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From Madeleines to Saltines
My first encounter with Marcel Proust was not academic, or even literary. As a teenager, I was obsessed with Monty Python, which I’d come to know through a dedicated, bordering on religious, listening to Dr. Demento every Sunday night on 94.7 KMET (“the Mighty Met”), at the time the most listened-to Sunday evening radio program…
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Loud Joyce
This week marks ten years since I have lived at Stonewall Gardens Assisted Living in Palm Springs. It has, on the whole, been a good experience. There have been ups and downs, but that’s life, isn’t it? If I were writing a Yelp review, I’d give it 4.5 out of 5 stars, holding back that…
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It’s only Tylenol!
I don’t want to mislead you with that title. This post is not about autism. The Buffoon-in-Chief, flanked by his Secretary of Health and Human Services (Bobby Brain Worm) and the head of Medicare/Medicaid (TV’s Doctor Oz), declared that taking Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism. It does not. I am not a doctor or a…
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Directing Traffic
“Hollywood” as an industry goes through cycles. Of course, you have the big studios which each have the facilities to complete an entire television show or film “in house.” But economic conditions sometimes dictate outsourcing to specialty studios that can often provide work at a more cost-effective price point. It was during one of these…
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Speech Therapy
Back during the winter of 2006-07, I was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai in West Hollywood. Following brain surgery which yielded a diagnosis of PML, I spent about a week in the ICU and then another week “recovering” in the posh “celebrity wing” I’d finagled my way into (just how is a story for another time). The…
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Rock of Ages
This is the story of a rock. Not a metaphorical rock. And we could argue whether the rock would more accurately be called a stone, or a boulder. And I just made a note in my journal to write a post in the future about rocks, stones, and boulders, specifically the characteristics of each and…
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It all started with Ranjit’s legs
The first computer program I wrote was called ROLO. That’s not entirely true, because in high school I’d written a program that did nothing but print my name out on the screen ten times to demonstrate to Mr. Rodgers, the Computer Science teacher, my grasp of the concept of “iteration” using a for-next loop. It…
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Mexico
Oh, MexicoIt sounds so sweet with the sun sinking lowThe moon’s so bright like to light up the nightMake everything all right James Taylor, “Mexico,” 1975, from the album Gorilla Watching the coverage of the protests in Los Angeles, one thing stands out. It is Mexico’s green, white, and red flag that has become a…
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Pillow Talk
When I first saw Ray, he was sitting alone at the other end of the bar. Ray is a “peeler;” he compulsively peels the label off his beer bottle between swigs. A jet-black head of hair atop an olive complexion gave him a dark, swarthy, almost brooding look. I could tell he was Latino –…
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Party like it’s 1999
Mark was a mess. But he was rich, so as drinking buddies go, when you’re in your 30s and up to your nipples in credit card debt, he was a good friend to have. Plus he had a really cute Latino boyfriend that I had less than honorable designs on, so I figured “befriending” Mark…
Your mileage may vary.