What’s your favorite celebrity sighting? Mine’s the time I made Dick Van Dyke laugh. The first thing I can ever remember specifically laughing at was Dick Van Dyke’s slapstick tumble over a footstool, when he walks in the front door in the immortal credit sequence from The Dick Van Dyke Show. Certainly it’s the first wellspring [...]
When we write we are speaking, in print, in the voice of whatever we are. I find myself in a weird place right now. As I enter my fiftieth year, having come through two years of chaos and crisis in more than one arena of my life, I feel so changed that I’m not even [...]
Flannery O’Connor once said that the only way to write successful autobiographical fiction is if you are able to look at yourself as a fictional character. In other words, if you can look at you as if you were not you. Autobiographical or not, your fictional characters are not you. They’re never you. Of course, [...]
It was our first rehearsal for Salome, late spring 1991. I had managed to drag Mutahar Williams along. “Mutahah,” as it was pronounced, was his Subud name, but he was very English, his voice deep and resonant, like seasoned wood: an exquisitely-tuned instrument for poetry. We’d hit the coffeehouse poetry circuit trolling for players for [...]
We did Oscar Wilde’s Salome in our underwear in the summer of 1991 and got “Pick of the Week” in the LA Weekly for it, a big deal then. We had a hit play on our hands. We were the Gray Pony Chorus. It was a wild ride. That was the peak of our renown. Since [...]
This is a special Three Line Lunch crossover edition of Hippie Squared. It’s a first edition. Save this, it could be a collector’s item. (Do I date myself? Very well then, I date myself! I am large, I contain decades.) TLL graciously offered to step in when it became clear that HS was going to [...]
After almost thirty years in LA, I’m still discovering new things. Whole new worlds even. Last Sunday we took a nice walk with Riverworld on our left and Golf World on our right, and then watched astonished as Golf World gave way to Horse & Cowboy World. Our dogs had cabin fever. My wife Elise had heard about [...]
I keep coming back to the idea that we’re too much under the sway of what’s in the end, just a system of weights and measures gone haywire. Money, I’m talking about. And the whole monetary regime that we’re living and dying under right now — a towering teetering scaffolding built of tattered paper pretending to [...]
I was living in Hollywood then, dead across from the last known address of the Black Dahlia at 1842 North Cherokee. It was the crack years in Los Angeles, and my once-tony neighborhood was a center of the trade. I lived in a grand old apartment building fallen on hard times, called Cliffwood Terrace, just [...]
When I was nineteen I took a Wilderness Survival class at Lansing Community College. For the final we had to pair up with a classmate and survive a night without tent, sleeping bags or gear in the late fall Michigan woods. No snow, but still plenty cold enough to catch a nice case of hypothermia [...]
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