CARMAGEDDON !

Los Angeles, California

It's here, and will the world stop? For those of you living out of the Los Angeles basin (or east of Fairfax, as the current joke goes), Carmageddon is the word, reputedly first used by Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky (though there is a computer game by the same name) to describe the anticipated chaos of this weekend's closure of the 405 freeway.

Now, the 405 freeway was called the San Diego Freeway when I was growing up and freeways all had names and off ramps had no numbers (actually, I find the off ramp numbers quite helpful, especially when navigating to somewhere new, worrying that I might have gone too far, and not trusting my navigation system as she led me astray once in an appalling fashion). Anyway, the ol' 405 was cut through Sepulveda pass way back when, and it used to be a lot less congested than other freeways in the area, but no more. All of our freeways are clogged with cars, most of which have one person in them, and that would be the driver. And, more and more people keep pouring into Los Angeles. They are young. They are hip. And they ALL want to work in the industry. Don't get me started as I've covered this sufficiently in a previous post entitled The One-Year Anniversary of Neighborhood Chaos (and available here for a very small cost).

Here are the two big preguntas about this weekend's closure: Will it be a chaotic nightmare beyond all imagining? Will they get it reopened Monday morning on schedule? Will it solve the problem? Ok, I know, that's three questions. I threw in the middle one for the fun of it. But the big question as discussed on my local NPR station which broadcasts from Pasadena (an area that shouldn't be affected by Carmageddon anyway, so why are they getting involved, I ask you?), is the latter one: Will it solve the problem? They are adding additional lanes, including a car-pool lane (once called a diamond lane, I suppose for it's preciousness?). Will more people double up in their cars in order to take advantage of this? Doubt it.

I did come up with a solution to this some time back. I thought that we could solve the problem of traffic in Los Angeles, if everyone who was born in a different state had to return to that state. That's it. Simple. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine, she protested that she and her husband (New York) would have to leave California, in that case. "Well," I said. "I have to make sacrifices as well. My mother (Ohio) has to leave. And Billy (Minnesota) has to leave." She wanted to know what I wanted to do with people who were born in other countries. I didn't have to ponder that. I kinda sorta like the multi-culturalism of Los Angeles, especially as reflected in the Latin-American origins of California. And I don't want to appear ethnocentric. So, basically, they all get to stay. "But," she said. "This would be something a totalitarian government might do!" I had a ready reply. "Sweetie, this isn't about politics. It's about traffic . . !"

We used to really love our cars here in Los Angeles. At least before they became movable containers of anger, angst, and anxiety (the real Triple A club of motoring). I have carried on a pretty good relationship with most of the cars I have driven, since learning to drive in my dad's Alfa Romeo. In fact, I got on quite well with that first car, much to my dad's dismay. You see, my much-older sister wasn't much of a driver, and didn't learn to drive a manual shift. So, my dad decided he was going to teach me to drive in his manual-shift, red, convertible, Italian import. Guess whose car I wanted to take to the beach on Saturdays when I got my license the day after my sixteenth birthday? An Aristotelian tragedy, that! I piled girlfriends into it (it had a shelf backseat), and motored through Malibu canyon as often as I could wheedle the loan of it. This was an experience so memorable, that the first car I bought with my own cash was a brand-new, white, convertible VW bug. My third in a long succession of all German automobiles, and probably my favorite to date. But I digress . . .

So, Carmageddon. This weekend. How will it all end? Gridlocked misery or trumped-up doom-prophesying, much like the anticipated hell of the '84 Los Angeles Olympics (which turned out to flow perfectly in all manner of ways including southland traffic)? But, just in case, we are sticking around our neighborhood, as advised, for the duration. A little gardening, a little cooking, a little hanging out by the pool. As I always say, when the cosmic trafficmeister hands you a lemon, it's always smart to spike some lemonade. Thank you for reading my blog. Vaya con huevos!

Frenemies

Los Angeles, California

Yes, it's come to that, and you must have known it would. I've been on a bent of bitching, complaining, and whining -- in spite of my annual observance of Lent, and my code of doing what Sandra would do. I do try. I really do. Seriously. But sometimes things, and people, get under my skin. This is one of those times.

I'm pretty nice. I know that word gets a bad rap, but it really shouldn't. My goal in dealing with family and friends is to try to do the best I can do. My philosophy is that it is daunting to try to change the world at large, but making a difference in my circle, in my home and with my family, friends, neighbors, and community, is doable. I am polite in the marketplace and on the road. I think I am friendly. And I am tolerant . . . to a point.

One of my fellow Scorpio friends (who is also, incidentally, Sicilian) once told me that her instantaneous response to sever ties, when a situation has become intolerable, is not her favorite trait in herself. Survival instincts rarely are, I think. But I know what she is talking about. I call it the wall. It's that thing that happens in your mind and soul, that thing that, for me, drops down, impenetrably, and says enough. It's that thing that lets me know beyond a shadow of a doubt, with nothing I can do to change this, that I am done.

What causes this chasm to open? Usually a profound breach in the golden rule. Again, I am kind, I am thoughtful, I am polite and friendly. But I'm not inert. I expect that flow to come back at me, more or less. Some flow, anyway. And when people are short-tempered or rude, or worst of all, can't handle their own issues and act out, I am outta there. I do allow people a second, and even a third chance. But once the wall comes down, it is over. Not my favorite trait in myself, but there you have it.

Life is so short, and people are so cranky! I am often astounded by the abundance of lack I encounter all around me. Lack of concern, lack of empathy, lack of manners -- it is hard enough to do business or to be a consumer when encountering these cranky types. But what about coming face-to-face with this in your family and friends? I suppose for all of us it is sometimes a struggle to contain the caustic comment or the remark precipitated by irritation, but shouldn't we at least try?

Some years back I spent a few months screwing up my courage to confront a friend about her odd habit of eating off of my plate. She is an actress who lived in Manhattan when we first became friends. Still, we saw her often as she would fly to LA to work in the TV industry.

She kept her bad habits under wraps during that time, but once she moved to LA, it was open season.The first time I saw her with her uninvited fork in someone else’s food was at a dinner party at our house. She mostly picked at the food on her own plate, and ostensibly had finished eating when she suddenly lunged with her fork toward our friend Christopher, spearing up some pasta from his plate. After that, no one's plate was safe.

At a restaurant brunch gathering, she ordered asparagus. When it was served to her, she picked up a stalk, then wandered down the long table dipping into sauces on other people’s plates. I was reminded of that dramatic scene in The Miracle Worker, when Anne Sullivan first sits at the family dinner table, and experiences Helen blindly snatching handfuls of food from the plates of other family members.

Now, if you've been reading along or at least have read some portion of my fiftyish posts, you might garner this piece of info about me. I don't mind sharing my food. In fact, I like to share and often when out with people we share "small plates", or order one dessert with four forks. But this is a totally different thing. This is much like the high school girlfriend who goes after everyone else's boyfriend. Just because she can. This is serious boundary-crashing.

One night, after about six months of experiencing her eating off of my plate and the plates of others, we were dining at an Italian restaurant together, when, without warning, her hand darted across the table into my plate where she grabbed a large fistful of dressed salad greens from my plate, then, dripping a trail back across the table, she crammed them into her mouth, all the while continuing to talk. I knew right then that I had hit the wall.

It had taken me several months of internal debate to realize that I could either stop eating with her, or else I had to apprise her that she was in violation of my comfort zone. So after much rehearsal, I did just that. It did not go over well. Evidently, for her, having free rein to invade the plates of others was an entitlement that must stand, at all costs. As a result, we parted as friends. Billy boiled the whole thing down to its essence by casually stating that he wondered how long it would take her to realize she had lost a good friend. That made me ask myself whether I was willing to lose a friend over something like this. I wasn't, but, evidently she was.

I would like to think of this as an isolated instance, but I have learned that there is a whole world out there of boundary-crashing for sport. The challenge is to be someone who is generally nice, and kind, thoughtful, polite and friendly, yet still protect your boundaries, and with fortified armaments when necessary. Because some people, and let me not allude to their upbringing, simply won't observe any etiquette with regard to interpersonal relations. And I had a hand print in my salad to prove it.

So, sadly, I have occasionally found myself done. And, like my Sicilian, Scorpio friend, done swiftly and permanently. Even when it is a friendship that I valued or hoped would evolve to fristerhood. For being nice doesn't mean I don't respect myself, nor that I do not expect to be treated with respect. There is a definite line between friendship and frenemies. I don't like to cross it. But given the right circumstances, I can. And will.

So, don't cross me. The temperature is climbing, and we currently live in a world of earthquakes, war, and continued economic upheaval. I'm still worried about the sea turtles at The Kona Village (in the wake of the tsunami disaster there). Yet, even in light of all this, I have trust in my proven ability to make lemonade out of lemons. So if you have lemons, feel free to share. Just don't lob them at me, unless you are prepared for me to permanently disappear as your target. Thank you for reading my blog, so nice of you!

Alice Cooper

Los Angeles, California

Got your attention, didn't I? Actually, this is not a post about Alice Cooper. Rather it is inspired by his iconic song, currently looping in my loopy brain, and that is: School's Out for Summer. Because, as we've just passed the summer solstice, it dawns upon us that it is that time of year, once again.


For those of us who have been out of school for a multitude of decades, more or less (except for the occasional Spanish language or writing classes, or what have you), you would think we would forget that first flush of summer that always came to us in a rush when we finally left the school year behind on that blessed day in May or June. I clearly remember, and can call up, that feeling of exhilaration and promise when the entire, eternity of summer lay before me. It only got better as I got older and the requisite family vacation finally ended, that happening in the summer between my junior and senior year in high school. An entire summer spent with my friends. What bliss!

How many of us remember the contentment of shutting down the alarm clock and sleeping in throughout the summer? I hope you got to do this, but for me, unfortunately, during my school years spent living at home, that summer joy was always short-lived. It lasted about a week, then the morning came, almost on schedule, when my mother would slam into our rooms in the early morning and announce that if she had to get up and do housework every day then we would, by God, not be sleeping in to all hours all summer long. I spent as many nights as I could at the homes of girlfriends, where we were allowed to sleep until noon if we liked, even waking up, on occasion, to pancake lunches prepared by their moms. Bliss reestablished as a reward for cleverness.

The other rule imposed upon me during the long summer between 11th and 12th grade went about like this: Your father has to get up every morning and go to work, so you are not, by God, going to stay out until all hours every night. It's a rare talent that I can get the rhythm of those speeches after so many years. I want that appreciated. Anyway, in truth, this second admonition made more sense to me than, say, the evil edict against sleeping in. My parents did stay awake until after we had gotten in each night, locked the front door, and ducked into their bedroom to say that we were home safe and to bid them goodnight. Actually, there was something reassuring about that ritual, though it did occasionally bring to light the old adage that most teenagers know and respect: parents inspire immediate sobriety. Anyway, my dad did have to leave the house each day quite early, as he had a long commute to work. So, I was allowed to go out two weeknights, and stay out until eleven or eleven-thirty on those nights. It was during that summer, after I arrived home at an hour that felt far too early to go to bed, that I discovered old movies and Dagwood sandwiches.

Most of my friends and I skipped dinner on nights when we were going out. One of three things would happen. We would end up at McDonald's early in the evening. Or at a coffee shop late in the evening. Or we would come home after hours, raiding the refrigerator and freezer at our respective homes. I had one girlfriend at whose house I loved to spend the night because she would fry up french fries -- like, fresh, from real potatoes, french fries when we got home late. But, if I was on my own, slipping back into our kitchen after everyone else in the house had gone to bed, it was always sandwiches. When I described these creations to my mom, she said that they were called Dagwood sandwiches. I just ran that through my best recipe source here and came up blank. But Google tells me that a Dagwood sandwich is made up of a variety of meats, cheeses and condiments, and is named after Dagwood Bumstead, a central character in the comic strip, Blondie. Having grown up in the era of Peanuts, I don't recall that character. But his namesake sandwiches, as I conjured them  up, were inspired.

Meanwhile, I would pull up a comfortable chair in front of our living room television, eating my sandwich and watching whatever old movie I could find. This was a revelation to me. I watched the Marx Brothers, and Alfred Hitchcock films. I watched Hepburn and Tracy. And, I watched every James Cagney film I could discover while severely limited to VHF and UHF. This was before Turner Classic Movies, and certainly before my family had cable. My parents rarely watched television, and though there was this largish TV (though not by today's standards) in the living room, my sister and I generally did our TV watching in the privacy of our own bedrooms. But it was SUMMER, people, and I was loathe to go to bed before midnight -- nor even to retire to my bedroom. The house was sleeping, and I had a piece of it, smack in the middle, all to myself.

Now, back to those sandwiches. I guess I have always been a sandwich lover. My mom wasn't much of a sandwich maker, however, and in my lunch bag in elementary school, I would generally discover white bread with some thick-cut meat in the middle between the buttered slices. This cut into uneven halves. With all that peevish housework going on, she couldn't much be bothered to put together a nice sandwich. And, as an aside, I must report that my mom had gone back to college during these years, and much of her attention was directed towards her degree (summa). I mean really, housework, lunch packing? I don't think so. Anyway, I did eye my friend's sandwiches, with a modicum of envy, during those days. Even the bologna ones looked good, between thin slices of wheat bread with a smear of yellow mustard and mayonnaise and a crisp leaf of iceberg lettuce. Or tuna salad with diced celery, again with the wheat bread and lettuce, and maybe a thin slice of tomato, and all cut diagonally into perfect triangles. Sometimes even crustless! I mean, seriously. These girls were eating English tearoom. My sandwiches looked like they came straight out of Bedrock. I soon threw in that towel and ate in the school cafeteria for the rest of my school years, which took the quality of the cuisine up from my brown bag experience by, say, a hair.

But sandwiches were still enticing me. One of my favorites was the Monte Cristo sandwich at The Blue Bayou restaurant in New Orleans Square, Disneyland. We hied over there when the sun moved across the yardarm after someone called out "lunch, mateys" (this restaurant overlooked the Pirates of the Caribbean ride). We (not the royal we, mind you, but my friends, cousins, and sister) also liked the tuna sandwiches on the Chicken of the Sea pirate ship in Fantasyland, which has, alas, ceased to exist. It was THE BEST place to watch the fireworks, especially with your boyfriend standing behind you, arms around your waist, ah youth! But I digress.

Also out of town (since all Angelenos consider Orange County out of town which is code for out of whack), I have very fond memories of the shrimp sandwiches, basically shrimp salad on really good San Francisco sourdough bread at Crivello's Oyster Bar, which also no longer exists. This little kiosk-with-seating lived at The Cannery near Fisherman's Wharf. Once, when Billy and I were eating there, one of the guys making sandwiches came around the counter and sang, by special request (he said), La Donna e Mobile from Rigoletto. It was one of those glimmering moments. Ah, the San Francisco of yore.

Back in Los Angeles, I had a fond attachment to the patty melts at The Jolly Roger. OK, I get that there's a pirate motif here, and I don't know why. But the patty melts were also good at Hamburger Hamlet, famous for it's Shakespearean quotes on the menu, such as "Eat the sides, I pray thee," and for dishes such as Those Potatotes, Lobster Bisque ("Famous for This"), and Egg Custard Lulu. One thing we all had going for us back then was . . . digestion.

And speaking of digestion, I'm not going to offer a recipe for sandwiches. No, I'm going to get a lot more lethal than that. Billy and I prepare really pretty good ribs. It's our flying-in-the-face of all diet restrictions (you know, the good old five percent mode, and, yes, I'm aware that I am in danger of making you disbelieve that we only eat things like this five percent of the time), and the aforementioned digestion, and any other problems lying in wait. I mean, what the heck. It's summer. And summer sometimes just kinda means ribs and corn and watermelon, or at least here at Casa Healy it does. This goes well with The Beach Boys singing California Girls . . . riding around in convertibles with boys . . . staying out late, and, by God, sleeping in until all hours. And so . . .


Baby Back Ribs

4  lbs.              baby back ribs (will serve four persons)

1 teaspoon     freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon     lemon pepper
2 teaspoons   Lawry's seasoned salt (sorry!)
2 teaspoons   brown sugar
2 teaspoons   white sugar
2 teaspoons   chili powder
2 teaspoons   cumin
1 teaspoon      cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon      smoked paprika

Preheat oven to 275 degrees.  Lightly salt and pepper ribs (there is plenty of both in the rub to come), and place in a roasting pan(s). Cover with foil. Roast for two hours. Remove corner of foil, pour off oil and liquid that has been rendered, and let ribs cool until you can handle them. Meanwhile combine the remaining ingredients in a small bowl.

When cool, pat the rub onto the meat of the ribs. In spite of the name, do not rub or it will roll into little balls on you. Not what you want. Let ribs sit while you fire up the grill. Grill ribs until they look browned up and crusty with the rub (in a good way). Turn frequently with tongs or your hands if you have asbestos fingers or fire-proof gloves. Remember that the ribs are already cooked, so you are just looking to brown them and meld the rub to the meat. Billy uses the MOM method for this on his gas grill. First burner on Medium, middle one Off, third on Medium. Get it? MOM. The one who laid down all those heinous, hard rules when you were a teenager trying to enjoy your last few summers of freedom. Oh, sorry. That was my life.

Note:  This recipe was cribbed and adapted from Susan Branch. It is based on the barbecued tri-tip you find in Santa Barbara County and Central California, often called Santa Maria Style. You can use it to season tri-tips, steak, chicken, salmon, or whathaveyou. If you use it on tri-tip, in the aforementioned Santa Maria Style, you must serve it with pinto or pinquito beans, good sourdough or sheepherder bread, and salsa. That's the law.

And so, summer. It's just beginning, with Fourth of July weekend looming on the horizon, and our favorite house guests, Brendan and Diana, arriving on Saturday, I am feverishly planning menus, marketing, and prepping the breakfasts and dinners to come. Lunch is more or less superfluous, since we play Sh#!head (that card game mentioned in a previous post, available here, oh you know) till the early hours and then, wait for it, sleep in, by God, until all hours. Have a lazy weekend -- hell, have a lazy summer, one with no hard rules, and thank you for reading my blog. Happy birthday USA!