special effect.”
When her mother applied for a credit card, the company
wanted her husband to sign.
“She fought them. It was her money, she said. She didn’t
get the card, but she stood up for herself.”
After high school, Cozine began college, but lacked the
focus to continue. Back home, she worked at Tiger Beat magazine
and met writer Caris Arkin. A shared love of music led
them to form a duo called Nevoy Envoy that performed and
recorded in New York. And a love for one another led to a
wedding ceremony at a friend’s SoHo penthouse.
“Once Carole King was in the audience,” she recalls. “She
talked the whole time, but it was cool.”
Arkin also influenced Cozine’s spiritual journey. For years
they followed the teachings of Meher Baba, an Indian mystic,
making several trips to India. The couple also performed
internationally until a six-month gig in Japan proved fatal to
the marriage.
“We played all day at Huis-ten-Bosch, the Holland park
in Nagasaki, then they’d take us back to the hotel,” she says.
“Being together all the time, we grew apart.“
A few years after the divorce, Cozine moved to Florida and