Things to Think About

Last night, I joined Tanya Ward Goodman and the poet Helena Lipstadt for a reading at a very cool independent bookstore in Echo Park. A small, intimate crowd came, and we sat outside in a funky light-stringed courtyard behind the store. I can't tell you enough good things about Tanya's book Leaving Tinkertown, and even though I've read it in different incarnations over many years, it's still a thrill to hear her words. Helena is a new friend whom I met in my new writing group, and her poetry is so intelligent, lyrical and powerfully erotic. I read a few of my How We Do It posts and realized as I was doing so, that they might make a book if they are strung together in some skillful way. I need to get on that.

Other thoughts today concern my struggles with obtaining a better health insurance policy, how I'm realizing just how insidious the tentacles of the Insurance Industry really are --at least for those of us in the independent market. A few years ago, when the whole healthcare reform movement began and the rumblings started about Obamacare, I wrote of how ridiculous it would be to "shop" on the free market for healthcare. You can read about that here.  I'll give you a moment, because it's pretty prescient, if I do say so myself.

Are you back? What I'm finding is that while I can certainly add Sophie to our individual policy  because the ACA has done away with the preexisting condition clause, the drugs that she takes are not on the formularies, and I'm terrified that we'll have to go through some crazy labyrinthine system to get those drugs covered. If you can recall from my Canadian drug mule days, we finally found a non-profit foundation that picks up the co-payment of one of those drugs, but the other one is equally expensive and was only covered after months-long wrangling with the insurance commissioner and my local congress person. For those of you who have written me with the suggestion that Sophie go on Medi-Cal, well, she is, secondary, and those drugs are not picked up by them either.

Hey, like The Tan Man says, The United States has the best healthcare delivery system in the world.

Why the hell do we not have a single payer system? Why the hell is socialized medicine a less attractive alternative to a plutocratic system?

What a clusterf#*ck.

I'm also thinking about the Congressman from Virginia who was stabbed by his mentally ill son who then shot himself and died. Evidently, the son had been admitted for mental health treatment earlier in the week, but a bed wasn't available for him.

Again, let's recite the powerful Tan Man's mantra:

The United States has the best healthcare delivery system in the world.

That being said, Michael Tomasky has a great, brief piece on how the Affordable Care Act addresses mental health coverage for the first time in history. You can read that here.

Finally, ya'll might want to come on out and visit the estate sale of Dr. Arnold Klein, the dermatologist who worked on the face of Michael Jackson. He lives in my neighborhood (the fancy part), and evidently his estate will be liquidated over the next four days. Rumor has it that an extensive collection of Star Wars memorabilia, as well as Picassos and other celebrity crap will be auctioned off. There's a line snaking out the door as I type.

Good Lord.

Reader, what are your thoughts today?

Please Come

I think if you click on that picture, it will enlarge and you can read the fine print. Tanya Ward Goodman, the author of Leaving Tinkertown, should have been listed first with stars around her name, but she's ridiculously humble. If you haven't read her book, yet, please do. You'll never forget it. Helena is the other reader, a beautiful, beautiful poet who I've had the privilege of listening to in our little Tuesday writing group.

It's going to be fun, and I hope to see some of you there!

Oh! There's also this:

Ya'll come on out.

Spread the word.

Let me know if you're coming!

Spreading the LA Love In a Messy Way

Obviously I didn't take the above photo of Los Angeles, but there have been plenty of days that I've looked east and seen that exact view and subsequently marveled over this piece of crowded land that I call home. I'll be honest and say that I almost never agree with my friends who really don't like living here. The complaints are always about the traffic, about the nasty entertainment industry, about the crowds and the many ugly neighborhoods, about the tackiness, about the culture and the plastic surgery and the bad schools and the excessive privilege. I'm moving back to the midwest, eventually, one friend always tells me. I would never want to grow old here. Friends who have also lived in New York say that there's no comparison, that they miss the grit and the darkness and the chic and effortlessly cool people, the walking and the honesty of that city. I, too, adore New York and feel as if the almost nine years that I lived there were among the greatest of my life. I don't think a day went by that I didn't think God, I love this place! and less so, but still frequently, God, I hate it here! I see my fair share of the grotesque here in Los Angeles -- even at my son's benign high school in the San Fernando Valley, you might rub elbows with Larry King and his eighth wife, Sylvester Stallone picking up his kid in a gold Bentley, and a veritable freak show of eighty year old men with trophy wives and teenage kids. But you'll also see the California boys and girls of your imagination, golden skinned water polo players with tousled, stiff chlorine-tinted blonde hair, towels around their waists, jumping into jeeps with surfboards on the top. I won't go into Los Angeles' weather, because you might up and leave, if you haven't already, but what might surprise you is that the culture here -- the sheer size of the city and the incredible diversity -- rivals that of any other city in the world, I think, and you only have to drive

a

bit

to take advantage of it.

Last night, I had the pleasure of listening to my great friend, Tanya Ward Goodman, read from her new memoir, Leaving Tinkertown. She read a bit and then her brother, a tattoo artist and incredible musician with a gorgeous voice, sang songs that he'd written to accompany her. The performance was at a Masonic Lodge in the famous Hollywood Cemetery -- yes, a famous cemetery -- and it was filled with old people, hipsters, artists, attorneys, NPR folks, screen and television writers.  I met an attorney who works with families of kids with disabilities, and it turned out that she reads my blog daily and also knows of the organization that helps kids in the foster care system that I also work for!

Today, I finished a cake for a young girl's sixteenth birthday, and now I'm off to type for an hour at a performance art thingamajig going on at USC. I'll be pecking away at John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, part of a typing pool, and as soon as I find the announcement about it, I'll post it. Maybe I'll even get a photo.

Here's the cake in process:

I don't mind getting old in Los Angeles, by the way, as long as I have these things to do, the sun still shines year round, and I'm able to make a living doing the things I love.

Hilton Head, Part 4,567,356

So, they look good, these boys of mine! They've spent nearly three weeks at Camp Grandma and Pop Pop, and I was so happy to see them tonight after my day of airplanes and airports and airport spinach dip and airport beer and a large pack of Twizzlers and three New Yorkers and one fantastic memoir (my friend Tanya Ward Goodman's Leaving Tinkertown). Tomorrow I'll catch up with my parents and my sisters and all my nieces and nephews and a few cousins. I might just possibly put on a bathing suit and go into the warm Atlantic ocean and drink cocktails at 5. Or maybe I'll drink a cocktail in the morning and then put on the bathing suit and go swimming in the ocean. In any case, I'm happy to be here and will probably be largely absent from blog world. Don't do anything crazy while I'm gone.

First Lines

Tanya Ward Goodman

First lines of novels can either make you stand there in the bookstore, lie there on your bed, grab you so that you don't so much as read but slither into a story and get lost, or they can make you sigh and put them down. Even if I hadn't already read parts of Leaving Tinkertown, by Tanya Ward Goodman, my dear friend and writer extraordinaire, I would be floored by it. The memoir just arrived in my mail yesterday, and I'm nearly halfway through. Here's the first line:

I was conceived in a pickup camper on the New Mexico State Fair Grounds when my parents were on the road with the carnival.

You all need to hop on over to your local bookstore and order it, or go to Amazon and buy it. Right now. This moment. Today. Leaving Tinkertown is about a woman and her father, a beloved and eccentric artist who died too young of Alzheimer's disease.

I'm so excited for the world to finally read Tanya's story, I can't stand it!

Here's another excerpt:

Although they had stopped traveling with the carnival full time, Dad still packed up his brush box and hit the road a dozen times or more each year to work as a showpainter. Sometimes he painted brand new rides like the Sea Dragon and the Flying Bobs in a factory in Wichita, Kansas, but most of the time he headed out to one dusty lot after the next to slap color on rides that had been kicking around the road season after season. Carny folks call this being "with it," which means that even if you're not on the road, the road is always with you.



Watch the video.
Buy the book!

Leaving Tinkertown

Tanya Ward Goodman, one of my dearest writer friends who I've sat with for literally hours and hours, talking about writing and reading and parenting and husbands and food and movies and plays and everything else under the sun -- who I've read my own words aloud to, thousands and thousands of words, and most importantly of all, whose own story I've read in bits and pieces over the years is now going to be a PUBLISHED AUTHOR of a book. It's so exciting that I can hardly stand it, and I know that you will all love Leaving Tinkertown. Go and order it, now. It'll be August before you know it, and the memoir will be the best book you've read all year. I absolutely guarantee it.

Order it HERE.