Time Out of Mind at the Sundance West Hollywood

On Saturday last it appeared that there was no movie for my friend Len Speaks and I to see.

I had no other plan, but I was restless. So I decided to try one more time to find something, near my condo, as I was restless, but lazy, to attend. The only thing was a newly released Richard Gere movie in which he plays a homeless man.

I debated whether going off to see this movie would only increase my restlessness, and provoke my dysthymic mood into something more dark. And then I made a kind of "let's see how I feel when I walk over there" decision. I dressed and went over to the Sunset strip mall that houses the Sundance West Hollywood. The dispositive factor--Richard Gere was going to appear and speak about the movie.


Funny how ordinary and "famous" lives overlap in this town. Back in 1981, just after I moved to Los Angeles, I was at Venice Beach and Gere was making a movie. I can't remember if it was "Breathless" or "America Gigolo".  I remember he was wearing these plaid like pants and he was good looking. And here we are, both a lot older, our paths crossing again, with me, as usual, in the crowd. Not complaining. So, I bought the ticket. I had an appetizer lettuce cup with tasty diced chicken and a glass of sparkling wine at Wokcano and people watched.

Inside the Sundance, I got my second drink to nurse through the movie, a large glass of Proseco (it's an entirely 21 plus theatre) and hoped I had not made a mistake in taking my restless self out.

I was fascinated from start to finish. And provoked to consider, yet again, my own disposition toward the homeless. In my life I have twice been involved with charities to assist men, and women, to transition back to lives off the street, for a combined period of about four years. And I have never found discourse on the subject to be particularly useful because it is a complicated problem that involves more than just a willingness to help, or money. And that's what this movie showed, one soul, and the attendant complications of addressing his homelessness.

We have no idea what this man's story is when we first see him sleeping in a bathtub in a crummy apartment that appears to have been abandoned, presumably, if you are to believe his story when he is discovered by the manager of the building trying to fix the place for the next tenants, by a friend of his named "Sheila". "Sheila" is invoked over and over until you are pretty sure that no such person exists and that he got into the apartment, which he does a second time, simply by ringing various doorbells from downstairs until someone reflexively buzzes him in. We get to know him in much the same way as we get to know homeless people we see all the time on certain corners. We learn his name in one encounter --this fictional character is named George.  We feel the boredom of his life, moving from benches, to hospital waiting room where he is thrown out, despite the occasional kindness of a staffer. We see that he spends what money he begs on beer or hard alcohol. We see him following a girl who turns out to be his adult daughter, who, one begins to see has become hard toward him only after being unable to address whatever deep seated fracture in his soul that keeps him homeless.  He is, as a character played with sad fervor by Ben Vereen, "reduced", but that reduction appears to have been a combination of circumstance (his wife died, he lost his job, his house, but what finally threw him over the edge to being a street person where someone else would have rebounded is never made clear just as they are not clear in real life) and self-sabotage.

He is an unnecessary prop in the buzz of New York life in the winter, sometimes very cold and sometimes not. He has no identification. One wonders why instead of asking his daughter for money or grubbing a beer at the bar at which she works, he doesn't seek information that will help him get identification. He is able to scavenge, but unable to produce. He wants relationship, but he does everything he can to discourage it.

The movie is unrelenting in its lack of answers, just like life is when we see people on La Cienega here in Los Angeles taking turns begging at the same small island in traffic. Is it that he just needs a break, or does he want to stay homeless? I should qualify--it is not entirely unrelenting for at the end, the daughter, Maggie, having rebuffed him, having protected herself against his apparently intractable condition, does relent, and chases after him. Will there be a happy ending? Will something change in his street, to shelter, to street life? I have to say I was left with the feeling, "probably not." But I was still glad she went after him at the end.

There was no proselytizing in this movie. I liked that. The problem is difficult. As Gere said in his live talk, it's really about the bigger existential picture, who are we in this life? What forces form us? What is being known? What is being anonymous and alone? We are, none of us, more than few steps away from the life of George, or the lives of the real people we see on the street. Doesn't help the problem? No. But it's good to be aware. Keeps you humble. And the glib answers. That's all that can be said for them, they are glib.

I knew a man once who lived next to a dumpster in an alley off Fairfax Avenue. He was a tall, good looking black man, with all sorts of ideas for gadgets and talked of creating his own business. He'd sell bottles of water along the street.  I worked with a small transitional homeless residence through my Church. Robert became one of the residents in one of four single rooms with a common area of living room and kitchenette. The residence staff helped him get a regular job at a local eatery. He had the transition to "regular" life in his hand. But he didn't like to be with other men in a residence. He didn't like rules, like no drugs and no women. And so he went back to the dumpster.  I haven't seen him in a long time. Sometimes it's like that.

I wasn't depressed after the movie, maybe because I appreciated its preach free style. And yet, it reminded me, you do what you can. You help where you can. That's all.

As to Richard Gere? During the movie I forgot that there was an actor on screen. After the movie, he was funny, articulate and sensitive. I love Hollywood.

Mom's Side

My given name and surname would offer no indication that I am fully half of Irish descent.

My given name, in particular, was a source of great confusion to the nuns of my Catholic grammar and high school. I could almost guarantee that in going through any attendance list, Mother so and so would be rolling along with the children's names until she stopped abruptly at mine. an Arabic inspired first name and Greek last name. The first name was an adaptation from the title of a poem by Victor Hugo, about the "Djinns", who are often mischievous spirits in Arabian mythology. I usually did not admit to anyone that I could not be baptized under my first name because no saint ever bore it. These days however you will find the name all over the net, it having become somehow, somewhat, cool.

But I digress. I don't know much about the immigration of my grandparents from Ireland. I have heard that it was around 1912, although some members of grand-dad's side had come earlier, in the mid 1800s, helped to build some of New York's brownstones and then gone back to the old sod for a while. My grandfather, as I have written, died the year after I was born, about 70 years old, if that, but looking a great deal older, no doubt the result of hard life experience. Grandma lived about thirty years longer, dying only a few months after one of her daughters at too young an age, my mother.

I only remember my grandmother as old, white haired, clad in a perpetual house dress, speaking in a brogue accented English very little. Occasionally, she and my maiden aunt, my mother's eldest sister, would baby sit me. I went to their sparse one bedroom apartment in the building attached to my own. In a mind bending revelation only a few years ago, it turned out that my aunt actually did not have her residence in that apartment, but when she "visited" my grandmother, she would usurp the bedroom leaving Grandma to the convertible couch in the main room.

They hardly spoke to one another and whatever else I did not know, I knew they did not much like each other. There was never anything in the refrigerator, except maybe a carton of milk, some bread, and condiments. I found I really enjoyed mustard sandwiches, which I made while waiting for "Gunsmoke" to come on after the tedious (for a child) "Lawrence Welk" and his bubbles. I was grateful I did not have to be left with them often. They were kind enough, but cool.

I saw more of my grandmother when I went to Monticello in the summers to join my cousins. She stayed with her other daughter, Rita, and her family for those months. She'd putter about the grass in her bare bunioned feet. She seemed more relaxed in that atmosphere than in the Bronx, but again, the interaction was remote, except for the occasional moment when she would call us kids out for being a bit rowdy.

Funny, that these are the people with whom I spent my formative years, and I did not know them at all. 

Some years ago, my maiden Aunt Kathleen sent me a photograph of Grandma when she was young.

There is something in her face that is determined. I recognize the family mouth, resolute.
I see a great deal of my mother in this younger picture, something I never did when each was older.

Perhaps a softer version, as befits the first generation American to whom more comforts were available, though in the 30s and 40s, certainly not as much as we have today.

I know as little of my mother as I do of my grandmother. I asked one of my other aunts, Teri, to record her memories of their childhood and their relationships in an effort to learn about the interior life of my mother. Over two tapes, she recorded many events, but nothing that explained the individuals, in particular, my other who I knew as a child. I wonder sometimes if my mother had lived to her old age (she would be close to 90), whether she would have finally revealed the reasons for her sadness and dissatisfaction.

I have so little information that I cannot really even speculate about it, though, of course, I have tried.

Once upon a time there were four girls, the daughters of a lovely Irish lass. One of them was my mother.

Do Not Close the Windows that St. John XXIII Threw Open

"Aggiornamento" is what Saint John the XXIII proclaimed upon the opening of Vatican II. It was about updating tradition not dispensing with it.  The people of God, who had been spectators at the Mass, now were invited to be close participants. The gates of the sanctuary, the altar rail, were opened, and we were invited into the sanctuary, into that small representation of Heaven, where God Himself truly and substantially resides. But as we humans are wont to do, when those windows were opened, what was unleashed were bowlderdized interpretations of that which transpired in Rome. And so we went from great discipline to virtually none at all. It wasn't enough to be able to participate in the liturgy, but for it to be changed unto a folk and rock show (in the 1960's and 1970's) or a New Age extravaganza.

I was eleven when Vatican II concluded and I was overwhelmed by the apparent dispensation of everything which had been drilled into me as unchangeable truth. We went from Jesus on the Cross to Jesus Christ Superstar who probably had sex with Mary Magdalene. There were no more touchstones. And, being an overly sensitive child that took all authority as being without question, and not one that dealt with contradiction and ambiguity well, I was overwhelmed with cognitive dissonance. As all kids moving into puberty I was internally in perpetual doubts about myself and the world and then the one thing that had been certain was dubbed "We don't do that anymore!"  "They" said it was a good thing. I was at sea. I imagine the evidence that I wasn't the only one who struggled is that a large number of my generation left the faith. Some, like me, came back, and investigated foundational dogmas and documents to the best of our ability. Others never did, either hurt by the outrageous acts of priests and nuns who did not understand their roles under either the traditional or the new liturgies, or just so so concussed by the variable opinions on what once had been clear dogma that they concluded there was no objective truth related to how we conducted our lives.

And so, we went from one extreme, to another.

Human beings react to extremes, and in a society where sex and drugs are now the height of moral activity, your opinion is as good as mine unless you have the power and then yours is better, and dismantling the Natural Law essence of the founding of this country is a sport, people are reacting. One things some Catholics are doing is seeking out the Latin Rite Mass which was the norm prior to Vatican II and which Pope Benedict re-energized.

Because I am more conservative--that is, I believe there are First Principles, that there are wrongs and rights that are not a matter of opinion or legislative or judicial fiat and because for years I have attended a parish that adroitly combined the Novus Ordo (the New Mass, the one that allows lay people to read, and lay acolytes) with the reverence and elements of the old, I thought I would have been enamored of the Mass that I had attended from the time I was six to the time I was eleven.
I was. And I wasn't.

I remembered so little of the ritual, except the phrase, "Et Cum Spiritu Tuo" which means, "And with your Spirit". And it was for two reasons, the one I enumerated above, that we parishioners were prayerful spectators under the Extraordinary Form (The Latin Mass). The sanctuary was reserved, as it was in the Temple during Our Lord's life, to the priest, the "Alter Christus", not because he was more worthy than we, but because he was consecrated specially to that role.  And the other, I was too young to comprehend any of it.

There is something to be said for this separation of the people from the sanctuary, and I am not pretending to speak theologically, for I know there are many more theological reasons than I know in my limited reading. The separation reflects the gravity of the spot, and the Essence of Heaven. Over the years, guitar rehearsals in and around the spot, and people traipsing in shorts and flip flops around the space, often no longer separated by an altar rail at all, caused us to forget WHO is in the tabernacle.

But in order to recapture the seriousness of the Liturgy and its theological significance, I wonder if we have to go back more than fifty years and undo that which was good-- bringing the people into the service? Some parishes have maintained the best changes, the ones I have to believe were guided by the Holy Spirit, with Latin translations of the Novus Ordus, and the participation of the lectors and servers as has been the case for the last decades. They have been reverent and have taught reverence to those who volunteer. I came to my parish, and a return to my faith because the then pastor had so well merged the "old" with the best of the "new".

I fear that there will be a kind of schism, those who want to stay with the, shall I say  it, liberal interpretations of the Novus Ordus, and those who want to close the windows that Pope John threw open.

I have to admit a potential bias because I am a woman. Do I hold the opinion that going back to the "good old days" of the Latin Mass is ill advised because I would have, in secular sensibility at least, less of a role? I have been a lector since about 1987, and in the last few years I have had the privilege of assisting priests at Mass. I have failed to recognize how blessed I have been in that gift from Him. If the Latin Mass were to "come back" and the sun were to set on the Novus Ordo, I would be relegated to the pews or to the choir. These are not bad places, to be sure. But I would indeed have some difficulty with it.

It seems to me that engaging us lay people in the mechanics of the liturgy really has been the work of the Holy Spirit. The return of the Latin Mass seems to be a reminder of what was lost, and an effort to rekindle what was discarded with the misinterpretation of the Novus Ordo. The people dress. They are exceedingly reverent. The Latin language somehow does inculcate a sense of awe in the proceedings. God is the Center in this Mass, not ourselves. We are reminded that we are His instruments. He is not ours. And there is such a thing as sin.

But I am not sure that we should recreate it as if the last fifty years did not happen. Or that the profound inhibitions imposed on many of us who grew up in that earlier time were always good. Those were days when children were given such a fear of the darkness of their souls that a moment of happiness seemed profligate. And not every person in authority had goodness in his or her heart. Or God. We were not taught how to discern who was who in such a scenario. I can say that I have lived with that failure of the "good old days."

Can we ever, we human beings, do something in moderation? The pagan Greeks had that right, and after all Plato was a progenitor of Aquinas, no?

I am happy that the Latin Mass has shown up at my parish and many others.  But, I would feel sad if we simply kicked the clock back and tried to recreate something that was of its time, that the Holy Spirit, in His Wisdom, has moderated. Of course, IF we were to go back completely, then I would assume the Holy Spirit has spoken and I would acquiesce in His Action, I hope. Why? One reason only. I believe that God is Present in the Eucharist, and to leave to go to another faith would seem to deny Him. But I am hoping they can co-exist or, continue to evolve in a merging.

Time will tell. I have been attending Mass at St. Victor for thirty one years. I am not, I pray, going anywhere.

"Lord, I believe, help my unbelief."

9/11: 3,000 People Deserve More Than the Capitulation to Evil

These notes are being written about  a half hour from the end of the 14th anniversary day of the vile and cowardly murder of 3,000 people on one day and many more in its aftermath.

Perhaps we have not forgotten the people who died, but I fear that they have become something less tangible than they were when the deed was unleashed. In some ways, we have sanitized it--it is rare, for example, to see certain photographs that were taken that day, the ones where those trapped in the upper floors jumped out of windows rather than die by suffocation and fire. In the last 14 years we went from a country of righteous outrage and resolve to one that has not only rationalized the unmitigated evil of terrorists but managed to find justification for their despicable conduct.

I heard for the first time in a while the voices of operators trying to calm down people, promising help that physically could not be brought to the floors above the raging fires before the building fell. One woman says that she doesn't want to die. Of course she did. I worry she died in vain while we bury our faces in our smart phones and ask why in the world should we worry about what's going on in Iraq, or Syria, or Iran pretending, yet again, that what is happening in these places will not touch us here. How can we be so utterly and masochistically oblivious to the fact that evil does not retreat. We have seen it. And yet we deny what we have seen and are afraid to speak because truth necessarily causes offense.  And the last thing we want to do is be deemed politically incorrect even if that means saving lives, including our own.

And, on the day before this anniversary, our leader has forced upon his people an Executive Order that our other representatives have either embraced or tolerated that will assure that those who have sworn to not only our physical destruction but our very foundations in natural law and diverse faiths. It is not agreement. It is edict. It cannot be debated. It cannot be stopped--unless maybe we elect a President who can unravel it all, and that seems unlikely given a pervasive societal brainwash. And by then a great deal of money which officious pundits opine idiotically will go to the people of Iran will have funded weapons, not prosperity for the people.

The people who felled the towers haven't disappeared. They have increased in number and animation as they have watched us trip over ourselves to pretend they do not intend us the harm they already demonstrated they are committed to do. I suppose, they could wait for us to destroy ourselves from within as we remove all vestiges of our Americanism, our liberty, our assimilation, and God Himself. They probably won't though because they are impatient, and we are very weak.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, stirring the United States finally from its pretense of the time--that what was happening over there in Europe really had nothing to do with us, we were fortunate to be able to enhance our seriously reduced armed forces and defend ourselves. But should Iran receive the benefits of the "agreement" which Mr. Obama has imposed with his spectacular political skill, and build its armament including its nuclear weapons, one wonders whether we will have the chance to defend ourselves. At least the USSR played by a critical basic rule, MAD, mutual assured destruction. They didn't want to die any more than we did. But this enemy, this diabolic enemy with which we (well figurative we, as I and most Americans don't support it) have made our Faustian deal, doesn't play by that rule. They have no problem with dying. Or making others die.

It is so distressing that we don't learn from history. But then that little book that our culture thinks is so quaint had a word for that little failure--Apocalypse.

God rest those who died fourteen years ago. May they not have died in vain.

California on the Six Week Plan

The first person I made the announcement of an intended effort to move to California was my father.

I'd like to say that he was happy about it. He was not. Dad was, as often I have written here, and elsewhere, my determined protector. I could have none better.  He would have thrown himself on a railroad track to preserve my life. But, he was not in favor of change that involved any kind of risk. And when he wasn't in favor of something, it was more moral prohibition than advice that was dispensed. And the fact of his disapproval was evidence of my folly in even considering it.

At this point, in late 1980 or early 1981, I had a job with that small personal injury practice. I was making probably less than 10,000 a year, without medical benefits. I was in agony in the cramped three rooms, only two of which were usable by the three or four staff which included me--the third reserved as the office of the boss. I was in agony not only because I was the associate that the judges put on the spot when he wasn't in court on time, but because he was a "yeller". He yelled on the phone. He was particularly fond of the F-word. Everything was urgent. Files were everywhere and no where.

If there was ever a time for me to risk a move, this was it. But dad's advice was "to make it work" for me. I had a job. That was good enough. And I had a place to live, safe at home in more than enough space for father and daughter.  I had about 4,000 dollars in savings and that wasn't, Dad thought, sufficient cushion upon which to build a new life. I had learned to drive, but I had little practice as the only car to use was my father's, and he was terrified of my being out and about making mistakes (as I did luckily without bodily harm) on the streets and highways. I would not be able to afford my own car in Los Angeles, at least until, if if, I got a job.

Dad was right, of course. I wasn't much of a grown-up though I was in my late twenties and an attorney. I had been so well protected and so long embraced that protection that doubts were beginning to overtake me. I was by nature inclined to doubt and had difficulty making decisions about anything, even when there were no apparent obstacles.

Uncharacteristically, I was undeterred.   I began to tell friends and family that a move was imminent.

And then Dad had his second heart attack. His first had been in 1971. Dad was 63 years old.  He was convinced, as he always was with any medical condition, that this was his end. I have always told myself that I was an attentive daughter in those couple of months during which he recovered, but whether that is so or not, I know that I was resentful. I am ashamed of the truth, but here it is. I felt that Dad's heart attack was his unconscious way of keeping me in New York. And I believe he thought that I would now abandon the idea. He put the responsibility on himself, and the happenstance of his illness.

Looking back, the period between his heart attack in June 1981, and the implementation of my plan to move was brief.  Did I simply decide he was sufficiently recovered? I could see that it did not make him happy that I was STILL looking to leave. He seemed depressed. How could I ignore that?

I think as I write that I owe the fact of my move to my utter selfishness. Then I know I felt not only justified, but compelled to go ahead. And once I described to him what I was going to do, and how, he conceded, and as he always did, he supported me.

I would quit my job. I would take what savings I had and commit to six weeks in Los Angeles. My uncle's family was willing to put me up on their trusty couch, so I would have a safe place to stay. I would look for a job, which because I was not yet licensed in California, would be clerking or secretarial. If, after that six weeks, I still had no job, I would come home, and abandon the whole idea.

And so Dad hosted a just in case farewell party for my family and friends. Not everyone came it being on short notice and many there privately thought (I would hear later) there was no chance I would stay. I was always so cautious, so afraid, so well, pessimistic. And wonder of wonders, my employer, who thought I was a nut for wanting to move to California, did not want to lose me ("I've invested a lot of time and training in you." I recall no training whatsoever.) and said he would give me a leave of absence (unpaid of course) for the six weeks. Like my father, he apparently was less than convinced of my likely success.

Mr. Anonymous, now of the deluxe furnished Barbara Judith Apartments, but then still a denizen of New York, joined me for two weeks of the experiment. I rented a Ford Escort for that two weeks.

In the morning, I would peruse the Daily Journal. It became immediately clear that I couldn't be waiting for responses to written applications. So beginning at what was then the TICOR building on Wilshire Boulevard, the 6000 block, I spent the mornings knocking on doors---literally. I went from floor to floor stopping at various lawyer offices. If I liked the arrangement of the names on the door, or for some other visceral reason, I would go in and solicit work. "Hello, I am an attorney licensed in New York. I am moving out to Los Angeles and am looking for a clerk job, research job, or secretarial job" while I study for the California Bar."

Most places politely declined my request. A few spoke to me. One, an associate of Gloria Allred, as it happens, could offer me only part time work. I needed it to be full time.

Mr. Anonymous and I made a detour to the Century City towers, the ones which served as exterior for the offices of Remington Steele, my favorite TV show of the time, and, about a week into my plan, went up and down each tower, with no success.  Only then, sitting on one of the benches in the ABC Entertainment Center, did I admit to Mr. Anonymous that I had begun to think I had indeed made a mistake. Why would anyone hire me? The saving grace was, that in the afternoons, I would go back to vacation mode and Mr. Anonymous and I would tour the city and the beach, restoring my resolve not to give up until the end of the sixth week.

It was the week after Mr. Anonymous returned to New York, and I had wended my way to the 5000 block of Wilshire Boulevard. I walked into a door on the fifteenth floor of a turquoise building. The receptionist, a large, friendly Southern woman took an instant like to me called her boss to see if he would talk to me.

He did. He was a man older than my father who had become a lawyer late in life and started a family firm. Little did I know at the time that the family practicing with him were pushing him to retirement. Apparently, though, he wasn't ready to go, and my appearance on the scene fit into with his plans to stay on in the office. I was so naive that it never occurred to me his interest was more than professional. I couldn't imagine that any man of his age, with an ill-fitting wig and a disheveled suit, would think I would be interested in anything beyond the professional. Be that as it may, he offered me a job, for about the same as I was making in New York, without benefits of course, to start immediately. I would be his secretary. And because I had a license in New York, I could do research for him and draft paperwork for him.

I'd like to say that the sailing was smooth thereafter. Naturally, as life goes, it was not. But, my aunt and uncle were happy to have me stay on their couch until we saw whether the job would "take", and until I could find an apartment I could afford. I called my boss in New York on the third week of my plan and told him I would not be coming back. He tried to convince me to open a branch of his office in Los Angeles when I got my license. I would have none of that given my experience in the cramped office in New York.

The job was only about two miles from my family's apartment, and though limited, the buses in Los Angeles, took me there. Two months into my sojourn, perhaps in something of a Providential moment, an apartment opened up right across the street from my family, another 1920s four unit residence. The owner was charging $375.00 in a neighborhood that was now seeing rents of nearly or over $600.00 which I could not afford, and though I knew he was a do nothing landlord from the shape of the outside of the building, and the stains on the wood floor within, the price was right, the apartment was otherwise cheerful and large for a one bedroom. Coming from more institutional looking buildings--our last one had some fifteen or twenty apartments on the same floor--I felt like I was leading a suburban life. Though I was in the heart of the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, the building felt like a house. I had a back door. I even had a soupcon of a back yard.

Dad and I talked nearly every day. He might not have expressed great delight at my having made a successful move, but he did share some with my friends and family. Maybe it was even a hint of pride that his insecure kid finally took a bull by its horns. We never talked about things in any direct way, so I don't really know.

We bring our personalities and our challenges with us. If I thought that moving to California would solve whatever problems I had or thought I had, of course, I was wrong. I was still afraid and unsure enough that Dad and I were on the phone virtually every day. I was an as yet un-diagnosed case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what I had done at home, I did at a distance.  I worried constantly and out loud. Dad tried to solve it with a logic to which OCD is notoriously resistant.

The job was significantly imperfect. My boss, whom I came to call "the rascal" was a seat of the pants type lawyer. Like his counterpart in New York, organization was not his strong suit. He took every case that walked in the door whether he knew enough about the area of practice and he would not always tell his secretary, me, that he had taken one. Clients were constantly calling for status and I would not necessarily know where he had tucked away the paperwork. He also had made it clear that his interest in me was social as well as professional, and I learned about his various affairs over the years from his brother in law, who acted as one of his administrators. The office that had made it possible for me to get an income to move was an ethics violation waiting to happen.

I couldn't take time off to study for the Bar, though I was allowed to take the actual days for the examination. And I didn't pass right away. The rascal, having conceded to my disinclination to be other than his secretary, gave me sound advice. He said that my handwriting was so bad the examiners weren't reading or able to read it my blue books.  He suggested I type the essay examination. When I did, on my third try, I passed. If my dad were alive today, I would hear him say to my revealing that, "Why do you have to tell anyone that you didn't pass right away?" He told people I passed the first time. That was true, but only in New York.

Except for a bed I bought for $200.00 at Ortho Mattress, a small color television and the piano I had shipped from the East, I could not immediately afford much furniture. My uncle, an inveterate collector of items, provided chairs and a small desk on which I studied for the Bar when I could. In lieu of furniture, I acquired a free cat, a little tabby I named Hollywood who would live 18 out of the 31 years I spent in that one apartment.

Over the next year, a friend or two visited, coming to share for a little while with me, the new vista I had found.  And loved.

Larry already lived here.

In 1982, Dad took his own leap and moved out to live in Los Angeles. I found him a one bedroom apartment about four blocks from my own. He never really liked it here. But I was his only daughter, and he found his satisfactions, picking up an old avocation, his writing. And resuming his job of protecting me- until he was 90.

I have never regretted my move to Los Angeles. Here I finally found my life's work as an attorney at the State Bar of California. The climate here is that of a paradise. I am a happy transplanted New Yorker.

Under a Magnolia Tree

I left the nursing home feeling restless. I had somewhere to be for a meeting, but not for a while yet. I didn't want to stop home.

The facility is on the most beautiful grounds and I so rarely stop and enjoy them before or after a visit to my elderly friend. It is at the highest point of Culver City. Trees of every variety punctuate it. Always there is a cooling breeze. And wildlife. I have actually seen a coyote on the other side of a high fence. Today, as I walked toward my car, a squirrel wiggled into and out of a large trash bin. We eyed each other, me making all those silly noises intended to ingratiate myself to wildlife that has no use for human interaction. After I tried to get closer he vaulted onto the fence and into a tree.

I noticed the little island of grass near my car shaded by one of the many magnolia trees on the property. I decided to say the rosary, something I am trying, without much success to do every day. I settled under the tree, the wind caressing me and the leaves wafting down around me. As I began, a resident, who happens to be a retired priest, was playing the soundtrack of the "Sound of Music", and there was the Alleluia of the marriage scene for a prayerful backdrop.

There were distractions. There always are distractions. One of the staff noisily dragged a large trash can toward the very large bin in which the squirrel had just previously been rummaging. She never looked in my direction. I somehow felt guilty being there. I doubt that anyone has ever sat under that particular tree. "What is she doing there?" I imagined she was thinking. Planes were gliding in regular intervals to landings at Los Angeles Airport over the cemetery, Holy Cross, where my father's wooden urn sits in a niche, my own niche, empty beside it. Many interrupting thoughts caused me to lose track of which "Hail Mary" in the decade I was saying.

Holy Cross Cemetery down the hill. 

There is a paradox about this place. It is so bucolic and life enhancing a site. But the people who live here are so rarely able to enjoy it. They are ill in body or mind, sometimes in both. They have little interest in the nature that surrounds them. Somehow it makes me poignantly in need of savoring that which I still can, my body and mind presently intact.

And then my rosary was complete with the recitation of the "Hail Holy Queen" and my restlessness overtook me again. I got in my car and left for my next appointment. Ordinary life goes on.

Intoxicated by the Palm Trees and Orange Groves of Los Angeles

I didn't sleep at all last night. Isn't that the beginning of a song?

In between tossing and turning, and punching my pillows into submission, I spent the night solidifying in my mind the direction of this blog. Yes, it will be in large part an archive of my life and of the lives of the people with whom I have intersected and interacted.

There will be pictures.

I am reminded, somewhat painfully, of a pronouncement by a decades long friend the other day. He said, with the certainty of the Oracle of Delphi, that no one is interested in my pictures. He said something similar some years ago, I recall, also with a sting of hurt, about the journals I have so assiduously kept. Did I think them worthy of being housed in a college library or some such institution of preservation?

I suppose it is true. I get it. I am not a graduate of Yaddo, or a head of a corporation, or an inventor, or a great philosopher. I have made no mark on the world to justify that the artifacts of my existence be held dear to anyone, certainly not in the public forum. I am the commonest of common people. My journal is mostly reams of complaint and lament, about people, places and things, punctuated by an occasional putative deep thought. I know I ain't got the gravitas. But I AM interested in the lives of others. And am an "other" who is a stitch in the tapestry of the world and so, I hope that others might find the petals of my past of some vague interest to them as theirs is to me. It's all connected anyway, or so I believe.  I suppose that my insistence on proceeding with this direction is a rebellion of sorts. I hope that my friend is utterly wrong. I hope that someone will be interested in my pictures, perhaps another old friend in the mists of time who was in one of them. And in the ill told tales of this blog and its predecessors.

And so I proceed despite the dire predictions of my inevitable earthly anonymity and with the happy hope that if it is thus, it won't matter to me since I will be with the Eternal God.

It is 34 years since I took the only risk in my life. I was 27 years old and still living at home. It wasn't so odd a thing perhaps in that my mother had died some years before and there was plenty of room for me and my widowed father in the two bedroom apartment Bronx apartment. I went to law school two buses and two trains away, in Queens, a serious commuter student without funds to rent on my own. And frankly, I had been raised by parents who loved me, but feared the dangers of the world profoundly and bestowed a share of their weight of worry on me.  With all good intention, they wrapped me in a cocoon and for my part, I was loath to leave it.  In part, it was fear of betrayal of paternal wisdom. In part, I inherited that part of the extended family genetics, that with rare exception (I am specifically thinking of my Aunt Teri and Uncle Frank and I came to learn, even my father when he was young and overseas) eschewed all things adventurous. My mother dreamed of a different life from the one she had, but she never stepped out to pursue it, modeling. She depended on my dad to find it for her, and that was hard to do on the manager's salary at a Baby Photography Studio in Brooklyn. We were not a confident trio, my late mother, my father, and me.

My little room in that second, more upscale apartment building than we had known near Mt. Eden Avenue, was a cheerful hiding place and quiet study space. The neighborhood was closer to Riverdale, the upper middle class enclave. Or maybe rich, I never really knew. It wasn't however, in Riverdale. My mother wished there had been a doorman, but my father's more generous salary in the city government, still did not raise us to those heights.

A cat, there always was a cat. This is Rameses. He was a hisser. He'd lay in wait in the bathtub for a visitor.
He made the move to California, but was so traumatized, as he arrived on a different plane than did my dad, in a brutal storm, he sat in an empty closet facing the wall.  He recovered some, but not enough. He was only eleven

I was a driven, restless, often depressed and hypochondriac kid. I needed escape. As I grew older I thought I needed a taste of something very different from New York. This bee in my bonnet could not be driven away or warned away by my practical father a doom saying Cassandra. In a brief break from my first semester at St. John's, I suddenly had a plan.  My father's youngest brother, Steve, had lived in Southern California, Los Angeles, for years. I had met him, and his wife, maybe twice as a young child.  I hit upon the idea of a week there, and with a little intercession on the part of my father, I hoped I could presume upon their hospitality.

While the relationship between Steve and my father had always been distant, he, they, said yes. And in June 1977 I made my second trip by airplane (the first was Bermuda with college friends and I had yet to develop a nearly crippling fear of flying) to Los Angeles. My uncle, my aunt and their 14 year old daughter, Angela, made room for me on their couch. I was in a new place and I had a new extended family to get to know.

My Uncle Steve, Dad's youngest brother, his wife, my Aunt Mary, Cousin Angela on the right and her niece Becky.

I never loved New York winters or summers. The trains were freezing from November to March and boiling from May to October. This was the New York of high crime, needle parks, graffiti that obscured the windows of every subway car, and broken windows along the El lines. It was a gloomy place. It exacerbated my natural internal gloom.

Los Angeles in those days was still open and relatively uncrowded. The sun wasn't blocked by tall buildings, at least where my family lived, and there was more foliage than concrete.  I was mesmerized by palm trees and an ocean that was just ten minutes from the Fairfax District, where my family lived. I was astounded by the drivers who yielded to pedestrians and never went through a red light even when there was not one other car around.

I was hoping one day to be a television writer, with my then partner, Len Speaks. And that was all in Los Angeles. My guide, one of our group at Fordham, was a fellow at USC and he showed me the sights. We went to the Sea Lion in Malibu (now Duke's), right on the beach, which had been featured in a skit on Johnny Carson about furious rain storms and waves in Los Angeles that literally broke a picture window. We tooled around the other college village by UCLA, Westwood. I had my very first Mexican meal, a tostada at Villa Taxco on Sunset. I stood in front of the Hollywood Roosevelt, watching kids line up for the very first Star Wars movie. I felt I could breathe here--literally (the smog of the 60s was mostly gone) and figuatively.

My first guide Dennis Vellucci. This is in his apartment on Euclid Avenue the year Len and I made our joint visit.
We heard that Troy Donahue or some such 1950s idol lived in the building.
And Beau Bridges was at the hamburger joint we went to on Wilshire. We listened to My Sharona together. Well, he was at his table, we were at ours.

Not sure about the face, but I did love that UCLA shirt. Mary and Steve's former mother in law, who spoke no English was visiting. 

I even managed to spy a vestige of old Hollywood. Schwab's Pharmacy where Lana Turner was apocryphally said to have been discovered had seen its heyday and was closed, awaiting its fate, a tear down to make way for a strip mall. The first tenant in the very spot was Virgin Records, which itself became obsolete. I note that there was a Wells Fargo Bank next to Schwabs. There is one today in the exact spot. These days I live around the corner from what used to be the famous star counter hangout. I feel the vibe as I walk by the facade of the newest tenant, a hip furniture store.

The seed was planted. Was it possible to move here? The likelihood seemed remote. I looked into transferring to UCLA's law school. There were obstacles I could not presently manage. The next year, Len Speaks and I came together and, in his rented car (I still did not have a license) we roamed the Hollywood Hills while Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" played and replayed in the top 40.  Len had made a connection with a television writer that used to go to Fordham. On one visit we even got to visit Twentieth Century Fox, which still had their fake New York Elevator train on the lot, a part of the set for Hello, Dolly.  We managed to get onto the MASH set, watching a scene being filmed. We met most of the cast, including Alan Alda, another Fordham graduate, who, having left the Bronx campus in 1957 or so, commented on our youth. We walked from the commissary back to the "swamp" next to Loretta Swit and her beau at the time.  Harry Morgan actually asked to know my name.  There was Yesterday's, the Restaurant not the song, and Casey's Bar. I was delighted when at age 25, I was still "carded."

Len seems amused. I really hate my outfit. I think this place became a Mexican Restaurant. Westwood.

Len, Malcolm, his college roommate, (today a very well known writer and professor of sports journalism) and my cousin Angela, eight years our junior, jaunted to Disneyland on one of the visits. I seem to remember Angela somewhat enamored of Malcolm, though I think she might say she doesn't have any memory of that.  Disneyland was the Wonderful World of Color for a child growing up in the Bronx. I had never imagined that one day I would be there watching the Electric Parade feeling like a retro 10 year old. I could never be bored with the Pirates of the Caribbean and an early dinner in the Blue Bayou which abutted it. It was pure play.

Our rented car broke down on the way back from Anaheim. I was content waiting for rescue sitting on a curb with Us or People, reading about my fave at the time, Roger Moore, who had taken over from Sean Connery in the role of 007.

Resting after dinner at the Blue Bayou?

I know on one or two of those visits, we saw the Carson show, where Jimmy Stewart recited his poems in celebration of his trip to Africa with his beloved Gloria. His appearance is on one of those "best of" reels advertised on late night television. I probably have it in my collection.

There were visits to the ABC Plaza by the Shubert Theatre, quite the destination in its time, but now long gone and replaced by a sleek shiny building that houses Fidelity Financial. It was in this complex that we would see one of many Joan Rivers' performances, in an intimate venue where our unrestrained laughter bounced off the walls.

The sadly gone Shubert Theatre. Good Chinese Restaurant in the complex. And a sport bar. And the nightclub where we saw the late Joan Rivers in her prime.

                                                                     

The Sheraton Unusual, I mean, Universal is over Len's shoulder.

Len and I were on the verge of finding success in our writing partnership. Lots of speculation scripts, several given wonderful critique by our industry friend, who let us peek into his world and bask glancingly in his success at a very young age. He never helped us put our foot in the door. We managed to find an "agent" at William Morris in New York. We "almost" had a job writing jokes for Carol Channing, albeit on the east coast, but there was a taste of Hollywood even in that.  The opportunity fell through and our "agent" disappeared from the hallowed halls of William Morris. Our visits there were concluded. Well, at least I had seen Jack Lemmon in the elevator.

I finished law school in the summer of the last year of the 1970s.

Me and Mr. Anonymous.

I had an immediate problem finding a job-as an attorney. I was fortunate to have help in getting a non-legal job in a New York City agency through the aegis of the gentleman pictured above. There wasn't much to do, so the job provided an opportunity to write. And it allowed me to meet someone who helped me get an attorney position in the Appeals Unit of another City agency. While that job did not last, for a confluence of reasons that were truly beyond my control, after a few months of unemployment I found myself on Madison Avenue right near Grand Central Station in the very small law office of a friend of the son of our old neighborhood hardware store owner. It was a profound education in the reality of volume practice and quick settlement three times the meds--a dramatic contrast with the idealized fluff fed to us as students. I soon learned that it was my job to be yelled at by judges who disliked my employer who overbooked and never was on time. One Edward G. Robinson-esque judge, with Clarence Darrow suspenders over a rumpled white shirt, and chewing a thick stogie, ordered me to tell my boss he was an asshole.  "Yes, your Honor," I'm sure I said.  The Courthouses, particularly in the Bronx, were dirty, hot and sticky. If law schools told students what it was really like "out there" for the majority of us who were not destined for large firm jobs, no one would pay to go.


Los Angeles might as well have been another planet, it promised so different a lifestyle from that I had known.  One night I sat in the Bar of Peppercorn's, a regular Westchester haunt, with Len and Mr. Anonymous pictured above, awaiting our table. The light was dim. I was probably drinking a bourbon sour on the rocks. I emphasized either to myself or them that I had to leave New York. I had to start a new life in temperate and novel Los Angeles.  I'd get work, get a California license to practice law and write on the side. It's a good thing that, in contrast to my usual modus operandi, I didn't allow myself to think of the obstacles.

Next:  Changing Coasts