For a moment, the Bubbleman, a female boxer, a recovering alcoholic and others shone in our pages. Here are updates on their remarkable lives.

Whether you thought of it as the first year of the third millennium or the last year of the second millennium, 2000 was a rich time for purveyors of feature stories. Today, Southern California Living publishes postscripts to the tales of some we’ve profiled in the previous 12 months. Together, the stories give a glimpse of the startling range of life that has been chronicled in these pages.

*

Quincy W., a single, 30-year-old rock concert promoter from Sherman Oaks who talked about her rocky but so far successful 15-year journey through sobriety (“Quitting Is Just the First Step,” Oct. 1), continues to weather the ups and downs of her life without taking a drink or a drug. She has also quit smoking, she says.

But her stress level is rising. She is still involved with a former heavy drinker who continues to imbibe, and she is busy and pressured at work. Where she once adhered to a rigorous program of daily prayers and meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, she hasn’t been to a meeting in more than a week.

Quincy says she is not tempted to drink, nor does she feel in danger that she might. At the same time, she says, “I don’t say that with a whole heart. I’m always an arm’s length away from a drink.” In the past three months alone, Quincy says, six longtime friends, each with 12 or more years of sobriety, have started drinking again.

“That’s the problem people have when they get sober before they reach the legal age of 21 and never had a chance to drink legally on a social level,” she says. “They have a tendency to doubt how real their alcoholism is.”

In 2000, Quincy saw several other stories about recovery surface. She was not surprised to read in August that Audrey Kishline, founder of Moderation Management, an organization advocating moderate drinking for some problem drinkers, had killed two people in a car crash while driving drunk. Nor was she surprised to learn last month that actor Robert Downey Jr., in and out of recovery programs for many years, had been arrested again on drug charges.

The difference between their stories and hers, she says, is that theirs have a higher profile.

“Everybody says [Downey is] weak. He’s not weak. He’s wrapped up in a disease created by self-delusion: ‘This time it’s going to be different,’ ” she says. “It’s never going to be different. He may end up dead in order to figure that out.”

She voted for Proposition 36, the November ballot measure that mandated treatment rather than jail time for nonviolent drug offenders. She was thrilled to see it pass.

Quincy says the publication of her story of her mental and emotional battle with sobriety brought surprising criticism from friends within Alcoholics Anonymous who believed she had violated the program’s tradition of anonymity and wondered if she was OK. She maintains she upheld the tradition because she did not use her last name. “Most people in AA like to hear the speakers end on a happy, hopeful note,” she says. “The article ended on a real note. Sometimes I don’t know where I’m at. Sometimes I go through an identity crisis. Sometimes life sucks. That’s just the way life is.”

She knows of at least two people who were inspired to enter recovery. “That alone makes it entirely worth me doing the article regardless of what anybody else on the whole planet thinks.”