Home » personal (Page 47)

Category Archives: personal

Muscle Beach Party

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello Hit the Beach

After lunch today, Martine suggested we take a walk. I suggested something that would include part of the Venice Boardwalk heading north along the beach to the Santa Monica Pier. As beach parking costs $9.00, we took the bus and got off at Brooks Avenue in Venice.

Martine does not much care for the Boardwalk because of the smells (burning sage and incense), anarchic bicyclists who brush back pedestrians, and crowds. Of course, there were the usual bums, drugged-out hobags, and crazies with Tourette Syndrome carrying on intense conversations with the Void

But, after about a half mile, we were able to pretty much shake the more picturesque denizens of Venice and walk along the beach at Ocean Park and Santa Monica. Along the way, we stopped briefly at the original Muscle Beach, just south of the Santa Monica Pier, to see a lithe young blonde maneuver back and forth on the rings. She was surrounded by tourists and picture-takers. (I would have been one of the latter had I remembered to bring my camera.)

There are now two Muscle Beaches, the original one, and another one about a mile and a half south, between where Windward Avenue and Venice Boulevard meet the ocean. The new one is enclosed and has a lot of weights and exercise machines, unlike the original site which is decidedly low tech.

It is pretty inconceivable today to imagine anything as wholesome as a 1950s beach movie taking place in Santa Monica or Venice. It might, for all I know, still be happening at places like Zuma Beach in Malibu or Huntington or Newport Beaches in Orange County. Santa Monica and Venice Beaches are a bit too downmarket for Frankie and Annette.

This afternoon was beautiful. The sun was out, but it wasn’t over 80° Fahrenheit (27° Celsius) with just a slight breeze. On the bus on the way back, we sat behind another Tourette crazy and just smiled.

 

Ghosts and Goblins and Skeletons, Oh My!

Posted on by | 1 Comment

Halloween Exhibit at the Grier Musser Museum in L.A.

It’s that time of year again: Halloween, becoming an ever more important celebration in the calendar of the year, is almost upon us. I have prepared for the festivities by reading four horror classics: The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells and a trio of stories from Edwardian horror writer Algernon Blackwood, namely The Willows, The Wendigo, and The Listener.

Then Martine and I capped it off by visiting the Grier Musser Museum on Bonnie Brae Street close to Downtown L.A. Ray and Susan Tejada have purchased a Victorian mansion with which they have family associations and filled it with collections of antique and recent decorations pertaining to the seasons. At this time, it is full of eldritch Halloween exhibits, including animated figures, dolls, puppets, old greeting cards, and horror film tie-ins. The whole place is jammed full of ghosts, goblins, mad scientists, monsters, skeletons, and demons.

As for Halloween itself, it’s a working day. In the evening, if it’s anything like the last fifteen years, there won’t be any trick-or-treaters. The schools have been very effective at alerting parents that the practice is dangerous, what with so many child molesters about. Parents are afraid their children’s candy will include rusty razor blades or strychnine. Instead, there are Halloween parties at the schools which include a distribution of “safe and sane” candy.

I remember going trick or treating when I was a kid. I had an old blue cub scout shirt, to which I had my mother sew some impressive epaulets, and wore a Union army cap. My disguise: A Civil War and Old West Cavalry officer. I didn’t bother wearing a mask—too uncomfortable! I liked the costume because I was a devoted fan of such TV series as Rin-Tin-Tin and F-Troop. And I got a ton of chocolate, candy corn, popcorn balls, and apples.

A Tale of Three Restaurants

Posted on by | 4 Comments

Bertha’s Famous Tamales

Generally speaking, I do not cook on weekends. It’s a special treat for Martine to be able to go out from time to time, and Saturdays and Sundays are usually it. Now you would think that Martine would not be a tamale person, and you are right! While she lolled around in bed resting after an all night bus ride the night before. (She had taken a Greyhound Bus to Sacramento to see her doctors, her old friends from her days working at the old Sacramento Army Depot, and her mother’s grave.)

So, instead of rustling breakfast up for myself as usual, I drove out to the Farmers’ Market in Santa Monica at Pico and Cloverfield. There, accompanied by a thermos of my own unsweetend Darjeeling tea, I had two pork tamales from Bertha’s Famous Tamales, well slathered with their fiery hot sauce. Then I bought some Deglet Noor dates, some Asian pears, and some Fuyu Persimmons.

Attari Sandwiches in Westwood

Lunchtime I took a chance with my little sweetie. We went to Attari Sandwiches in Westwood, a busy Iranian sandwich shop where I had a mortadella sandwich and their delicious home-brewed iced tea with lime and mint. Martine had a chicken sandwich which she did not much care for. If I were in Teheran, I would have no difficulty adapting to their delicious cuisine—except I would eat too much Basmati rice, which is more or less forbidden to me because of my Type II Diabetes. Martine, on the other hand, would have a rough time of it.

Attari Sandwiches is a key focal point for the busy Westwood Iranian community. The restaurant was really hopping when we were there, but the owner and his staff know me well and always give great service (and delicious food). Their osh soup is fantastic, but it was too hot for it today. (It got up to 90° Fahrenheit today.)

Pepy’s Galley (AKA Pepy’s Chili) in a Mar Vista Bowling Alley

I had to make it up to Martine for taking her to a lunch spot she didn’t care for, however much I love it. For dinner, we went to Pepy’s Galley located in the Mar Vista Lanes Bowling Alley on Venice Boulevard. Pepy’s is an American/Mexican comfort food restaurant where Martine could get her hamburger steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, cooked vegetables, and a salad for a reasonable price. The food is down-home good, with good American dishes and a chilaquiles plate that will knock your socks off.

For dinner, I just had a navy bean soup and a plate of cantaloupe with iced tea. I had eaten enough earlier. The important thing was that Martine was placated for making her eat strange “Muslim” food for lunch.

At The Petting Zoo

Posted on by

Mother Goat With Baby

It has become a tradition for Martine and I to go every October to Oak Glen in San Bernardino County to buy fresh-picked apples, a pumpkin for Halloween, and (for Martine at least) to eat a giant piece of apple pie a la mode at Apple Annie’s Restaurant in Oak Tree Village. Also at Oak Tree Village is a petting zoo that Martine loves to visit.

I had hoped to find some Honey Crisp apples, but they’ve been sold out for a couple of weeks. I had to settle for some Pippins and Fujis from Snow-Line Orchard, my favorite purveyor of pomes.

For starters, I decided to rent a car. My 1994 Nissan Pathfinder needs some maintenance, and Oak Glen is a hundred miles east of where we live. I know it costs money, but the thought of getting into car trouble somewhere in the so-called “Inland Empire” makes it worthwhile. Eventually, I’ll have to get a new car, but I have too many irons in the fire right now to contemplate such a large expenditure.

In all, we spent an hour at the petting zoo, looking at (and feeding) goats, a donkey, Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, roosters, chickens, a Jersey cow, alpacas, Barbary sheep, and aoudads. I enjoy seeing Martine enjoy herself this way, talking to the animals and trying to tell them where some dropped food is that they can eat. The animals have their own agenda, and are well enough fed without the corn we have to offer them; but watching Martine become a happy little girl before my eyes is a precious experience for me.

The momma and baby goat shown in the above picture were like royalty in the petting zoo. Everyone was trying to feed them, but neither of them were hungry. Nonetheless, they accepted the homage of the crowd. And the baby’s fur was so silky smooth.

On Hungarian Time

Posted on by

Hungarian Cowboy, or Csikos, on the Hortobagy

This weekend was spent attending two Hungarian events: A Los Angeles Hungarian Meetup Group get-together at Mishi’s Strudel Shop in San Pedro and the Fall Bazaar of the First Hungarian Reformed Church in Hawthorne.

It was interesting to spend a weekend on Hungarian time. At the strudel shop, Martine and I were there on time (at 2 pm), but no one else was. At the church, the bazaar was to begin at 1 pm. We got there fifteen minutes early, and found the place was full because everything started much earlier than the posted time, perhaps by as much as an hour. (And it ended an hour and a quarter early, too.)

I am usually fanatical about being not only on time, but a little early, for everything. It was strange to be outdone in this regard by my fellow Magyars.

Fortunately, it didn’t matter. We just took our seats and enjoyed ourselves immensely through the dinner and musical program. There were two opera singers—Sándor László and Huba Marcsi—singing old Hungarian folk songs to be piano accompaniment. This was followed by a singalong led by Dr. Tai Chen of other old folk songs based on music passed out to everyone. (My Hungarian, being sub par, made it difficult for me to participate.)

There was also a number of rousing folk dances by the Kárpátok Hungarian Dance Ensemble, whose flawless execution of a series of stunning and complicated maneuvers is always a crowd pleaser. I see tthem at least twice a year and find their work to be exhilarating.

It was such a good weekend that I feel like manhandling a bunch of horses like the csikos in the above photo, which comes from Flickriver.

 

 

At Kuruvungna Springs

Posted on by | 1 Comment

The Oasis at Kuruvungna Springs

Today was the “Life Before Columbus” Festival of the Gabrielino-Tongva Indian Tribe. (Appropriate, as tomorrow is Columbus Day, one of America’s more uncelebrated holidays—except by banks and the Civil Service).

About half a mile from our apartment is a site sacred to the Gabrielinos, who once occupied Southern California between Catalina Island and Cajon Pass, between Santa Barbara and Orange County. I am speaking of what is variously called Kuruvungna Springs, Tongva Sacred Springs, and Serra Springs. It is tucked into the Southeast corner of the University High School campus in West Los Angeles.

The Gabrielinos are not one of the better-known Indian tribes, but as Professor Paul Apodaca of Chapman University remarked at the festival, there are two hundred separate Indian tribes in the State of California, and something like a hundred Indian reservations. The tribes belong to some eight language families. My guess is that the Gabrielinos, like other smallish tribes, have not been able to gather the political support to have their own reservation or casino. And, in fact, many political entities do not recognize them. I can understand their budgetary collywobbles to some extent, but I recognize them, as does the City of Los Angeles. (The little Tongva cultural center at Kuruvungna Springs has a series of official scrolls attesting to their status by various governmental entities.)

That does not hide the fact that, when Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast landed in L.A. in the mid-1830s, it was the Gabrielinos he encountered. They were named by their affiliation with Mission San Gabriel, which they helped to build. They were one of the few maritime bands in California, rowing in their plank canoes to Santa Catalina and the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara.

The little oasis around the springs (which form part of the water supply of the City of Santa Monica) is a serene and peaceful place in the great wen that is Los Angeles—which, by the way, is called Yangna in the Gabrielino tongue.

The Life of the Party

Posted on by

No, I was not the life of the party

Last night, Martine and I attended the wedding of my best friend’s second son, Eric. The ceremony and reception were held at the Heritage Museum of Orange County in Santa Ana, about 45 miles south of where we live.

Since Eric is more than a generation removed from us, it was interesting to see the differences between a social event for the young compared to old poops such as myself. To begin with, once the DJ cranked up the music, my communication skills were all but shut down. Although we were seated at a table full of people we knew and liked, I was unable to hear anything.

And insofar as dancing went, I have never had the skill the move in time with music—ever since I was banned from the folk dancing class at the First Hungarian Reformed Church in Cleveland back in 1950 for accidentally stomping on the feet of my dance partners. And, dear readers, I have not improved since then.

So, far from being the life of the party, I felt as if I were immured in a carbon prison like Han Solo in Star Wars III: Return of the Jedi. What made it worthwhile was being with old friends, not to mention honoring the wedding of someone I have liked since he was an infant. I find, after the wedding, that he is even more of an upstanding person than I had thought.

I wish him well as he treads the dangerous paths of this life.Fortunately, he has a killer sense of humor that I think will carry him and his young wife through in style.

Photo Credit: No, this was not taken at the wedding. It is an ad from a website called People Skills Decoded which offers to teach you how to be the life of the party. I suppose they could do that if they replaced my hearing and subtracted a few decades from my age.

Return of an Old Enemy

Posted on by | 3 Comments

At the Eastland Motel, Lubec, Maine

Looks innocuous, doesn’t it? It was here in the easternmost motel in the United States that my old enemy reemerged. Around one o’clock in the morning, I awoke gasping for breath. Martine didn’t hear anything because she habitually sleeps with earplugs. I sprang up in bed and felt an incredible tightness in my lungs. With every breath that I attempted, there was only a hideous whistling sound as my air intake appeared to have shut down.

Finally, after a minute or two thinking that I was going to collapse on the bathroom floor and die with a startled look on my face. (I was there staring at myself in the mirror over the sink with wide, frightened eyes.)

Eventually, after a few choking coughs, the breathing started up again, accompanied by awful wheezing.

The problem had begun a week earlier in Canada. We ran into several days of 100% humidity and intense rainstorms. Although I had had asthma before, it seemed finally to have dissipated in the 1990s. But now I had both a chest infection and a return of the wheezing that used to bedevil me, especially in the more changeable seasons of the year. (Yes, Southern California does have seasons of a sort.)

Finally, on Sunday, September 23, I checked in to the emergency clinic in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. A Canadian physician prescribed a course of antibiotics (Clarithromycin) and prescribed Ventolin for my wheezing. The crisis arrived two days later in Lubec, where we stayed to see Franklin Roosevelt’s famous summer cottage on Campobello Island across the bridge in New Brunswick.

The Ventolin seemed to work, but I was still waking up with a choking series of coughs. Now that I am back in Los Angeles, here I sit at the computer at 2:00 am after having waken up choking. And now my Ventolin is out, and I have to call my physician later in the morning to see what she could prescribe to help me.

In a few minutes, I will stagger back to bed, where I am sleeping in a sitting-up position which helps somewhat. Eventually I will get to sleep, but I will wake up coughing several more times. Curiously, the worst always occurs almost exactly three hours after I’ve gone to bed.

I can hardly wait to get a full night’s sleep again—once I’ve managed to shake this old enemy, if such is possible.

A Prickly Individual

Posted on by

Alzheimer’s Disease

In 1968, I was hitchhiking on Wilshire Boulevard in West L.A., hoping to get a ride as close to the Los Feliz Theater on Vermont as possible. I forget the movie I was originally intending to see: All I know was that it was a French film.

I was picked up within a few minutes by a guy a few years older than me in a slate gray stick-shift Volvo. Just by coincidence, he was going to see a movie, too, except that his destination was a screening of Splendor in the Grass (1961) with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. After a few miles on the road, I decided to go with him, not having seen the Elia Kazan picture and not being averse to the luminescent eyes of Natalie Wood.

My new friend, whom I shall call Marvin, and I became movie-going buddies. We would see a film and then eat dinner, doing the bubble-gum card trading which with us passed for film criticism. Films were either “great” or “a piece of sh*t”—there was no middle ground. Inevitably, we drifted apart, as we were both pretty stubborn in our views. Marvin moved back East and ran a comic book store in Northampton, Massachusetts. And I went on to do the things I did, working in computer software and marketing and eventually accounting.

About twenty-five years ago, Marvin started coming to the film memorabilia and comics shows in Southern California. We reestablished contact. Then Martine started working for him as a helper: Marvin’s hearing was rapidly deteriorating. His hearing aid was about as efficacious as a banana. Fortunately, Martine was able to interface with the customers while passing written notes to Marvin when it required his input.

This year, Marvin came to the Cinecon show displaying alarming symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease. He had forgotten to ship his film posters, which were the big money-maker for him, and instead just sold a few lobby cards, stills, books, and film magazines. He would keep asking me repeatedly what day of the week it was, and then promptly forget what I told him.

He knew something was happening to him. He frequently referred to his requiring a new memory chip. At the same time, he would frequently appear confused and agitated. He even misidentified Dorothy Dandridge in a still from Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess (1959). This is the type of mistake which, hitherto, Marvin had never made before; and other symptoms of mental slippage were beginning to appear.

Despite that, my friend was still his opinionated self and took issue with me because I read too many works of foreign literature that were translated into English (he never read anything not in English), and too much history. At the same time he was reading a John Grisham, an author deliberately not represented in my collection of mysteries.

Yesterday, when the show ended, we drove Marvin to the airport and dropped him off at the Delta Airlines terminal. I was relieved to hear from him by e-mail that he got back home safely, if tired. By return e-mail, I suggested that he see his doctor about his memory. With luck (my fingers are crossed) something could be done to reverse or ameliorate what looks like a precipitous decline.

Marvin is a prickly individual to say the least. He lives alone, though he had hopes of linking up with a woman from Northampton whom he knew. Alas, she died last year of taking several medications which didn’t agree with one another. Since then, Marvin has been more despondent than usual.

I’ve known the s.o.b. for forty-four years now, and I sincerely hope that his health improves so that we could continue our contentious friendship..