Haunted weekend

Even on cloudy days, Santa Monica is full of tourists, locals taking the sea air, and last weekend, LA Marathon runners.

It's getting harder to get away from it all these days.

When the "all' you are trying to get away from includes news of wholesale death and destruction — it seems churlish to be enjoying yourself. But really, I'm not trained in earthquake search and rescue, so what can I do except donate money?

And there's not a damned thing I can do about Libya, except pray. But still, thoughts and worry about the state of the world cast a pall over last weekend's excursion to Santa Monica to see the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising's annual scholarship dinner and fashion show, Debut 2011.

A Friday's conversation with my German friend Barbara didn't help. I guess they don't have natural disasters on a scale with ours in her native country, because she is freaked out about earthquakes after the news from Japan. Stupid me, I made the mistake of telling her about Jim Berkland, the former Santa Clara County geologist who predicted the Loma Prieta earthquake four days prior.

I take next-to-nothing seriously, and certainly nothing I see on Fox News, so I threw it out there in a phone conversation that Berkland had predicted The Big One for California in an interview, and that the most likely day was Saturday, the following day.

"What are you going to do?" she asked me.

"Go to Santa Monica," I replied. "If the have the 'big one,' maybe a tsunami will get me."

(I should get struck down for this flippancy, I know. It wasn't nice. She was really scared.)

I have lived in California most of my life. I have packed more earthquake survival kits and then stolen the stuff out of them than I care to remember. Out of toilet paper? There's some rolls in the backpack in the trunk of daddy's car.

I have kept emergency cash, emergency food and water, and packed small emergency kits requested by my children's school with toys, family photos and a loving note inside. But after preparing so many times  and nothing happens, you get jaded. Eventually, you stop doing all those things. I know we should all be prepared like the Mormons, but it becomes tiresome.

The terrace of Le Merigot where I
sipped a martini and imagined tsunami
destruction.

So I told her about this the way I would a novelty, like a three-headed chicken, but she wasn't amused. And the conversation haunted my reverie on the terrace of the Marriott across the street from the beach the next day, when I looked at the building and calculated how high a tsunami would hit. (I figure the third floor, right where the patio umbrella is.)

I tried to conjure up visions of deck chairs, patio heaters, tables and marathon runners being sucked out to sea by a wall of water. Oh, did I mention that 3/4 of our hotel was populated by out-of-towners bent on running the LA Marathon? It was a win for us, because the hotel had a special carbo-loading menu, and the mushroom raviolis were to die for...

I think those those poor marathon runners were less concerned about an  earthquake than they were the skies opening up on them the following day. (Which they did— a sopping wet runner stepped out in front of our car while we were exiting the hotel parking lot, and scores were treated for hypothermia on race day.)

We went out on the pier and mingled with people in Adidas sportswear and cameras, local families treating themselves to a day at the shore, and thin bespectacled Japanese teenagers holding collection  boxes marked "Pray for Japan." So, even there in that seemingly carefree environment we were reminded that the seaside was not a calm diversion everywhere in the world.

The Santa Monica carousel building in the background, and the play ship and sea monster in the foreground.

The FIDM show later that evening was the best in the nearly ten years I have been attending. Ten of the students in the third-year program do a 12-look collection for the fashion show, and the media production this year did video projection like at this year's Academy Awards, that totally transformed the stage for each designer.

We were whisked to a snowy Moscow for the woman who did an all-knot collection based on Eastern European colors and folktales, for example. A designer whose looks didn't fit comfortably into a certain place and time was treated to a background of Grauman's Chinese Theater and dancers playing 1940s reporters and photographers. The effect was amazing.

The show began with the costume design students imagining "Carnivale in Rio," and as you would expect, the results were stunning. All that talent and imagination put into service to a wide-open theme gave birth to six-foot headdresses, glitter, spangles, enough Spandex to send us reeling back to the 1980s, and more colors than a flock of tropical birds.

My personal favorites, not surprising, were done by a little goth girl designer who had a steampunk Nancy Drew-like investigator, and a huge-skirted black and red number with an Elizabethan-style ruff that looked like cemetery gates. The kicker was that the bodice had a skull bra. The whole thing looked very heavy, but I totally wanted to wear it for Halloween.

Sunday morning dawned with the Pacific a slate-gray, and a monotonous drizzle soaking the hardy souls down on the beach: tourists with baby strollers determined to get a dose of ocean, and recreational runners not out on the marathon course.

The hotel was so quiet, it felt like we were the only people in the world, but bad news in the form of the LA Times snuck into our bubble — when we last heard the news, the French and their allies were only the ones involved in Libya. Now we knew
that Uncle Sam was flying sorties, too.

That afternoon we saw the LA Opera's "Turn of the Screw," a natural for that gloomy day.
Jim, looking at the rain pouring down: "This is perfect 'Turn of the Screw' weather.
Me: "No, this is 'Wuthering Heights' weather."
Jim: ""Nope, it's 'Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' weather."

And it was — the wind was insane; the little Miata was blowing all over the road on the way home, and I had to avoid parts of trees in the road. It was rather like being a tent on a bad Girl Scout camp-out with the rain drumming the ragtop. I finally turned the radio off because I couldn't hear it over the din.

The Dorothy Chandler chandeliers from the
 level of our nose-bleed opera tickets.

The opera was satisfyingly creepy, and lunch at Pinot on the plaza was interesting. Water was pooling under the tables, and I was sitting right next to the clear-plastic wall, which kept blowing back and forth, creating a wave in the puddle right next to my feet. I felt sorry for the servers who were working in waterproof parkas.

As you may have noticed, the predicted earthquake never came, and the window that Berkland gave has come and gone. I know I should get prepared, and I'll work on that. And I resolve to be more circumspect about what I tell my German friend. My Californian blase attitude is not very helpful.

Locking Out Redemption

Editor's note: Since I couldn't get my column together on time, my husband decided to take this opportunity to get something off his chest. Enjoy!

I bleed orange.

I am a Denver Broncos fan. I loathe the Raiders. If I was that creepy kid from that Twilight Zone episode, I would wish the Kansas Chiefs into a cornfield. I wish evil, unspeakable things upon the San Diego Chargers.

I'm not sure exactly when I became a fan, but growing up in Colorado,  it was inevitable. Perhaps because the Broncos were lovable losers, comically inept like I was when I first started playing the  game. The first time I intercepted a pass in a neighborhood game, I got spun around and ran the ball back the wrong way. I joyously celebrated what I thought was a score for my team only to turn and see my teammates groaning and shaking their heads while  the opposing team laughed.

The Broncos and I were destined for  one another. Every year, my hopes would soar in September  as a new season started. Most years would end in  heartbreak, but for two glorious seasons we were the best in the league.

I bring this up  to help explain the frustration and anger I feel about the NFL's labor dispute. For those of you not following the issue, I'll sum it up this way — billionaire owners are arguing with  millionaire players over how to  slice a $9 billion revenue  pie. Instead of negotiating a new  contract, the two sides are engaged  in a battle that includes  lockouts, injunctions,  and lawsuits.  There  is a real  possibility that games will be lost. Maybe even an entire season will be lost.  

The situation is especially frustrating for me because it's delaying something my team needs desperately right now  — redemption.

Let me set the stage for you.  After the Broncos won back-to-back Super Bowls in the 1990s,  they made a decade-long slide into mediocrity. Then, just when we thought it couldn't get worse, along comes head coach Josh McDaniels to destroy the team and take away our self-respect in just two years.

The evil Josh McDaniels.

It wasn't just the losses, of which there were many. It wasn't the terrible personal moves, also many in number. No, it was the horrible atmosphere he created — one that contributed to players and coaches making headlines for all the wrong reasons. There was a suicide, an arrest  for sexual assault, and a star player arrested not once, but  twice for DUI,  and then the final humiliation — a cheating  scandal in which one of McDaniel's friends videotaped the practices of an opposing team, a violation of league rules. It's not clear if McDaniels was in on  the cheating, but he did know of the incident and did not  come forward.

Not only were we losers, but now we were cheats to boot.

McDaniels was shown the door. John Elway,  the man who gave us so many thrills and our  two championships as a player, came back, this time as an executive to run the team. John Fox, a man who turned a horrible team  into a good one once before,  was hired to  replace  McDaniels.

There  was hope.

Then came the labor dispute.

With wars in the Middle East, earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, and financial despair rampant just about everywhere, my thoughts and prayers are scattered about the globe. But each day, I add one  more prayer — Let the us have the opportunity to rebuild our Denver Broncos, our pride, our image, our self-respect. Let's have a shot at being good again. Give us a chance to get the stadium rocking once again.

Column will be delayed

I'm in Santa Monica, after going to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising's annual scholarship dinner and fashion show, Debut 2011, and I'm on my way to see "Turn of the Screw" at the Music Center.

Happy birthday, Lotte!

Charlotte in one of her photo sessions with Valeri Estrada from Little Blue World Photography

In a few weeks, my darling granddaughter Charlotte will turn two. Forget about the terrible twos, she started into that developmental stage about six months ago. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I got the ax from my former employer was they thought I wrote about Charlotte too much, and I haven’t written about her for months.

Being a grandmother is not what I expected. In some ways, it is so much more: that overwhelming unconditional love that you thought you’d never feel except for your children. And at the same time, it is not all Hallmark moments, especially with a granddaughter as precocious as Charlotte.

Charlotte and her mommy at the beach in Santa Monica.

I imagined that Lotte would be a cuddle-bug like her mommy: eager to sit in a lap, bestow kisses, ask for a story, or stroke your hair. Charlotte is way too busy for all of that. She is cuddly with her mom and dad, of course, but only on her own terms. To my daughter’s heartbreak, she is sometimes banished from the play space by her tiny tyrant.

With everyone else, she is like a skittish woodland creature: curious about this adult who has invaded her space, but not very anxious to have a close encounter of the third kind. Not shy, really, because she’s happy enough to have you stare at her; she’s just wary, like a faun at a watering hole.

I approach her like I would any wild animal: I acknowledge her presence but keep my distance. I let her come to me. You can’t just pick her up, or she screams bloody murder. Now that she is talking, eventually she will want to tell you something, so she initiates contact.

Lotte checks out part of a train with
her daddy at Travel Town. She always
wants to know how it works.

She is whip-smart, and curious about everything. Her mind is like a pachinko machine—you can almost see the bright silver balls bouncing from pin to pin as she takes in a concept and makes the connections, ending with the payoff of enlightenment.

Her dad is determined that she not be prissy and too girly, so he loves that she will eat bugs with him at the natural history museum and isn't afraid of snakes.

But I think he's fighting a losing battle with the girly stuff; Lotte is Disney-princess crazy, with Ariel and Tiana being her personal favorites. 

She brings out the best and the worst in me. Like the other day: In response to her command “Don’t touch me!”, I childishly chased her into the kitchen with my index finger outstretched, and poked her in the stomach when I caught up to her. Yeah, I know, I should be above that, but suddenly I was 7-year-old again, with a bratty brother in the backseat of my parent’s station wagon.

I imagined being a traditional, but hip, grandmother. You know, one who bakes cookies, sews heirloom dresses, AND listens to alt-rock, but it turns out I'm so busy, I don't have time to bake, and I mostly babysit Charlotte for her parents' movie dates. Lotte has a very full schedule of playdates, naps, doctor visits, and outings, so it can be difficult getting facetime.

So far, the extent of my spoiling has been to let her watch "Nightmare Before Christmas" whenever she comes to my house. I do this because when she walks over to the television, blonde curls bouncing, and asks "Jack? Sally?" I am helpless to resist her charms.

 

Charlotte, two binkys in one hand, finds a spot of dirt
on the street in Beverly Hills.

She is particularly fond of the male part of the species. She is no sooner on my doorstep than she starts asking about my husband: "Pop-Pop?" to which the answer is most likely, "He's at work."

Now that we've said that so many times, she will answer her own questions, saying" "Pop-Pop is at work..." .

Constantly in motion, one of the few things that will slow her down is an offer to read a book. If you're lucky, she'll only want to hear it once, otherwise, she pipes up with, "Again?" as soon as the last page is turned.

She doesn't suck her thumb, or carry a blanket, so when she needs soothing, she wants a binkie. Actually, she wants two: one to suck, and the other to stroke her cheek with, much the way Sherlock Holmes fingers his pipe.

Although I think her goal is world domination when she's lost in thought like that, not problem solving.

It's hard for me to imagine ever taking her affection for granted, but maybe it is a good thing that she bestows kisses the way a queen does land grants — it makes you appreciate them even more. When she slides her little arm around my neck and buries her face in my shoulder, I know there is nothing I wouldn't give her, no task she could set me I wouldn't do gladly.

Lotte is such a joy that she inspires me to want to live a long life in order to see what crazy thing she will do next.

littleblueworldphoto.com

Top up, cramped — Top down, liberating

Ham the Chimp squashed into his capsule at
Holloman Air Force Base in the late 1950s.
My husband swears this is what he feels like in the MG.

Editor's note: I am under the weather, and while I was sick in bed, my husband Jim disappeared for a few hours, came home and wrote the following. 

I hate my wife’s MG.

It is evil personified. It is a cash-sucking machine. It is British engineering — which is an oxymoron equivalent to jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, fiscally-responsible Democrat, or compassionate conservative.

This hatred started when our Saturn died, forcing us — and by us, I mean me because Kim took possession of Honda Fit — to use the MG to get back and forth to work. Had it been time any other time of the year it wouldn’t have been so bad, but alas, this happened during a very cold stretch of winter. That meant the MG’s top had to stay up.

A couple of very bad things happen when the top is up. First, all the vehicle noises — of which there are many — get amplified. Second, the smallness of the cabin makes me bent over and squished. I feel like Ham the chimp, the astronaut chimpanzee NASA crammed into a rocket and shot into space.

On cold days, which all of those days seemed to have been, I had to use starter fluid to get the MG to start. As much as I washed my hands after, I could still smell the fluid as I headed to work.

Another reason for my hatred of the vehicle is that fact that it spends as much time in repair shops – or waiting to go to a repair shop — as it does running. There was one week in which it made three trips to a repair shop — once for an odd wheel noise, a second time for a broken seat, and a third time for a wonky starter.

If it were any other vehicle, I would have pushed my wife to get rid of it. It would have been on Craigslist so fast it would have made your head swim.

Ham the chimp peers out of his capsule.
www.animalplanet.com

So why is it still in our carport? Let me begin by quoting one of my daughter’s instructors who said of an obstinate llama that was refusing training: “Well, at least she’s pretty.” Yes, damn it, it is pretty. People’s heads turn when we drive it. When I drive it, I have women who wouldn’t normally give me the time of day come up to me.

When my redhead wife is in it even more heads turn. Kim insists that isn’t true, that people are just looking at the car. As a guy, I know the difference between an admiring look at a vehicle and a lecherous look at a woman. Let me break down the guy math for you: sports car + redhead = sex on wheels.

Ok, so I’m exaggerating. I don’t really hate the MG. In fact, I’ve had some great moments in it. The first that leaps to mind is driving it to my wedding with one of my groomsmen, James Koren, in the passenger seat, both of us in tuxedos. It looked like something out of a James Bond movie. Okay, with two guys, it looked like something out of a gay James Bond movie (Thunderballs, anyone?), but a Bond movie nonetheless.

On a sunny day, with the top down, the MG is a joy to drive. It’s not fast by any means, but it handles curves and turns like a cat. It’s perfect for a leisurely drive in the country or, in the case of the Antelope Valley, into the nearby hills.

My drives into the hills are what I call “perspective drives.” While others are racing from Point A to Point B like crazed tenants of an Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm, I’m enjoying the scenery.

I took one of those perspective drives on Saturday. I was feeling a bit blue, thinking of money problems, career issues, and how schools have failed to recognize my wife’s talent, forcing her to be a road warrior adjunct instructor instead of a full-time, tenure-track professional. So that was the frame of mind I was in when I looked at the MG in the carport, ignored recently by Kim, who now has a Miata, and by me, who prefers the roomy cabin of the Fit, especially on cold days.

The MG started right up – it was as if it was eager to be driven. The day was perfect for a drive – sunny, about 70 degrees, with a slight breeze. I headed up to Lake Hughes. Along the way I saw guys in boats on Lake Elizabeth, people out with their dogs, and 20 or so bikers making a mid-day stop at the Rock Inn. It was an idyllic day.

Along the way, I saw the first wildflowers of spring – even a handful of poppies. Parts of the hills were still black from the Station Fire, but here and there patches of green were pushing through the charred earth. It is cliché to say that sight was life-affirming, but just because something is cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true or worth some quiet reflection during a drive.

I think it’s rather impossible to stay blue on a sunny day when you’re driving an MG with the top down. Maybe the MG isn’t so evil after all.