The Voice of Summer

Los Angeles, California

My father was known in the family for many things. We called him The Shell Answer Man, after an oft-run commercial. What Dad didn't know, he would research. When we pondered a variety of topics at the dinner table, and invariable a question arose, he usually had the explanation handy. When he couldn't pull up the information out of the vast store of information he had in his head, he would get up from the table and pad downstairs in his socks to retrieve the almanac from a guest room lined with bookshelves. Back up he went to read to us and settle the question. Dad was a voracious reader of non-fiction. And, while we had them in the house, he rarely watched television. It would have taken away from reading time. Though it was said he ran track in high school and college, he was definitively not a sports guy, neither playing nor watching.

Dad came home after the war trained in radar and electronics and became an electronics engineer, and later an aerospace engineer. There were a lot of gadgets around our house. He built his own stereo system which was an exposed array of tubes behind a cabinet door and connected to our turntable where we listened to original cast recordings of broadway shows, borrowed from the Burbank Public Library. And in the garage, where he did a lot of building and tinkering, he wired a radio to the lights. When you walked into the dark garage and flipped the switch, both the lights and the radio would spring to life.

When I was quite young and my parents were working on some outdoor project at our home on summer nights, they would set up one of the cots which we used when we went camping in Yosemite Valley each year. I would be put to bed on the cot in the driveway, while my parents puttered around the garage and yard and my older sister played at some game or another. It was summer in Los Angeles, Burbank to be exact, and the nights were comfortable. I would lie on my back, looking at the stars and the moon and hearing the chatter of my parents. Our cat, Penny, would wander amongst us with characteristic curiosity. Those were perfect summer nights and the soundtrack was Vin Scully's voice coming from my dad's radio in the garage.

I think Dad liked baseball. I never heard him listen to football or basketball. I discovered UCLA basketball on TV when I was about twelve years old and had begun playing it at school. Other than that, there were no televised sports in our home except figure skating during the Olympics, as my sister and I both trained in that sport. No other sporting events around, except for Vin Scully and the Dodgers living in our garage.

My first professional baseball game was at Chavez Ravine, but was an Angels game. Who are these Angels -- Los Angeles? California? Los Angeles at Anaheim? Before they had a stadium, they shared Dodgers Stadium. Not sure how that schedule was worked out, but my uncle and his partner bought season tickets on the first base line. Great seats, though on the wrong side! Their seats were field box on the aisle with two seats and two directly behind, within the first five rows off the field. The peanuts were in small paper bags, this being years before the travesty of supersizing. We ate Dodger Dogs. Again, it was a perfectly warm summer night. And that night, Bo Belinsky, pitching for the Angels, pitched a no-hitter.

Did this make me an Angels fan? Not a chance. I went on to see two more (so far) no-hitters at Dodgers Stadium, both pitched by Dodgers pitchers including Fernando Valenzuela's. By then I was a fan, indoctrinated by my college boyfriend, David, and today even more so. And through those years of college, married life, and after, there was always, always the voice of Vin Scully in my life.

With his passing this week, I have listened to local radio coverage and texted with some of my friends. And this is the thing. Los Angeles is a city of transplants. The influx of Gen X and Milleninals who swarmed in to work in the goo of the film and media industry greatly changed our community and I accept that. But native Angelenos share the unique and special memories of having grown up here and thus remembering So Cal the way it was then. I know this is not unique to Los Angeles. But Angeleno nostalgia combines the visuals of freeway cloverleafs that actually moved traffic, with beaches still dotted with bungalows on the sand, and the music of The Beach Boys and that voice of summer, Vin Scully. It was a magical time and place to grow up and if you weren't lucky enough to have spent your youth here, you simply can't appreciate what it once was. Now it is just a city. Then it was a uniquely magical place.

As I have written before, I spent two of the summers of my adolescence in Waikiki and the Waikiki of that era had its own magic. But in spite of my family's history in the Islands, I was a summer import and couldn't appropriate the experiences of having grown up there. And that is what those of us who grew up in LA always feel. If you weren't here then, you'll never truly be an Angeleno.

The passing of Vin Scully reminds those of us who remember his voice from our childhoods, of the bliss of growing up here. Memories flood me -- at thirteen, daringly and quietly skinny dipping with my best friend after attending a party and coming home to her house where her parents were sleeping. Hundreds of drives through the canyons to the beach. Riding with boys in convertibles. The Rolling Stones on the radio on a warm summer night between movies at the drive-in. And Vin Scully's voice everywhere, all summer long.

I have spent time lamenting the ills of my upbringing, but through it all, there was always the golden memory of the spell of those summers. And along with the boys remembered from those summers, there was also, always, the boys in blue. The Dodgers will stay with us. But Vin Scully is gone. And we true Angelenos are missing him for all that he was and all that he meant to us. And feeling this final loss of that Los Angeles that once was.

Timba Girl

Los Angeles, California

Joel learned to dance cumbia when he was young. The oldest son and nephew in a large family, he was drafted into the party by his mother and aunts, and learned to dance and lead at a young age. He once told me a story about being with his younger cousins, playing in the street, when his mother called him back up to the adults' party to dance. Too many aunts.

He tells me that when he was older and out at nights, DJs in Mexico City would bring huge amplifiers out into the downtown streets and that was where the dancing happened. He learned to dance disco. And then, one night, someone came to the event and demonstrated salsa. And the DJ played salsa music. And the rest is history.

Joel's father worked in the US. And Joel, the middle of five children, was the only one who was born in the US, at Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles. But at the age of five they returned to Mexico City where all of their family lived. At twenty-one, Joel boarded a bus to the US, with his papers showing his US citizenship. He spoke only two words of English: Coffee and doughnuts. By the time I met him, about twenty-five years later, he was a stellar salsa dancer.

My friend, Todd, once remarked that he thought salsa dance was an opportunity for ugly men to dance with beautiful women. Much later, when I told Joel about this, he said: He's right. Joel is by no means an ugly man. He has the most soulful dark brown eyes. And he is a really, really good dancer. But he didn't have me at hello. We hung out together in a large group at the club, The Borderline, where many years later a shooting and many deaths would occur. But before that tragedy, Joel danced around the floor with multiple partners, as did I. But once, when neither of us were dancing, and we were standing in the same vicinity, the DJ played a timba, and I excitedly turned to him and exclaimed: I have to dance to this! He took me out on the dance floor, and I rather sheepishly said that I didn't usually make demands like that. It's good to know what you want, was his reply.

Timba. A music from Cuba that has a distinctive sound and rhythm. Joel can always identify the song styles the DJs play. He will tell me It's rumba. It's bachata, cumbia... salsa. I recognize timba. Perhaps the origins of this is when I learned to dance rueda which is salsa danced in a pattern and called, like square dancing. I loved dancing rueda. It was danced similarly to salsa, but Cuban style is rather pushed out instead of in. I know that won't make any sense to anyone who doesn't do latin dancing, so let me just say that there is a nuance that differs from salsa dancing.

Depending on the DJs when we go to dance, we hear salsa, rumba, bachata, cumbia, occasionally a cha cha with a small dose of timba in the mix. Again, depending on the DJ, we may sit out some songs, the songs we don't like. And then comes a timba. I have to dance to this.

I don't know a lot about Cuba, but I know that timba is joyful, energetic and infinitely danceable. Simply put, I am a timba girl. It is as simple as that. I love timba. Here is a late summer gift. Be happy and joyful. But most importantly. Just dance...  Click here: Timbamania