Spanish, robots and Bela Lugosi....

The cover of the reissue of "Music for Robots." The 1961 original album cover was in black and white.

I was sitting in Mr. Richard Sheffield's 8th grade Spanish class at Valley View Junior High in Simi Valley about 1968. He was going on about the lecture that Ray Bradbury had given at Moorpark College the previous evening that he had encouraged us to attend.

Suddenly he wheeled around and pointed at me. "And you! With your talent, you really should have been there!" My classmates all turned around to look at me, wondering what talent I had and how he knew about it.

They didn't know that this teacher and I had history. Sheffield probably had more influence on me than any other educator.

I was in fourth grade at Knolls Elementary when I first met Mr. Sheffield. I opened the door to my classroom expecting Mrs. Mahnken, a lovely, nurturing elementary teacher straight out of Central Casting — grey hair and all. She had previously worked for Disney's art department.

What I saw filled me with indignation. A man with a small black mustache, and black frame glasses wearing a beret, a red plaid vest, black pants and suit jacket was leaning back in my teacher's chair with his feet on the desk and his fingers interlaced over a quite chubby belly. I was incensed that his black dress ankle boots were defiling my sweet teacher's desk.

How dare he?

I had no idea then how much this man who infuriated me would change my life.

I don't remember what all we did in class that day, but in the afternoon, he pulled a vinyl album titled "Music for Robots" out of his briefcase (I had never seen a teacher with a attache case before) and put it on the classroom's portable record player, which was roughly the size of a Buick.

An ad for "Music for Robots"
 in "Famous Monsters of Filmland."

One side of this record was Forrest J. Ackerman talking about famous robots, and the other was all experimental music. I want to say it was a Moog synthesizer, but I can't swear to it. Mr. Sheffield played us the music side, gave us crayons and paper and told us to draw what the music made us see.

I can't draw to save my life, but I was loving the assignment, and created a huge eye in the center of the page with optic nerves that snaked around the corners and became other creatures. I think I impressed him, because the substitute had high praise for my creation.

I ran home eager to show it to my mother, who was less impressed than I about how the sub had spent our instruction time. I found out later that Sheffield was a good friend of Forry Ackerman, the science fiction and movie memorabilia collector. Over the years, I learned many interesting things about my teacher.

What can I say? He won me over, and I was glad when he became my math and science teacher in fifth grade. Sheffield had a huge interest in paleontology, and he took us on a field trip to a wash at the other end of the Simi Valley to hunt for fossils. It's because of him that I have the urge to look for trilobites every time I pass Red Rock Canyon.

Richard Sheffield's photo from imdb.com

Like every grade school teacher, Mr. Sheffield had to control schoolroom chatter, and his method was "hush cards." You brought in or made three cards to put on the corner of your desk (mine were Beatles trading cards), and when you got caught talking or misbehaving, you forfeited a card. When you lost the last card, you were punished, sort of "three-strikes and you're out."

He decided one day that because we were acting immature, anyone who lost all their cards that day were going to have to spend the day in kindergarten. "All except you, Kim. You'd have a good time there." How well he knew me...

In fact, he knew I was a writer before I did. At some point he was my English teacher, and I read him my crappy short story about meeting the Beatles on a train, poems about the Painted Desert and other natural wonders, and the beginning of some horrible Dickensian novel. I didn't take any of it seriously, but he told me I should.

The summer between sixth grade and junior high I went on an exchange program to Mexico, at Sheffield's urging. His wife was from Mexico, and I'm not sure how he was involved, but I spent a month down there with a family who had a girl roughly my age, then she returned with me and spent a month in California.

To prepare myself, I took Sheffield's Spanish class he taught in adult night school. I had to get permission from my school principal, and my parents drove me to Simi High where I learned alongside adults, drinking hot chocolate while they chatted over coffee when the catering truck came at break.

When I went to junior high, he stayed at Knolls for a year. I was mad because after I left, he got permission to adapt Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" for the stage, and his sixth-grade English class wrote the script and produced the play. Sheffield got Forry to loan him the original monster from "The Blob" to use in the alien scene. He was trying to convince Bradbury (also a friend) to show up for the performance.

The next year he moved to Valley View Junior High and became my Spanish teacher again. That was where I really learned about Mr. Sheffield. He is a natural raconteur, and whenever classmates hadn't done their homework, they begged me to get him off on a tangent so he would forget to collect it.

He grew up in Hollywood, and had a million fascinating stories about Tinsel Town in the 1950s. He told us he had been a pallbearer at Bela Lugosi's funeral, and that he had met Stan Laurel.

At that time Stan Laurel was in the phone book, and my teacher and his teenage buddies simply called him up and were invited over. Laurel spent the afternoon reminiscing, and taught them the lighting-your-thumb-on-fire trick. I wouldn't find out the whole truth about his connection with Lugosi for many years, until the advent of the Internet.

Bela Lugosi as his most famous character, Dracula

Apparently, the teenaged Sheffield met Lugosi in the final years of his life, and they became quite close. The aging actor was unwell, and movie roles were scarce. Bela had a stack of signed 8x10 glossies, and Sheffield asked for them. He wanted to bolster interest in the "Dracula" actor, and started a Bela Lugosi fan club, offering an autographed photo to anyone who signed up. There's a photo of the two friends here.

Sheffield co-authored a book called "Bela Lugosi: Dreams and Nightmares," and co-produced a documentary about the actor.

For years, I wondered what had become of my former teacher. I knew that at one point he was in Mexico City teaching, and I did have a letter from him a few years after junior high.

Last week, I stumbled across a YouTube video of him speaking at Monster Bash 2007 about how he cut school from Hollywood High to visit the set of "The Black Sleep" with Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine.

He was as nattily dressed as ever, sporting a black cape. Apparently, he always loved costumes, because there are photos of him dressed up as Dracula and the Werewolf of London here. I laughed when he said on the video he took his beret and cigarette holder to the set that day, because I'd seen that beret.

I don't how to contact him, but I'd love to be able to tell Sheffield that he was right all those years ago: I AM a writer, even if I tried to ignore that fact for years. I may not be a teacher because of him, but I want to be a teacher like him. Sadly, his kind wouldn't survive in today's No Child Left Behind, endless standardized testing atmosphere.

My old teacher's innovative teaching techniques designed to wake up students' intellects and make them question the world around them isn't highly prized. But I owe him a huge debt.

The Rhode Island wedding: The end...or rather, the beginning.

Allison puts a ring on Patrick at their May 29th wedding in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

I had never been to a destination wedding before my daughter's. Actually, I don't even consider this a destination wedding, because half the people involved already live in Rhode Island. There was talk of going to Ireland, which would have been great.

But since most of the out-of-town people were staying at the Hampton Inn, I could see how great it would be for everyone to fly to some great resort place to celebrate a wedding. Like a Scottish castle, for example. The way we sat in the lobby and could meet and greet other wedding guests was very cool.

The gown had a simple look,
yet exquisite beading and detail.

But I have a word of advice if you fly to a wedding: rent your own car. With a GPS system. My poor daughter was trying to save us some money after we spent roughly $2,500 getting to Rhode Island, and she insisting on giving us one of her cars to use.

She meant well, but getting people from the airport, to the rehearsal dinner, to the church, and then to the country club reception was the bane of her weekend. When I said I needed to ask her something while she was getting her makeup airbrushed on, she asked wearily if it had anything to do with transportation, and if so, she didn't want to hear about it. Poor lamb.

Sprint must have lousy coverage in that part of the country, because the GPS on my phone that normally I rely on couldn't connect to the satellite. The night of the rehearsal dinner, I was driving to the airport to pick up my mother, and made a fatal wrong turn in the first 5 minutes. I kept thinking I could fix it, and by the time I called my daughter, I was crying in frustration and cursing every road in Rhode Island.

We ended up screaming at each other, and she suggested that next time, I call as soon as I get lost. Sadly, there was a next time. And a time after that.

My poor mother had to wait almost an hour for me, sitting patiently curbside in one of Southwest's wheelchairs. I felt terrible, but not as bad as I did when I proceeded to get us both lost on the way to dinner with the bridal party girls.

We got lost going to restaurants, train stations, and stores. The only reason we didn't get lost sightseeing was that there was no time for it. The groom is inordinately fond of Newport, R.I.; in fact he proposed there, at the Tennis Hall of Fame. I don't care about tennis, but I did want to see author Edith Wharton's summer home, Land's End. All I know about Newport, I learned from "Age of Innocence." Patrick was upset that we came all that way and didn't see anything, but we'll just have to make a trip back.

The day of the wedding was a blur. My daughter had hired make-up artists and hair professionals, who invaded her hotel suite like a army bivouac. They set up director's chairs in front of the window "where the light is better," and a folding table which became littered with hairpins, hairspray, combs and brushes. It looked like backstage at a beauty pageant, which these ladies frequent.

The pros regaled us with funny stories about Mrs. Rhode Island contestants, while they ratted our hair, airbrushed on makeup, and kicked up clouds of Aqua-Net.

The organ and stained-glass window of the church.

The twin nieces of the groom were doing death-defying jumps from the top of the room divider to the bed, where Charlotte was using the king-sized mattress as a trampoline, just to add to the chaos of eight adult women getting ready in two small rooms.

In the middle of all this, the fire alarm went off in the hotel. We had ladies in the middle of being coiffed, and frankly, needed every second before the wedding. No one seemed to know what was going on, and the elevators wouldn't work, but we kept on. The klaxon was so loud, I could feel myself losing hearing.

We carried on until I heard and saw the fire truck, then I started moving everyone out of the suite. We were in the hall, getting ready to walk down five flights of stairs, when a hotel employee said it was just a drill, and we needn't evacuate. So I got to look like a jerk for panicking and giving in to the peer pressure of the herds of people I saw in the parking lot.

It seemed like the tumult went on forever, until suddenly, it was time to go. We piled into the limos and went to Our Lady of Mercy Parish Church, where the groom's family worship. It is a lovely church, founded in 1853, although like many lovely old ladies, it has had some work done.

Our party seemed dwarfed by the big room, but we huddled together in the front pews. Looking back to the door was lovely, and you could see the choir loft, with afternoon sunlight pouring through its stained-glass window, and the organ filling the room.

What can I say about how my daughter looked that day? All brides are beautiful, but Allison was stunning. The dress was elegant with clean simple lines, but exquisite beading and a row of buttons going all the way down into the train.

The groom was handsome, the children well-behaved, except Charlotte, who demanded in her two-year-old way to be near her mother at the altar, and had to be taken out by her dad, Chris. My older daughter Megan was the matron of honor, and I guess in Catholic weddings, they stay at the altar the whole time.

Allison, Megan and Charlotte.

The young priest told jokes, was engaging and the couple quickly went on their way with blessings, rings, and huge smiles.

We bombarded them with bubbles on the way to the limousines, and we moved on to the country club for the reception. The venue was beautiful, and they had a high minimum for the food service which translated for our small wedding into steak and lobster for dinner, and a cocktail hour with passed hor d'oeuvres and a buffet overloaded with shrimp and raw oysters.

Dancing at the reception.

Instead of a head table, the bride and groom had a table all to themselves, which made it nice for people to approach them, get individual pictures taken, and just wish them well. The table was in front of a picture window with a fabulous view of the water.

We all danced at one time or another, although the disc jockey didn't seem to have anything past 1979 in his repertoire. Megan asked me to keep Charlotte occupied for one dance because she had requested Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle." She knows I hate that guy, and said, "Don't judge me!"

Jim and I danced too, just not to Jim Croce.

We had to distract Charlotte while her parents danced because she hadn't seen her dad for the week Megan was at her sister's preparing for the wedding, and the tot was determined to monopolize his time. She demanded every dance, and even when she fell asleep in his arms, the sleepy toddler woke up and protested.

The evening wound down and we were faced with the transportation problem again. The hotel shuttle that the hotel advertised had only six seats and it was 40 minutes for it to make a round trip.

The ring-bearer Kaitlyn, flower girl Mia, and the ever-charming Lotte.

We called three cab companies, who refused to come get us because they had been burned before with people who called them, then hopped on a shuttle before the cab arrived. We begged, pleaded and offered credit card numbers in advance, but they were resolute. They were actually not very nice about it, with their "Cheers"-like accents. Welcome to R.I.—now go home.

In the midst of all this turmoil, my daughters' godfather Joaquin leaned up against the wall, took in the warm spring air and sighed, "Life is beautiful." I guess when you have escaped war-ravaged El Salvador, it puts the travails of getting from a beautiful country club to a nice warm bed after consuming expensive seafood, in its rightful perspective.

In the end, we were saving by Megan's in-laws, who had rented a van to drive down from Connecticut, and made another trip to come back and get us. It was really very nice of them. It's good to have family.

The new couple is at home on Long Island, where they face all the same obstacles everyone else does in today's society, only now they are facing them together.

The recessional.

Engineers — duct-tape, can-do attitude

My dad, Alfred Smith, at work in the Woodland Hills lab at Litton Industries
 sometime in the 1950s or 60s

Editor's note: Today column, the final installment of the Rhode Island wedding, will be late, so I can take my mother to church and to the cemetery, since it is Father's Day. In the meantime, here is a column I wrote about my late father, Alfred M. Smith, in August 2005 for the Antelope Valley Press.

My dad can fix anything.

Actually, I should say that my dad can fix anything mechanical. He tries to fix everything that is wrong or broken, everywhere.

When something has gears, printed circuit boards, wirewrap, nuts, bolts, gears, solder, oil, and, well, parts, he's successful.

When he's trying to fix other people's personal problems or straighten out the guys in his American Legion post, he's considerably less so, as you can imagine.

That doesn't stop him from trying. 

Living with an electronics engineer is trying. Or any engineer, for that matter. Especially retired ones.

They are so used to being the go-to guy for repairs and innovation,  that it seems to be impossible to give up that role.

The challenge for my father is to pick his battles and realize that just because he can fix something, that doesn't mean he should.

My folks are moving and downsizing from their current spread in Northern California, and it's been a little traumatic for my dad, I think. He's had to part with any number of unfinished projects - three Packards of various vintage, I don't know how many Mustangs, a Burt Rutan kit plane, and a Volkswagen bug, that when it emerged from the South 40 took my mother utterly by surprise.

“When did you buy that? she asked incredulously, as the new owner towed it out of the underbrush.

Never tell my dad that something is broken, because he'll want to fix it. But he's a really busy guy, so he'll take it with the best of intentions, and you'll never see it again. Or worse, he'll give it what my grandmother used to call “a lick and a promise” so you can continue using it- intending to finish it later.

He pulled the broken AM radio out of my 1967 VW bug over my objections. Of what earthly use was an AM radio to me? I used it to listen to Kings' games, and it's not like hockey season is year-round.

But he couldn't stand that it wasn't working, so he yanked it out and put it on his workbench, with the best of intentions. So then I had a gale-force wind blowing through my trunk and out the hole in my dash until one day my keys were stolen at a garage when they had my car overnight.

Some disgruntled former employee broke in and stole all the customer's keys. In typical kid fashion, I only had one ignition key. I managed to find an extra door key in a junk drawer, so I was able to get into the bug and my dad hot-wired it.

At home, he duct-taped a scrap piece of printed circuit board mounted with a toggle switch and a button over the black hole in my dash. I flipped the switch to get electricity and hit the button for ignition.

I drove it like that until I wanted to get a car stereo, then I was forced to fix it for good.

Years later, I had a problem with my Hyundai overheating because the secondary cooling fan wasn't coming on. He didn't have time to chase down the problem, so he hot-wired that, too. 

I had a switch mounted under my rearview mirror on the outside of the car. It worked great - just turn it on and let it run, then turn it off when you shut the car off. If you remembered, that is.

I can't tell you how many times I had to jump my car because the battery was dead. And I lived in mortal fear that someone walking by would see this random toggle switch and flip it just wondering what it did.

No wonder my favorite part of “Apollo 13" is when Ed Harris dumps out the random stuff that the astronauts have in the capsule and the engineers start spit-balling a solution to their problem.

It reminds me of my dad.

The Rhode Island wedding: Part two.

Allison and Patrick's wedding, May 29, 2011 in East Greenwich, R.I.

We saw "Bridesmaids" last night, and while extreme, it did a good job of depicting what is most crazy-making about weddings. We throw together people of different colors, religions, socio-economic standings, political parties, value systems and world-views, and expect them to get along simply because they know people in love with one another.

Brides have a tendency to look to the past and honor childhood friends, acknowledge those who are newly important to them, and incorporate relatives when choosing a wedding party, which can be disastrous. At least it was in the film.

Zipping Ally's dress.

In my first wedding I chose bridesmaids who had been my friends since elementary school. I never see any of them now, and my closest friend growing up I didn't see once after the wedding. We had drifted apart after high school (as evidenced by my finding a Barbra Streisand cassette in her collection), but somehow it seemed important to have her there.

The lead character in "Bridesmaids" is feeling left out, and can't quite deal with her engaged buddy's new best friend: the super-rich wife of the groom's boss. She has to come to grips with the bride's new life, and has to learn that although nothing will be the same, the love between them is still there.

My homegrown bridesmaids.

That's what I had to learn, too. Roughly a month before my own October wedding, my daughter Allison announced that she would be moving to New York with Patrick, her oenologist fiance. Like, immediately. So she packed up, he headed out, and she and her cat Darby stayed with up for two weeks until our wedding, and she left for Long Island a few days after serving as one of my bridesmaids.

Grow your own bridesmaids and flower girls, that's my advice. That way you'll be sure to see them again....

I barely had time to wrap my head around her being 3,000 miles away, then she was here for a few glorious weeks, and then gone. And I was now married, a state that my daughters needed to get used to; I wasn't always available 24/7 like I had been before. 

Then came the announcement that the wedding would be in six months. In Rhode Island.

Pop-Pop making foghorn noises
to make Charlotte giggle.

This trip was the first time I had been to her apartment since she moved, and it was cool seeing in person what I had only seen while we Skyped (yes, it is a verb, lucky I don't have a copy editor, they'd be arguing with me). Then we were racing to tip of Long Island, past Gatsby country to catch the Cross Sound Ferry to New London, Conn. on onward to Rhode Island.

Allison has always been family-oriented, wanting to have family game night and just hang out together, so it was no surprise when she brought out the "Authors" deck on the ferry. We played this Go Fish-like game for hours when my kids were little, gathering "books" of Shakespeare, R.L. Stevenson, Poe, Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, and Louisa May Alcott. Having her new love playing her childhood game — that must have thrilled my youngest.

A post-Authors card game on the ferry.

Perhaps I am too acculturated to the desert now, but I have to say: there are entirely too many trees back East. When one is used to seeing the horizon in every direction, having your sightline reduced to a 20 or 30 foot diameter because of trees and bushes felt a little claustrophobic. I now understand why film director Wim Wenders says that Germans are so taken with the American West — because they can see so far.

Rhode Island may not have the Black Forest, but it has many, many trees, and roads so idiosyncratic that  my husband and I were lost, together and separately, for five out of the seven trips we took by car. East Greenwich, the location of the church, was founded in 1677, and has those piled-stone walls you've seen in every Revolutionary War movie. You can practically see Redcoats marching by while ragged Americans crouch behind them.

The backyard of Ally and Patrick's apartment.
See what I mean? Too many trees..

I guess the town grew up around water sources, and then roads were built to connect everything, because following directions is impossible. Sprint coverage must be spotty in that location, because my GPS wasn't working, and often, when you were supposed to stay on a particular road, you actually had to make a left, because if you went straight, the road changed. Rhode Islanders must take Yankee thriftiness to extremes, because there were no road signs. You could find out the name of every alley-way off the highway, but not the main drag you were on.


We checked into our hotel, and the wedding weekend began. The bridesmaids, mother and grandmother of the bride, and the bride's father's fiance had a rather sedate, although scrumptious Italian dinner out, and I dropped some of the above off at a tavern for more raucous entertainment at what the Brits call "a hen party." On the way back to the motel, I got lost for the second time.

Charlotte had stayed with my husband, and she drove him crazy demanding to be taken first to "the hot pool" (spa), and then the "the cold pool." When my daughter picked her up, she had passed out in front of the television (a rare treat). Apparently she got annoyed because Pop-Pop couldn't rewind live television like her parents do her DVDs. A commercial would catch her fancy, and she became annoyed when her cries of "Again?" got her nowhere.

It was only the beginning of a very busy weekend for Charlotte....

A gratuitous shot of Charlotte and her mommy, Megan.

The Rhode Island wedding: Part one.

The whole reason we were traveling to first New York, then New Hampshire: the wedding of Allison and Patrick. This is from her photographer's blog. You can view the rest here.

So, how many times has this happened to you? You log on to the airline's website to print boarding passes the day of your flight, only to receive a message saying you can't do that, please call the airline.

When you call, you are told that your tickets were for the day before, and you were a no-show. Yes, you can re-book, but there will be a $150 fee per ticket, and there aren't any more flights that day.

No, this has never happened to you, only to fools like my husband and me, who book red-eye tickets and can't keep the dates straight? You want to know who knew when we were supposed to travel? My daughter, the bride, who kept saying, "I thought you were getting in Wednesday, not Thursday, are you sure?"

Thus began the most hellish (and expensive) voyage of my life. There were three missed flights, a full-body pat-down by airport security, a nearly-stolen laptop, bags arriving on the wrong carousel, and forgotten iPods, books and a sweater.

Flower-girl Charlotte, the blonde imp,
with her sash crooked.

At the end of this trip was a beautiful, flawless wedding (except for a certain blonde imp crying for her mommy) and an incomparably lovely bride, but the getting there took some doing.

I hadn't packed yet when I got the bad news about the flight, because I had been getting things arranged for my substitute teachers, sewing Charlotte's flower-girl dress, sewing sashes for the other two flower-girls, making a silk nightgown for the bride, and finding a bag to match my new shoes.

So when told I would have to take an earlier flight, I just threw things in a suitcase. We had to get to Las Vegas to catch a flight to La Guardia via Atlanta. (Don't quite get that? Me neither.) I considered driving, but was overruled by my husband, who after much swearing and lots of money, got us an American Airlines flight.

Racing down the 405, we debated whether we could take the Van Nuys Flyaway. I consulted the smartphone and found out that if we didn't make the 5 p.m. bus, we wouldn't make it. As we neared the Roscoe offramp, a long line of weary commuters waiting to exit made the decision for us. Parking at LAX was to be our fate.

Whipping out the smartphone again, I found a long-term lot with a free shuttle for $4.95 a day, versus the official airport parking of $12. We got there to discover that fine print said the price was for 30-day or longer parking, but it was still $6.95, a bargain. That was for an internet price only, so I had to sit in their lobby and finish the paperwork on my phone.

The other people got off the shuttle at the first stop, Southwest, and we whipped through all the rest of the terminals to get to American Airlines, our carrier. There we tried to print boarding passes, only to be denied by a computer for the second time that day. Apparently, you have to check in 40 minutes before departure, we now had only 30 minutes. Physically missing a flight is one thing. Being told the plane is there on the tarmac, we're just not letting you on, is entirely another.

Perhaps if I were younger, prettier, and could cry on cue, I could have pressed our case, and made them let us on. But I'm not, and I didn't.

Cool lighting sculpture in McCarran Airport in Las Vegas.

Same story as before: $150 per changing fee, which was damn near the price of the ticket, and oh-by-the-way, that was our last flight to Sin City. The counter person looked at her screen and told us that Southwest had an 8:10 p.m. flight, which would be a push to make our 10:30 connection, but we had to try, or forfeit yet another airline ticket.

I haven't had the heart to total up the damages in wasted airfare, but I know it is multiple four-figures.

So we trudged all the way back to Southwest, in Terminal 1, dragging all our bags from Terminal 5, and paid for a third set of tickets to McCarran. I tripped the metal-detector and had to have a pat-down from a female TSA. It could have been erotic, had she been more attractive and not wearing industrial-strength rubber gloves. Oh, and the fact that when she got to "sensitive areas," she used the back of her hand. Well, what the hell fun is that?

It turns out that my silver necklace with the MG logo was the culprit, so I learned how to avoid that particular thrill for the rest of the trip, but while I was getting felt up by a government worker, some woman walked off with my MacBook Pro computer.

Apparently she thought it belonged to her son, and was quite snippy when my husband said quite loudly, "That's not yours!" He was retrieving my stuff from the conveyor belt, and narrowly avoided disaster. Then we sat down in the terminal, nervously looking at the board that said our flight was delayed, and I went to pull out my iPod, only to find that I had left it in plain sight in the car we just parked.

Instead of watching the feature film I had on my iPod, I was frantically calling the foreigners who had my car, asking them to put my iPod in a less conspicuous place. But like me, they were busy, so I never got a call back.

I could feed a one-armed bandit, but not get a drink, in Vegas.

All I wanted to do was to get to Vegas and get a drink. On the plane I ordered a Scotch with a ginger ale back, but I was told I could only have one or the other, if I didn't want them mixed. Apparently, they had to make another trip for the soda, and the flight isn't that long.

We got to McCarran only to find that I could play slot machines, but all the bars were closed in that part of the terminal. We had to walk
forever to get to the baggage claim, and we were freaking out about not missing our flight.

All of the passengers were standing around waiting for bags, and I decided to go check in for our next leg. Apparently, my poor husband kept checking the signs on the carousel for 20 minutes, only to have our flight inexplicably change baggage locations.

Had our flight to Atlanta not been delayed 45 minutes, we wouldn't have made it, but the travel gods at last smiled on us. Another airplane change in Atlanta, and at last, we were New York City bound. I finally understood the couple who had been stranded by the Icelandic volcano eruption who spent $12,000 to get home. At that point, I would have severed a limb to get to my destination.

I couldn't sleep, and looked for the book I had paid full-price for in LA when I realized I had no iPod, and remembered I left it, and my husband's sweater I was using as a pillow, on the last flight.

One of my crappy photos of bridal party members,
including binky-faced Charlotte.

My daughter and her fiance met us at La Guardia and deposited us at our Long Island hotel. In the sweetest gesture I have seen in a long time, they returned with pancakes and Eggs Benedict from a nearby aluminum-sided diner, the only hot food I had eaten in the entire 18-hour trip.

And then we slept for three hours.

Next week: The beautiful wedding and getting lost five out of seven car trips in Rhode Island.