Carrie Schenken: The Woman Who Washes Dogs While Her Wife Gets All the Fame

Here’s something nobody tells you when you Google “Carrie Schenken” — the most interesting thing about her isn’t who she married. It’s that she opened Seattle’s very first self-service dog wash in 1997, kept it running for almost three decades, and barely anyone talks about that part. They just want to know about Amanda Bearse. And honestly? That’s a little unfair.

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Category	Details
Full Name	Carrie Schenken
Born	Approximately 1958–1966 (birth records conflict)
Birthplace	Sacramento County, California (per California Birth Index)
Spouse	Amanda Bearse (married 2010, in Vermont)
Children	Two (including Zoe Bearse, adopted by Amanda in 1993)
Profession	Small business owner
Business	Rub-a-Dub Dog Wash, Seattle
Business Address	6826 Greenwood Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103
Business Est.	1997
Public Profile	Deliberately, stubbornly private

The Business First — Because It Actually Matters

Let’s start where almost nobody starts. In 1997, Carrie Schenken opened a dog wash on Greenwood Avenue in Seattle’s Phinney Ridge neighborhood. Not a fancy grooming salon. Not some trendy pet spa. A self-service dog wash where you bring your own muddy Lab and Carrie’s staff shows you what to do.

She called it Rub-a-Dub Dog. It was the first of its kind in the whole city.

That’s not a throwaway detail. Seattle in 1997 didn’t have a template for this concept. She just… did it. And it’s still running today, nearly thirty years later, at the same address, with Carrie’s name on the website as owner.

The business now offers self-service wash stations, full-service baths, toenail clipping, brush-outs, and gland expression services. The website is cheerful and functional and tells you exactly what to bring and where to park. It also mentions they’re “celebrating 30 years in business next year” — which, when you do the math, puts us right around 2026. Yeah, that’s now. She made it.

There’s something quietly impressive about that. Most restaurants don’t last five years. A niche pet-care business run by one woman in a Seattle neighborhood? Nearly three decades. Make of that what you will.

So Who Is She, Actually?

Fair question. Here’s the honest answer: not much is definitively confirmed about Carrie’s early life, and a lot of websites are just making stuff up and recycling each other’s guesses.

Some sources say she was born April 24, 1958, in Florida. Others cite the California Birth Index, which lists November 21, 1966, in Sacramento County. Her mother’s maiden name appears in records as Evans, her father’s surname Schenken. That’s about it for the verified early-life stuff.

She attended Johnson High School in Sacramento, California, based on public records — graduating sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s if the earlier birth date is right. After that, the trail gets fuzzy.

You’ll see a ton of sites calling her a “cinematographer” or “camera technician.” That might have some truth to it — she’s associated with behind-the-scenes work in entertainment media. But the hard verified credits? Not publicly documented in any reliable film database. Be skeptical of any source that rattles off a specific list of her credits without linking to proof.

What IS documented: she was living in Seattle with a daughter from a previous relationship before she ever met Amanda Bearse. She was already a business owner. She had her own thing going.

The Love Story (Or What We Know of It)

Carrie and Amanda met around 2008. According to Amanda, it clicked fast. Two years later, in 2010, they flew to Vermont and got married — back when Vermont was doing what the rest of the country hadn’t caught up to yet.

That same year, they bought a two-bedroom home together in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood for $529,000. The purchase was documented as a real estate transaction with both their names on it, listed as registered domestic partners. That’s from actual property records, not speculation. The house was built in 1923 and sat at 910 N. 39th Street.

Amanda has spoken publicly about the wedding — tuxedos were involved, apparently, for both of them. She had on a little white tux. Which brings us to a story that actually put Carrie’s name in the news for the first time in a while.

The Ed O’Neill Drama (And Why Carrie Got Dragged Into It)

In early 2024, Ed O’Neill — Al Bundy himself — went on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast and admitted he’d feuded with Amanda Bearse for years. The rift started back in the early 1990s over a TV Guide cover where Amanda and her co-star David Garrison were excluded while O’Neill and the main cast got featured. He declined to push for them to be included. Amanda didn’t forget.

But the part that made headlines involved Carrie’s wedding directly. Amanda didn’t invite O’Neill to the 2010 ceremony. His feelings were hurt. When he asked her why, she told him it was “a tough call” — that she’d worried he’d find the sight of two women in tuxedos amusing.

O’Neill’s response, per his own retelling, was basically to prove her right. He laughed. He said something about it being funny. He later admitted he made “a mean joke” and that it was his biggest regret from the whole situation.

What’s interesting here is that Carrie Schenken is barely mentioned in all the coverage of this story. It was her wedding. Her day. And she gets one sentence in every article, as background detail to a feud between two people from a sitcom she wasn’t on. Classic celebrity-spouse treatment.

Amanda Bearse, Briefly — Because You Need the Context

Amanda Bearse is genuinely a significant figure in TV history. She played Marcy D’Arcy (née Rhoades) on Married…with Children from 1987 to 1997. The show ran eleven seasons on Fox and was a cultural juggernaut of the era — crude, loud, wildly popular.

But here’s the part that mattered more: in 1993, Amanda came out publicly as a lesbian. She appeared on the cover of The Advocate, the LGBTQ+ magazine. She became the first primetime actress to publicly come out while still employed on a major network series. That was genuinely bold in 1993. This wasn’t Ellen in 1997 with industry support and a planned arc — Amanda did it mid-run, mid-career, with no guarantee of what came next.

She adopted her daughter Zoe the same year. A deliberate choice, she’s said — she didn’t want to raise a child while being dishonest about who she was.

And she didn’t just act. Between 1991 and 1997, she directed over 30 episodes of Married…with Children. Then Dharma & Greg, Reba, Veronica’s Closet, and others. She built a whole second career in the director’s chair and later transitioned into stage directing. In 2018 she directed an Off-Broadway production featuring Hayley Mills, whom she’d admired since childhood.

She received the Out on Film 2021 Trailblazer Award. She appeared in the 2022 film Bros — her first big-screen appearance in four decades. She’s still working.

Carrie picked a remarkable partner. That part isn’t in question.

The Privacy Question

Here’s where I want to push back a little on how Carrie gets framed online.

Almost every article describes her as “preferring a private life” as if it’s a personality quirk, or something mildly sad — like she’s just the quiet wife in the background of someone more interesting. But think about what she actually is: a woman who built and sustained a local business for nearly 30 years, raised a family, and deliberately kept the spotlight off herself while her wife moved through Hollywood, Broadway, and back.

That’s not hiding. That’s a choice. A clear, consistent, multi-decade choice.

There’s a real difference between someone who’s forced into obscurity and someone who simply has no interest in being famous. Carrie Schenken reads as the latter. She’s got a business that works, a family that appears intact, and a life in Seattle that she has actively protected from the kind of coverage that would reduce her to talking points.

You could argue — and I will argue — that the internet’s obsession with digging up her birth year and height and net worth misses the actual interesting story entirely. Which is: a woman started something in 1997, kept showing up every single day for nearly three decades, and the whole thing is still going. That’s the story.

What’s Not True (Or At Least Not Proven)

Let’s be clear about a few things the internet confidently gets wrong.

Her exact birthdate is disputed. Multiple conflicting dates circulate online and are repeated endlessly without any original source being cited. Same goes for detailed claims about her camera technician career — possible, but not verifiable from any public film credit database.

Her net worth? Also fabricated. Any site giving you a precise dollar amount is guessing. She owns a small local dog wash business in Seattle. Draw your own conclusions about what that looks like financially.

Some sites claim she was previously in a relationship with a man before Amanda, and has a biological daughter from that relationship. This might be true — there are hints in a few sources — but the name of the former partner has never been publicly confirmed, and the daughter’s information is appropriately private.

The responsible thing is to say: we don’t know. And that’s fine.

Where Things Stand Now

The Rub-a-Dub Dog website is active and taking appointments. The business is at 6826 Greenwood Ave N, Seattle. Hours are 9am to 7pm, seven days a week. They do self-service baths, nail clips, full-service baths, and brush-outs. They have a loyalty punchcard program. The eleventh bath is free.

Carrie Schenken’s name is right there on the “About” page: Owner, Carrie Schenken.

She and Amanda, as of the last publicly available information, remain married. Their last widely publicized appearance together was several years ago — they keep their family life appropriately out of tabloid range.

Zoe, the daughter Amanda adopted in 1993, reportedly works as an audio editor in Palm Springs and lives privately. There’s at least one other child in the family whose details haven’t been made public, which is exactly as it should be.

Final Words

Carrie Schenken is not a celebrity. She is, however, a real person with a real story that gets flattened every time someone writes “Amanda Bearse’s wife” as if that’s the only sentence she gets.

She opened a business from scratch in 1997. She ran it through the economic crash of 2008, through the pandemic, through whatever Seattle has thrown at Greenwood Avenue for three decades. She married a genuinely important figure in LGBTQ+ entertainment history and stayed out of that narrative by choice. She raised kids without making them tabloid fodder.

The dog wash thing is genuinely cool, honestly. Think about how many people have had the idea to do something unconventional and didn’t. She did. And it lasted.

If you’re looking for a dramatic biography full of scandal and reinvention arcs, Carrie Schenken isn’t going to deliver that. But if you think there’s something worth noticing in a person who builds something real, stays loyal to it, and quietly declines to perform their life for public consumption — she’s actually worth paying attention to.

The internet wants her to be a supporting character. She’s just living her own story. That’s kind of the point.

FAQs

1. Who is Carrie Schenken?

She’s an American business owner based in Seattle, best known publicly as the wife of actress and director Amanda Bearse. She’s also the founder and owner of Rub-a-Dub Dog, which has operated since 1997 and was Seattle’s first self-service dog wash facility.

2. How did Carrie Schenken and Amanda Bearse meet?

They reportedly met around 2008. Amanda has spoken publicly about the connection being immediate. They married in Vermont in 2010, when same-sex marriages were legally recognized there.

3. Are Carrie Schenken and Amanda Bearse still together?

As of the most recently available public information, yes. They appear to be. Their relationship has remained largely out of the press for years, which seems very much by design.

4. What does Carrie Schenken do for a living?

She owns and operates Rub-a-Dub Dog Wash, a self-service dog wash facility at 6826 Greenwood Avenue North in Seattle. The company has been operating since 1997. Some sources also describe her as having a background in camera work or film production, though those credits aren’t publicly documented in verifiable databases.

5. How old is Carrie Schenken?

Genuinely unclear — conflicting public records give different birth years. Some sources cite 1958, others list 1966. Until she confirms it herself, treat any specific age you see as a guess.

6. What is a Rub-a-Dub Dog?

It’s a small, locally owned dog wash business in Seattle’s Phinney Ridge neighborhood. They offer self-service bathing stations where you bring your dog and staff help you through the process. They also do professional nail clipping, full-service baths, and brush-outs. It’s been open since 1997 and describes itself as Seattle’s first self-service dog wash.

7. Does Carrie Schenken have children?

Yes. She and Amanda have two children. Amanda adopted Zoe in 1993, before she and Carrie were together. Zoe is now an adult and works as an audio editor in Palm Springs. There is at least one other child in the family whose information has been kept private.

8. Was Carrie Schenken invited to Ed O’Neill’s wedding?

Wrong way around — it was O’Neill who wasn’t invited to Carrie’s wedding. Amanda excluded him from the 2010 Vermont ceremony after years of friction between them. O’Neill admitted on a podcast in 2024 that he reacted poorly when confronted about it and that it’s one of his biggest regrets from that whole chapter of his life.

9. Where does Carrie Schenken live?

She and Amanda are based in Seattle. They purchased a home in the Fremont neighborhood in 2010, with property records confirming the purchase.

10. What is Carrie Schenken’s net worth?

Nobody actually knows. She owns a small neighborhood business that’s been running for decades — that’s the most concrete financial information publicly available. Any specific figure you read online is speculation.

11. Is Carrie Schenken on social media?

She has a Facebook presence under her name, but it’s not a public celebrity account. She doesn’t appear to maintain a public Instagram or Twitter/X presence. The Rub-a-Dub Dog business has an Instagram account (@rubadubdogwash) if you want to see dogs getting squeaky clean.

12. What happened to Amanda Bearse’s career after she came out?

Amanda has spoken about this directly — she said work became harder to find as she aged, particularly after 50, and that she believed her age worked against her in ways it wouldn’t have for male directors with the same credits. She pivoted increasingly toward theater and stage directing and appeared in the 2022 film Bros — her first major film in about 40 years. She received a Trailblazer award from Out on Film in 2021.

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