If not for a conspiracy of circumstances you might still be a music teacher.

I wanted to be a violinist in college. Then reality set in when I realized that there was no way I was going to make a living performing in an orchestra. I played one season in Chicago. I was sweating bullets. That was a tough gig. I think it was really something I wasn’t cut out for, and I was better at teaching.

You were married to Bob Johnson all this time, right?

Yeah. I taught at Sidwell Friends School in Washington and I needed a second job. I heard Denise Nichols was leaving a production of Ceremonies in Dark Old Men at the Negro Ensemble Theatre, which had come down from New York. I went down there and auditioned with a bunch of other people, and I got the job. I made a lot more money doing that than teaching school.

Bill Newman, who is my husband now, was in that production. He was really young. He’s a year younger than I am, but at that time he was really young. Of all the people in the company, he was the one I could relate to the best. The others were very New York. I didn’t see him again until much later.

Those who read the wedding pages of the New York Times know Bill was the judge who heard your case when you and Bob divorced.

Bill had a role in Another World and worked at the Arena Stage in Washington, but I think ultimately his father must have hit him on the head and said, "Listen, you’re not going to make it." So he decided to go to law school.

Thirty years later, in 2002, I walked into the courtroom in Arlington, Va., to finalize my divorce and there he was. We were married at my farmhouse in Virginia [in September 2005].

In the intervening years, Bill must have read about you even if he was not among the demographics that ultimately became the audience for BET and the videos that you have said resembled soft-core porn.

Bob first started talking about starting an all-black network because he was upset with the way the media was portraying African-Americans. There was so much good going on out there, but no one ever heard about it. He was on a mission. We had some stunning programs when we started. We had Bill Cosby and Maya Angelou reading stories on the air. This was the 1980s, and music videos came out around that time.

At first I couldn’t wait to watch the videos. Everything was clean and wonderful. The videos also needed a market, and at the time MTV would not show any African-American videos. Finally they realized they were missing revenue. It didn’t cost us anything to put them on so it was pure profit. We clicked on all cylinders. It was later on, as we were all moved out of the company, that I think BET took a decline.

The sale to Viacom left you able to pursue anything you wished.

I think for many women who are divorced or widowed and have money, people think, "Oh, they can sit back and pop bonbons." When there are women like myself who want to do something with their money we get criticized; people wonder what we’re trying to prove.

Fortunately, some opportunities have come along, like buying a stake in Washington Sports Entertainment last May, which has given me the Women’s National Basketball Association team, the Mystics. I’m a managing partner. I have been able to break into a white boy’s network that is the most closed thing out there in the sports industry. You know, they are having a ball, and I wanted to be out there with them.

A lot of people said, "You don’t need to be doing this." I said the men do it; why can’t I be doing it? And if you are tough, they call you a bitch. But there’s a way of working that out. I work the men. And I’m not called that word, at least not to my face.

Were you always a basketball fan?

I never miss a game. I’ve always been a basketball fan, plus I was a University of Illinois cheerleader. There are a lot of owners who don’t even show up at their own games. When I became an owner, the Mystics’ attendance had dropped by an average of about 2,000 fans per game from the previous year. The best-known player, seven-time all-star Chamique Holdsclaw, had been traded to Los Angeles, and they’d had a five-game losing streak, which we broke. If I do miss a game, because of commitments with my own children, I’m on the phone with them.

I’m going to tell you something about these women. All the women in the WNBA are extraordinary human beings. They play the purest form of the game. They are honest, they care about one another. Their average yearly pay is about $37,000. They go to Europe to play in the off-season because they can get $40,000 a month and do endorsements there.

You go into an NBA locker room or a hockey locker room and it looks like you’ve stepped into a palatial penthouse. You know what we have? There are rats in the dressing room. Seriously. And a small metal tub for a whirlpool. This is on my hit list for this year.

And, as it happens, your ex-husband owns the Charlotte Sting WNBA team, and your team beat his last season in all four games they played.

It’s fun! We have a good team. I don’t want to poison our luck, however.

It sounds as if your country place, Salamander Farm in Middleburg, Va., is not exactly a refuge from the excitement of sports these days.

Middleburg is such a growing town, with a young government and special interest groups that have gone berserk. Most of these are people who have moved in recently. Once they move in, they don’t want anyone else to move in. It happened to me. They don’t want any kind of change whatsoever. But I’ve agreed to build a wastewater treatment plant and give it to the town. I’ve got 80 percent of the land in a conservation easement. For the town of Middleburg, the resort will create a very strong economic base. It is not a wealthy town, even though that’s the perception of it. The revenue from the resort will produce $500,000 a year for the town, which can go into roads or whatever improvements need to be done.

I want to make this a five-star, world-class resort. There’ll be horseback riding, and a spa with yoga and Pilates. We are going to have culinary classes and tennis and hiking, with golf not far away. We think it will be running by late spring or summer 2008.

Is it true you learned the hard way that people in Middleburg will not buy $35 olive oil?

Yes, there was $35 olive oil at Market Salamander, the French-style specialty foods store I’ve opened in town. We had to have a good reality check. We had a very high-end line and it didn’t work.

Now we’re concentrating on great food. We really want to boost the Virginia wine industry. We want to highlight the Piedmont wines and foods: the hams, peanuts, special recipes.

And someday maybe you will be selling items designed by Parsons School graduates who studied at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center.

Oh, I’ve always been interested in drawing and photography. I designed a linen line from my photographs that I’m going to use at the resort. Parsons came along around the same time. I became a board member there in 2002.

Working with the school has put me into a world with an entrée to some of the top designers, such as Donna Karan and Diane von Furstenburg. And I’ve just fallen in love with the school. It’s a great, diverse student body. And they were working under deplorable conditions, which is why I did what I did. The design center will be a common area for students to gather, with galleries, meeting spaces, archives and a design store.

What are you going to do next?

My biggest ambition is to make sure my two children grow up healthy and happy. I think I’ve got my hands full right now. I’ve got to build this franchise, I’ve got to get this resort up and I’m not going to take on another thing until these two things come to fruition.

I have a 20-year-old daughter who is taking a break from college. She tried a major and decided it wasn’t what she wanted to do. I told her, "I want you to wait until you find out what you want to do." Too many kids go to college and party, while the parents boast, "My child goes to Harvard." The kids come out saying, "I had a great four years, though I don’t think I learned much. Mommy and Daddy, find me a job."

My daughter is a show jumper and has very expensive horses. My 16-year-old son is like, "Can I have a Lamborghini?" and I’m going, "No." He says his sister has the equivalent in every stall. I have to explain that the horses are her job. I tell both of my kids to take on one thing at a time. I try to tell them that giving them everything they want is not going to make them good human beings. I tell them they’ll be miserable, depressed, with nothing to look forward to.

Photograph by Cade Martin.