(LOST) BOYS N the 'HOOD

40 years ago, Hollywood came to Santa Cruz

Forty years ago, this month, when Hollywood came to town to shoot a teenage vampire movie, nobody had any idea that The Lost Boys would become a cult phenomenon.

 

Sure, we locals loved it. The production crew was here for a couple of weeks, pouring Hollywood revenue into our hotels and restaurants, and employing hundreds of locals as extras. We loved seeing landmarks like Pogonip, the Boardwalk, and the train trestle over the river mouth up on the big screen.

 

What nobody could have predicted, was (fittingly enough, for a vampire movie) the extensive afterlife the movie would have beyond its original theatrical release — from midnight shows, revivals, and the advent of streaming, with its 24/7 access, all the way to Broadway, where an original stage musical adaptation just won four Tony Awards.

 

Little did we know, back in June 1986, when the movie was shot, what a cultural touchpoint it would become, not only in the annals of both vampire and teen angst movie genres, but as a snapshot of a very particular sort of hip 80s vibe. In which respect, director Joel Schumacher, cinematographer Michael Chapman, and production designer Bo Welch discovered that Santa Cruz was so ready for her close-up.

 

In the story, a recently divorced mom and her two teenage sons move from urban Phoenix to a sleepy California beach town to start a new life. Restless, 17-year-old Michael falls for a girl who runs with a seductive, yet sinister crowd of (literally) drop-dead cool kids who haunt the beachfront Boardwalk at night — and who turn out to be vampires. 14-year-old Sam starts hanging out at the local comic book store, where the owners' two tween sons try to convince him that vampires are running amok in the town, and enlist his aid in stamping out the bloodsucking menace.

 

Although the town is called Santa Carla in the movie, it taps into our early-'70s reputation as the "Murder Capital of the World," and the program of plastering the faces of missing children on milk cartons, to create a sense of real danger beneath the movie's teen comedy overtones. The plot turns on the scheming of glamorous alpha vampire, David, to induct Michael into their biker gang. The tagline — "Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire." — references Peter Pan, from which the movie gets its title. 

 

And if David is the Peter Pan figure in the movie, Santa Cruz is the Neverland.

 

From the first montage of Mom and the boys driving into town, with "People Are Strange," on the soundtrack, the fabled weirdness of our little burgh is on full display — drummers, dancers, street musicians, at least one snake-handler, surfers, punks, Goths, spikey Mohawks, and a panorama of jeans, leather, wetsuits, granny dresses, combat boots, and other items of trashy gypsy hipster chic. For a pivotal scene during a nighttime rock concert at the bandstand on the beach, the hundreds of locals hired as extras didn't even have to go through wardrobe and makeup — they already looked perfect!

 

Night scenes on the Boardwalk are shot around rippling tongues of flame, as if  bonfires were lit just out of camera range. Life in Santa Carla is one long, non-stop party, framed in torchlight and neon, and powered by jangly calliope music and scorching rock 'n' roll.

 

One particular thing the filmmakers loved about shooting in Santa Cruz was they didn't have to build a comic bookshop from scratch. Enter Atlantis Fantasyworld, operated by co-owners Joe Ferrara and my Art Boy, James Aschbacher. Their original, pre-quake building on Lower Pacific was cavernous; it had been a grocery store in the 1920s, with solid wood plank floors and a two-story high ceiling. When the crew folded back the giant accordion doors out front, they could roll the klieg lights right inside. The huge, freestanding shelving units in the middle of the room could be rolled aside to accommodate the lights, camera, and action of dozens of crew members loitering around the periphery on any given shot. 

 

The only problem was that Atlantis was not actually located on the Boardwalk, as the store in the movie is supposed to be. The solution was to build a replica section of the Boardwalk on the sidewalk in front of Atlantis, a plywood tunnel painted faded Boardwalk yellow, and complete with green benches, and the uber-eerie Laughing Sal automaton chortling right outside the door. When Schumacher decided there should be some graffiti on the wall outside the shop, he wielded the spray can himself. On the first day of shooting in the shop, production designer Welch marveled, "This is a monumental set to put up. You wouldn't even do this in TV!"

For three consecutive weekends, the faux Boardwalk facade was erected out on the sidewalk while the crew shot interiors inside the store. James and Joe auditioned to play the shop proprietors, but they didn't get the parts; Schumacher wanted a burnt-out hippie couple who slumped in front of the TV all day, instead of, you know, actually running the shop. But the two of them do appear in the movie for about six seconds, playing pinball in the background as Sam walks into the store. And the three of us got to hang out on set all three weekends, to discourage people from standing or walking on, or rolling equipment over the merchandise — and also ring up sales to crew members, who spend most of their time on movie sets waiting around to set up the next shot.

 

Forty years on, watching the movie again, I was surprised at  how short it is (89 minutes), how remarkably uncomplicated by any multiple plot threads, and what a conventional horror-movie finale it has — especially if you buy into the subtext of youth yearning to make community with their found tribe. Still, it captures as  evocative moment when Santa Cruz was (or was pereceived as) a fun and funky little beach town Neverland, with no delusions of metropolitan glamour. Those were the days, all right.

 

 

 

Above, upper right: Lost Boys call sheet

 

Above, left: Joe and James in Atlantis, with faux Boardwalk set visible outside the front door

 

Above: James and Joe at work, you know, running the shop, between takes 

 Right: 2 random onlookers fooling around on the set

PUZZLE ME THIS

 

In the third week of April, 2018, James and I were getting ready for a trip back to the Chicago suburb of his boyhood for his mother's memorial. Far-flung family members were coming in from Sweden, the Virgin Islands, Wisconsin and California, for what was going to be an epic family reunion. We'd been saving the New York Times crossword puzzles out of the Sentinel for about a week, in preparation for the flight; James was eager to see everyone, but he hated being confined in the plane for 4 hours and needed something to do.

 

On the morning before the day we were supposed to leave, James wound up in the ICU at Stanford. Two days later, I had to let him go, and my world turned upside down. Although I have little memory of the details now, I somehow managed to send email dispatches back to the assembled Aschbachers every night. Three days later, the event that brought them all together became a memorial not only for my mother-in-law, but for James as well.

 

Among the many household chores that began to accrue for me in the days and weeks and months and years after I lost him were those crossword puzzles we used to do together over breakfast and lunch every day. My heart wasn't in it for a long time, but because I was trying to keep my life (ie: my routines) as normal as possible, I kept methodically separating out those puzzles to save for later. (Not every day, but Thursdays, because there's always something tricky in the theme or the structure; Fridays, because they have the answers to Thursday; and Sundays, because it's always a big, intricate feast of a puzzle!)

 

It wasn't nearly as much fun to do the puzzles alone; there was no one to impress when I suddenly had an aha! moment, charged eagerly downstairs, and filled in the last couple of squares that solved some obscure clue. Still, I managed to finish one occasionally, over a period of days, not hours. But I could never work enough of them to make much of a dent in the ones I kept obsessively saving, which began to stack up and up, expanding exponentially like the Blob. When one stack got too tall and tottery, I skimmed a few off the top and started another stack somewhere else.

 

Well, you know where this is going. Six years later, I have four stacks of puzzles — mostly pristine, but some partially filled in — taking up real estate in my house, three squirreled away between James' art table and his former office, plus the most recent ones I keep on the dining table. (Where I still complete one, once in awhile.) But with family visiting from overseas next week, I had to face the awful truth — it was time for a purge. 

 

28th Anniversary present from James!

It's not like I'm a hoarder. You don't need GPS, a guide dog, or a machete to navigate around my house. All the stuff acquired in our 40 years together is well organized and tidy, the Virgo in me believing that if everything can be stashed away in some appropriate place (preferably out of sight), then I won't have to deal with it for awhile — if ever. Everything but those stacks of puzzles, which have been migrating from one inappropriate surface to another, defying my attempts to corral them.

 

Well-meaning friends have offered to dump them in the recycle bin for me — problem solved! — yet I find myself strangely unwilling to agree. Over these past few years, I've sent my Art Boy's clothes to Good Will, donated his art books to the Tannery library, and his art supplies to the schools; I rehomed his collection of monster and sci-fi toys to a toy dealer, cleaned out his video closet, and had 4 of his 5 VCRs hauled off to Grey Bears.

 

So why is it so hard to give up the puzzles?

 

On one hand, it ought to be a too-painful reminder of losing him in media res, the last little project he was working on before he was struck down, all those empty little squares unfilled. But maybe that's part of the reason I still cling to them. That first little pile of saved puzzles was like his stake in the future — making the plane ride enjoyable, then the fun family reunion, and whatever adventures would come after. Any time I saw them sitting there where he left them, I felt momentarily transported back to that fateful day. As if the life we might have had, but for one split second of fate, had we packed up those puzzles, caught our flight, and gone off into our future, was still right there, within reach, as if that little pile of puzzles was a portal between the optimistic past, that still felt so immediate, and the unexpected and unpredictable future now unwinding before me.

 

Realistically, I know I'll never be able to access that portal — unless my life turns out to be a Twilight Zone episode, or a Neil Gaiman story. But it's also come to symbolize a turning point in my own identity, a dividing line between my past and present self. Past me, marching fearlessly out into the world with my Sweetie, vs. Present me, physically compromised, if still relatively functional, but emotionally rudderless on my own. Emotionally, I seem to need to keep those puzzles as the last little tangible link to our partnership, in crossword puzzles and everything else, eagerly filling in all of life's little squares together.

BIO SPHERE

Graduation Day, 1974

In celebration of the (ack!) 50th anniversary of my graduation from UCSC, here's what I cobbled together for the online Alumni Reunion Profile pages.

 

As a junior transfer from Southern California, I graduated in 1974 from Porter (then called College V) with a BA in Aesthetic Studies. This coveted document got me a job selling popcorn at the UA Riverfront Cinemas on Front Street, followed by a stint in the textbook room at Bookshop Santa Cruz. 

 

As a lark, I answered an ad in a new 12-page throwaway publication called Good Times for a second string movie reviewer, which I thought would be a fun thing to do until I got a real job. This experiment in gap employment lasted 45 years.

 

I went through two owners, three publishers, at least 17 editors  (I lost count), five changes of venue for our physical offices, and an earthquake. Not to mention some two thousand movies, at the very least, and probably a couple hundred more. In 2017, my reviews started appearing on Rotten Tomatoes. I would still be at it if COVID-19 hadn't eaten my job in 2020. The theaters closed, and even though they've now reopened, people no longer consume movies in the same way; the massive amount of available "content" is too much for a weekly paper to keep up with.

 

In the meantime, I've had three novels published since 2001, with a fourth on the way. It was also my ridiculous good fortune to be married to artist James Aschbacher for 40 years, whose vibrant and playful murals (three of which we painted together) decorate public spaces and elementary schools all over Santa Cruz County.

 

 

My principal workplace for 45 years! 

 

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Although the Aesthetic Studies degree would soon be discontinued in favor of an actual discipline, what it meant to me in practical terms was I got to make up my own DIY major. Having completed all my science requirements at the community college level, I spent my two years at UCSC taking lit classes from Paul Skenazy and John Jordan, art classes from Doug McLellan, and Art History classes from the inimitable Jasper Rose.

 

Rose was so entertaining, my housemate (who wasn't even a student) used to come with me to sit in on his class. He would come swanning into the room trailing his slightly tattered black and scarlet Oxford robes, launch himself across the lectern, and greet us with an expansive, "Hello, duckies!" (My girlfriend and I call each other "Ducky" to this day!)

 

 And although I never studied to be a movie critic (it was strictly on-the-job training), I did take one terrific film course from Tim Hunter on Alfred Hitchcock. In those days of Pass-Fail grading, we could do pretty much whatever we wanted for a final, so I drew a storyboard for an imaginary murder sequence in an imaginary Hitchcock movie. "This is hot!" Hunter scrawled in the margin. Translation: Pass.

 

My favorite UCSC memory? A bunch of us were loitering in the hallway waiting for our lit professor to come open the classroom when Jasper Rose came gliding by and asked what we were up to. Someone said we were waiting for our Victorian Fiction class. To which Rose replied, "Oh, there is nothing more fascinating than Victorian Fiction! Unless, of course, it's Victorian fact!"

 

HE THOUGHT HE COULD

I was clearing out James' toy cabinet when, just like a box of Crackerjacks, I found a surprise inside. Tucked away behind the monster models, robots and ray guns was this unassuming little red story book from his childhood: The Little Engine That Could. 

 It wasn't something he picked up the flea market. Right there inside the front cover, somebody had written in, "Jimmy 1953." He'd had it since he was two years old. 

 I don't know if he brought it with him the first time he drove out west to California from Illinois, or whether he snagged it from his mom's things in storage when the family moved her into assisted living. I never really noticed it before, but what surprised me was that of all the storybooks he must have had as a child (and since he was the fourth of five siblings, the house must have been full of them), this was the one he decided to keep. It's about a train; there are no cute or funny animals, no spunky children, no magic, no whimsical trips into outer space. The illustrations aren't especially beguiling. Why this book? 

So I read it. And now I think I get it. 

To refresh, a train carrying toys and "wholesome food" to children waiting on the other side of a mountain suddenly breaks down. A snooty Shiny Passenger Engine and an arrogant Big Strong Freight Engine refuse to help, and a Kind Engine is too old and rusty. Then along comes a Little Blue Engine that has never been over the mountain and is only used for switching in the yard. But she hitches herself to the train and pulls it up the mountain, chugging along to the refrain, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can . . . ." 

 Consciously or not, I can see how my Art Boy might identify with that plucky Little Blue Engine. Consider the parallels! 

As an incoming college freshman, he declined his counselor's advice to start with introductory classes and signed up for advanced courses instead. Seemingly on a whim, he shocked his friends and family (who had lived in the same Chicago suburb for generations) by moving to California when his girlfriend at the time got accepted to UCSC. For a year, he made a living scouring the flea market for paperbacks to sell to his mail-order client list of collectors. Until he met singer, musician, and comics fan Joe Ferrara; together (with zero retail experience between the two of them), they decided to open a comic book store. 

A year after that, I met him, and a year after that, we were married. Four years later, when the landlord of our (two-bedroom, one bath, plus office and breakfast nook) rental house in Live Oak threatened to raise the rent from $400 a month to a whopping $500, James decided we should buy a house. He sold comic books. I wrote movie reviews. Interest rates were almost 20%. You'd think any self-respecting loan officer would laugh us right out of their cubicle. And yet, not only did we persist, we put on an addition, refinanced, and paid off the mortgage in six years.

 At which time, he decided to sell his half of the (now thriving) comic book business to Joe and become an artist. He wa 40 years old. He had no art training whatsoever. He was always the first to admit he didn't know how to draw; he had never even doodled in the margins. 

 He just thought he could. 

(Years later, people often asked me if I freaked out when he told me he was quitting his business to make art. I could honestly say, nope. It never even occurred to me to doubt him, given his track record for bucking the odds and making it work.) 

As an artist, he floundered around for awhile until he came up with the technique of layering acrylic paint over oil-based spray paint. Had he ever taken an art class, he would have been instructed that you can't mix oils with acrylics, but since he didn't know the rules, he was free to break them as he invented a style that was so distinctly his own. 

Ten years into his art career, he was commissioned to create his first public mural in Plaza Lane, in downtown Santa Cruz. He tried to hire a professional muralist to paint his design, but when he found out the muralist would charge as much as James himself was making on the project, he figured out a way to transfer the design himself, and employed a much cheaper crew — me — to help him paint it. A technique he perfected over the next ten years, painting murals at schools and public buildings all over the county. 

It's not that he had so much arrogant hubris that he couldn't even imagine failing. Rather, he had no fear of the possibility of failure. If one plan didn't work out, he figured he could always do something else; he had the confidence to adapt. He never paid any attention to people who told him he couldn't or shouldn't do something, so it never occurred to him not to try. 

He thought he could. And he did.

STONED SOUL PIZZA

Hold the pepperoni!

Pizza may be no more than snack food (or, worse, junk food) to you. But to the six extraordinary craftpersons featured in the Netflix series Chef's Table: Pizza, making pizza has become a life-altering ritual at the intersection of Life, Art and Identity.

The long-running Master Chef series profiles renowned chefs from around the world in tasty one-hour docu-bites. In its current (seventh) season, the focus is on maestros of the pizza arts, not only in Italy, but from such unexpected regions as Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Kyoto, Japan. The notion of what pizza is, can, or should be (along with an amazing diversity of ingredients, from flower petals to Korean kimchee), varies wildly from one pair of flour-encrusted hands to the next. But all agree that pizza is the ultimate soul food, expressing not only the soul of the pizza chefs themselves, but of the people and community that inspire them. 

Bonci: Revolution on a plate

That may seem like a lot of symbolism to heap on top of a humble pie, but every pizza tells a story — of drama, displacement, family, culture — and the stories are fascinating.

Native New Yorker Chris Bianco left the city trying to find his place in the world. From his first boyhood job hauling flour sacks up out of the basement in a pizza joint in the Bronx, he landed in Phoenix, selling home-made mozzarella out of his apartment to Italian restaurants and finally graduating to pizza chef. At his own restaurant, he concocts a signature pizza, the Rosa, made with hardy wheat grown in the sandy soil outside Phoenix, red onions sliced as thin and curly as potato chips, pungent rosemary, and crushed pistachios, that "tastes like the desert."

Hailed as "The Michelangelo of pizza," Gabriele Bonci became a celebrity TV chef in Rome (with his own irritatingly bouncy theme song), until he realized the TV persona was devouring him. Painstakingly weaning himself off of fame, like any other addiction, he shed a great deal of physical weight while also streamlining his purpose in the pizza kitchen, promoting the ethics of sustainable agriculture and thoughtful food consumption. He buys all natural ingredients from small farmers, raises his own sheep for cheese, and only buys the meat of animals that have "lived well."  He says, "I decided that pizza would be my weapon. On top, I could put a revolution."

Kim: Trusting herself

On her first day of school in Minneapolis, Ann Kim, daughter of Korean immigrant parents, saw that the bento box lunch so lovingly packed by her grandmother did not look or smell like the other kids' lunches; embarrassed, she threw it away, and spent years being ashamed of her heritage. Vigorously assimilated, she took a detour into theater to submerge her identity, but grew disillusioned with the limited roles offered to Asian women. 

 At a bleak crossroads in life, she thought, "Either you can live in the unhappiness, or you can change it. You just have to trust yourself." Impressed with the melting pot vibe in New York City, from her student days at Columbia (summed up in her first slice of sidewalk pizza), and realizing the one constant joy in her life had always been cooking with her mother and grandmother, she decided on a new direction. "I  said, fuck it," she laughs, "I'm going to put kimchee on a pizza!"

Franco Pepe and his brothers grew up in their father's pizzaria in Naples. All three sons had different career paths lined up until their father's death brought them all back to run the family business. Conflict arose when Franco left to open his own shop featuring his own innovative ideas. His Margharita Spagliata (Margharita Mistake), literally turns the classic pizza upside down, with the layer of mozzarella cheese on the bottom, and infusions of crushed (not cooked) fresh tomatoes and basil striped across the top.

Yoshihiro Imai came from a family of dentists in Kyoto, Japan, but a chance encounter with a library book on breadmaking prompted a passion for dough and pointed him onto a new path. He was in training to become a master chef in Europe until news that his girlfriend was pregnant brought him home. Miserable working in a fast-food cafeteria to support his new family, he opened his own pizza restaurant, foraging for wild mushrooms at dawn and fishing for a lowly species of river trout to invoke the flavor and serenity of his beloved forest. "The path itself," he says, with Zen-like aplomb, "is the meaning and the goal."

Pepe: Vats of bubbling alchemy

Trained as a painter, Sarah Minnick discovered the joy of cooking when the work-study program at art school landed her in the campus kitchen. Deciding food was more fun, and inspired by the DIY, pop-up restaurant scene in her native Portland, Oregon, she turns her artist's eye to pizza with a pallette of "weird weeds," wild edibles, colorful flower petals snipped from her garden, and other impressive  "veggie-centric" concoctions.

All of them share a common passion for locally sourced ingredients, and each has forged close relationships with the small farmers, ranchers, foragers, herbalists and millers who provide them. All of them craft their own dough from scratch, by hand, growing the living dough from regional, stone-ground wheat every morning for the day's pies. Their immersive relationship to the dough is irresistible, gleefully plunging in elbow-deep to massage, roll, tweak and shape their humble ingredients into great vats of breathing, bubbling, alchemy.

Stepping up my pizza game

Of course, pizza is the stuff of ritual in my house too, a way for me to commune with my Art Boy over the pizza board he built and painted so lovingly for our Monday night pizzas. He estimated he'd made a thousand pizzas on the broken, blackened (and beloved) pizza screen I still use. Ridiculously inventive and intuitive with his own toppings (leftover Thanksgiving mashed potatoes and stuffing; razor-thin lemon slices), he never met an ingredient he couldn't put on a pizza, which is why he would have loved the Chef's Table series. Whenever I get too melancholy wishing he was still here to watch it with me (reason #4972 on my list of Why I Wish James Was Still Here), I remind myself to Be Like James and get inspired instead.

Encouraged by my Spirit Guide, I'm stepping up my own pizza game. Yes, I'm still buying one-pound dough balls from Trader Joe's, but I'm trying to approach it less like a fearful supplicant, afraid of messing up, and more like a confident explorer, establishing a partnership with the dough, not a contest.

My efforts may not yet be vat-worthy, but the journey of a thousand pizzas begins with a single slice.

PS: Do NOT watch this show hungry!

ALIENS ATE MY BODY

Wall-E: Upweirdly mobile

 Late in life, when the great Katharine Hepburn was   asked if she ever watched her old movies, she said no —explaining something along the lines of, "There is very little pleasure in watching oneself rot."

I get it.

At least Hepburn had decades-worth of glamour images through which to chart her oh-so-subtle decline — photographed by George Cukor, gowned by Edith Head. 

But with a persistent autoimmune disease like MS, you don't get to review the progress of your life as a gracefully unspooling montage. It's more like time-lapse photography where everything changes in seconds.

My body is becoming an alien life form, in an ongoing, unpredictable state of metamorphosis. Rising from a sitting position requires 15 minutes of standing in place to see if all pertinent body parts are on the same page before I dare a step. My shoulders and upper arms have grown taut and sinewy from clutching my roallator for dear life as I drag my clumsy body around behind me like a tail.

I don't do fast. I have only two ambulatory speeds: shuffle and lurch. Except when one or the other (or both) of my legs launches into an unprovoked series of random spasms, when I look like a refugee from the Ministry of Silly Walks. 

The Maze: Night and Frog

 In one of my Art Boy's favorite (justifiably) unsung '50s monster movies, The Maze, a young woman arrives at a stately country manor house whose reclusive lord is never seen. But late every night, from her sumptuous chamber (mysteriously locked from the outside), she hears a lubricious schlep-schlep-schlepping down the corridor outside her door. Turns out the lord of the manor is an overgrown amphibian (as in giant frog, not Jason Momoa in sexy scales) whose handlers drag him through the halls in a huge sheet and outside to rehydrate in a secret pool hidden within a maze on the grounds. I think of that movie every time I hear the sound of my slippered feet scraping along in the wake of my rollator.

Remember Wall-E, where technology has rendered future humans so sedentary they can only get around on individual little jet pods? That’s what I need!

I can still pass for normal from the waist up, as long as I'm sitting down. But I envision the day the only part of me still mobile will be my head, hooked up to banks of various communication devices like The Brain That Wouldn't Die, spitting out caustic remarks.

Meanwhile, navigating the world of visiting home health care, I find myself teetering at the edge of a new reality where "toilet" is not only a verb, but a team sport. After spending 40 years as somebody's sweetie, it's weird to think of a future as somebody's client.

How much me is too much?

Back when I was still relatively ambulatory, I figured the only way to keep things running around here was to get myself cloned. Clearly, I need a staff — Financial Advisor Me for bills and business; Chef Me for meal prep (and Sous Chef Me for back-up and clean-up); Secretary Me for emails and correspondence; Medical Me for doctor's appointments and health issues; Money Pit Me to deal with homeowner issues like peeling paint, disintegrating deck furniture, busted window shades, antique plumbing — well I could go on and on. 

 And while all these clones were running around, maybe — just maybe — Actual Me could carve a couple of hours out of the day to write.

The problem with the Clone Theory is that I've become such a crab, I don't want any more than one of me around.

If only I'd thought to have James cloned while he was still here. My body might be rotting just as fast, but at least he'd find a way to make me laugh about it!

PRIVATE RITUALS

 "Come out here."

It was never a command, only an invitation, delivered in a subtle tone of voice that seemed to promise something wonderful.

On the afternoons when James took his daily walk to the harbor and back alone (in earlier years, because I was too lazy or preoccupied to go with him; more recently because I only had the stamina to go every other day), he would come home, kick off his walking shoes, grab his first glass of bubbly, and head out to the deck.

The kitties came scampering around, delighted to have a human out on their turf, putting on their usual show — racketing about, stretching out like little fur rugs in the sun, launching stealth aerial attacks on each other.

It was the hour that most people were transitioning into dinner mode, so it was usually pretty quiet in the neighborhood. No lawn mowers or gunning engines. Maybe some distant laughter a block or two away, maybe a neighbor's radio, but mostly birds and leaves rustling in the breeze. James always looked forward to this evening ritual, a chance to just sit down and savor it all.

On mild summer nights, after dinner, when I'd finished washing the dishes and he had dried enough to make room in the drainer, he would disappear outside again with his, er, next glass of bubbly (who's counting?) while I was still puttering around in the kitchen. "Come out here," he would urge me from the deck. "Come see the stars."

 

He knew I had a thing about the stars. I was always threatening to buy an astronomy book so I could identify all the constellations, although, like so many other things, I never quite got around to it. I knew Orion, however, which was always rising over the neighbor's roof at about this time, mainly because the three-star pattern of Orion's Belt is imprinted in freckles on my forearm. But whether or not we knew all their names, any summer night when the stars were visible before the fog rolled in was cause for celebration!

Of course, I always had some lame excuse. Okay, but just let me finish this one sentence, answer this one email, make this one note for tomorrow.

Okay, but just let me finish up in here, wipe down the counter, put on a sweater. What did I do with my shoes?

It was always something. Something I felt I had to do right this minute, one last chore before I'd permit myself to get out there and enjoy some down time. With you. Listen to the birds, laugh at the kitties. Gaze at those beautiful stars cocooned in black night. Cuddle up to my sweetie.

We thought we had an infinity of time, back in those days. Next time you ask, I thought, I'll be ready.

In retrospect, I'd say that 75% of the time, I finally managed to get out there with you. To take a break and just enjoy the peace and contentment, our reward for this life we somehow managed to cobble together from scratch. Against all odds.

But that means I squandered 25% of the time I could have spent with you. I regret every minute that I put you off with some feeble excuse. It appalls me that all those times when I still had the chance, I thought I had something more important to do.

Ask me again.

LOVE IS IN THE AIR

Love is in the Air

This year I'm celebrating Valentine's Day by sharing some of my happiest memories of my Sweetie, James Aschbacher. There are so many more to choose from over 40 years, but (right now) these are my Top Ten:
 

MARCH OR DIE  It wasn't even a date. I had only recently met James at the comic book store, and I asked if he wanted to come to a movie I had to review. It was March Or Die, a French Foreign Legion movie (a throwback genre if ever there was one, in the 1970s) starring Gene Hackman as an American soldier-of-fortune off fooling around in the desert. It was largely preposterous, but I was "at work," so we were slogging through. At one point, as the camera panned across the vast, golden desert landscape, three figures in shimmering electric-blue satin, sheiks or Bedouins, or something, appeared on the distant crest of a dune. James and I leaned our heads together and whispered, in unison, "Look, it's the Andrews Sisters!"

Okay, maybe not screamingly funny, but the fact that we made the exact same joke in the exact same instant suddenly felt — momentous.

MY FORMER/FUTURE GIRLFRIEND We were at a comics convention, one of the many we attended in the spring and summer before we got married. We would haul dozens of boxes of comics from Atlantis Fantasyworld to the con in James' gutted Econoline van (two front seats, and absolutely nothing in the back) to sell at our table in the Dealers' Room. During a slow period one day, probably when some popular interview or panel was going on in some other room, James covertly drew my attention to a pretty young woman with long hair strolling past the tables. What he meant to say (I think), was "She looks like my former girlfriend." What came out of his mouth, however, was, "She looks like my future girlfriend." Did I mention we weren't married yet? I suppose there were many snarky, irate, and/or cutting remarks I might have made in response, but I was too busy laughing.

MY WIFE We were prowling through an antique store one day during our 4-day honeymoon in Carmel at the Casa Munras Hotel. We were murmuring together about something, and the friendly clerk over at the desk asked if she could help us with anything. "No thanks," said James, "I was just talking to my wife." My wife. We looked at each other and tried not to giggle.

Into the Night

REDDING We had been at a weekend comic convention in Portland, Oregon. The event closed at 5pm Sunday evening, and since we were packed up by 6, we decided to head out immediately to begin the long drive home. That first night, we stopped in Eugene. The next day we got as far south as Redding before the ferocious midsummer heat (the van didn't have AC) forced us to stop at a motel. Our room was upstairs, with an exterior staircase right outside that led down to the parking lot, with a Denny's or HoJo's, or something, on the other side of the lot.

Our plan was to cool off in the blissfully air-conditioned room, then go down and eat so we could get an early start in the morning. But first, there was that bottle of champagne that we'd lugged upstairs in our cooler. (Don't leave home without it, that was James' motto.) We were watching an old Star Trek rerun on TV and I remember a long discussion about comic artist Steve Leialoha's slender, long-fingered hands; he'd been sitting adjacent to us at the con, sketching for the fans. Between the heat and the bubbly, we found we no longer had the enthusiasm, much less the ability, to navigate those stairs, so we went to bed instead, hoping it wouldn't be too hot to sleep.

In the middle of the night we woke up freezing! The sun was down, the earth had cooled, and our AC unit was still roaring away. James got up to adjust it, but none of the controls worked; either it was busted, or the knobs were merely decorative and the machine was permanently set to 'Arctic.' James even tried beating on it with his shoe. We had to bundle up in the one pair of pajamas we had between us: I wore the shirt, he put on the pants; we felt like Rock Hudson and Doris Day. We ransacked the closet for the one extra blanket we could find and piled all the rest of our summer travel clothes on top of that. Next morning we could not get out of there fast enough!

FAVORITE MOMENT A friend is a music producer with a recording studio in his garage. One night, over dinner, he mentioned that his favorite moment of the morning was when he took his second cup of tea into the studio to go to work. Without missing a beat, James said, "My favorite time of the morning is when my wife comes out of the shower naked and gives me a big kiss."

FUR FOR BREAKFAST  One night in bed, we were discussing upcoming travel plans. (Well, I was; James, a notorious homebody, was expressing dismay.) At one point I said, "You know, some people actually like to travel." To which he retorted, "Well, some people eat fur for breakfast!" There was a beat of stunned silence as our brains digested his words, then we both exploded like Vesuvius — breathless, shrieking, helpless. We laughed until we cried.
 
SO(HO) FUN For awhile, James belonged to a loose collective of local artists calling themselves SoHo Beach who once put together a weekend pop-up art gallery in a Watsonville parking garage. He was off somewhere schmoozing and I was sitting in the booth one day when a beloved local matron of the arts stopped in; she had never seen James' work before, and she couldn't stop smiling and raving about it. Finally she turned to me and said, "Oh, I bet he's so much fun!" "Well, I think so," I agreed. "I married him!"

STARS OVER SWANTON We had lazed poolside all afternoon up Swanton Road with our friends Bruce and Marcia, and Mort and Donna. (Donna and I actually got wet; everybody else kept to the shade, sipping margaritas!) As dusk fell, we all drifted upstairs to the wrap-around patio just outside the kitchen, claimed patio chairs, and gazed out over the green hills and treetops of Swanton to a glimpse of horizon beyond, watching the stars wink to life, one by one, in the vast, darkening sky. No conversation, no one-liners, nobody said anything. Just enjoying a magical moment with people we loved.

THE BUBBLE TEST One day, we set out to buy ourselves the perfect champagne glasses — flutes, of course, narrow enough at the base to keep the bubbles bubbling, and not so wide at the top that the bubbles would dissipate too quickly. But there isn't any way to gauge how bubbles will behave in a glass without taking it on a test drive. And since nothing else bubbles quite like champagne, we brought a well-stoppered bottle along with us to try them out, visiting kitchen stores and housewares departments, pouring little tots of bubbly into prospective glasses to see how they performed. We asked permission first, of course, but not a single sales person objected; they got a lesson in the aerodynamics of sparkling wine, and half an hour of entertainment!
 
LA VIE EN LA MOULIN James and I spent five days alone together at the Moulin, our friends' centuries-old mill house on the Yonne River in the Burgundy region of France. It was an excessively hot June, and we were pretty torporous during the day. But one evening we found an Edith Piaf CD and played it through the open door as we sat out on the back porch overlooking the river. Dark was just beginning to fall around 9 pm, we were sipping champagne (of course!) and I was fooling around with a set of Tarot cards in French we'd found, with Piaf's throaty vibrato carrying splendidly over the water. We noticed an older gentleman had pulled a deck chair out onto his little dock down the river, as the bedazzling stars emerged in the sliver of black night visible between the tree tops. When Piaf concluded her last song, with a rousing flourish, and all was again silent along the river, the man downstream quietly folded up his chair and took himself and his memories back inside.

"Everybody needs his memories," says author Saul Bellow. "They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."

Wishing you many happy and significant memories in this season of love.

(Paintings by James Aschbacher, of course!)

AUTO-IMMUNE

I was glad to leave the driving to him.

My name is Lisa, and I don't drive.

There's no 12-step program for it, but I might as well confess myself an alcoholic or a junkie.

It's especially weird for someone born in Southern California, and raised in outer Los Angeles, Freeway Capitol of the Known World. Remember the movie L.A. Story, with Steve Martin? Off to visit a neighbor, Martin's character jumps in his car at the curb in front of his house, and drives 12 feet to park in front of the house next door.

That's what it was like. Angelino babies are born with a silver set of car keys clutched in their tiny fists.

Except for me. Even in the throbbing heart of America's most turbo-charged car culture, I was resolutely auto-immune.

To be absolutely clear, it's not that I can't drive. I am in possession of a valid driver's license. I've aced every written driving exam I've ever taken, and passed my first (and only) test behind the wheel on the first try. (Okay, I only scored a 73, but it was a pass!)

It's just that, like Bartleby the Scrivener, I prefer not to.

Delhi: With and Without cars (Getty Images)

(Random English Lit Alert: Is Literature still taught in schools? Let alone Melville. Google it, kids.)

Well, that was true for most of the last 40 years, anyway, when Art Boy took over the household driving chores in his Art Boymobile. He was not a car guy. (He killed his very first car, a Camaro he bought from his older brother, because he didn't know he had to put oil in it.) He didn't love driving any more than I did, but it was one of the things he did more competently than me, so I was glad to let him.

I got to ride shotgun, and say "Home, James!"

In recent years, however, I've developed a much more compelling, even insurmountable excuse that has nothing to do with preference. One of the many disadvantages to MS, at least in my case, is the declining ability to lift my right foot. Whenever I'm extra tired and have to use a walker to get around, I drag my right foot like Quasimodo.

When people don't understand the connection between MS and driving ability, I say, "Have you seen me walk?"

My MS buddies in yoga class have the same right-side affliction, but they've been driving consistently all their lives, so they've learned to compensate for it behind the wheel. But after my late-inning diagnosis (I was 62), if I tried to drive the way I used to — with the right foot shifting between gas and brake —it was my foot, not the gears, that got stuck in neutral.

In an emergency, I don't want to be that dodderer who can't get her foot on the appropriate pedal in that crucial nanosecond, and ends up rear-ending someone, or plowing through a bunch of pedestrians on the sidewalk. Talk about a weapon of mass destruction.

So, instead, I've been leeching shamelessly off my friends for rides to the movies, or the market. (I'm surprisingly fine grocery shopping, as long as I have a cart to hold on to.) But now that movie theaters are closed and we're sheltering in place, like, forever, I have to depend on my village to do my shopping for me, and deliver the goods to my porch. I pay for my own stuff, of course, and I usually try to bribe, er, I mean tip my designated drivers/shoppers with home-baked cookies and cinnamon apple crumb cake.

Meanwhile, I try to delude myself that my not driving is good for the environment. We've all seen those photos of places like Delhi, before and after the coronavirus lockdown removed a majority of cars from the road. Not only is the sky suddenly visible at all, it's blue! In my old SoCal stomping grounds, you can see the San Gabriel Mountains rising above the L. A. basin from the beach!

That's my contribution to the fight against climate change, I think smugly: one less vehicle on the road. You're welcome.

But then, reality, that old killjoy, reminds me that somebody is burning fossil fuels to get me my groceries, even if it's not me. Until they start shipping my stuff via transporter beam, I can't pretend that my aberrant car-free lifestyle is in any way a virtue.

In the meantime, just call me the Leech Woman.

BETA BOY

"We could've written this!"

This refrain was often heard in our kitchen (usually over a glass of bubbly) when James and I came home after a movie and started analyzing where it had gone wrong.

Maybe there was a specific turning point in the narrative that shifted the whole story in the wrong direction. Maybe a character did something so inexplicably out-of-character that the whole thing lost its credibility.

But sometimes, as we went over plot points, themes and epiphanies, it seemed like the scriptwriter simply had not made the best use of all the elements that had already been set up and established in the storyline.

If this character had done this or that in the first quarter of the movie, we reasoned, then this exposition in the third quarter would make a lot more sense. Or this action that feels completely arbitrary might have been salvaged if it was done by a different character or from a different motivation. We often found everything needed to make the story work right there in its narrative bones, but it just hadn't been put together correctly.

After we'd figured out where it had gone wrong, and worked out the fix that could have saved it, it was time to clink those glasses. "Hey, we could've written this!"

I miss those critical download sessions, especially now that I'm grappling with my own busy fictional narrative that needs to be shaped into a coherent story. After my 187 years in journalism, I can still pretty much figure out what does or doesn't work in a movie. But I'm all at sea confronted with the unwieldy text of my own next book.

Among so many other metaphorical hats that my Art Boy wore around here, he was also my most trusted beta reader. If he didn't understand a plot point, even after the long-winded explanation in Chapter 21, or he questioned why a character said or did something peculiar, and my only defense was "because the author said so," I knew it was time to go back to the keyboard.

It was also at his urging that I started reading early drafts of my manuscripts out loud to him. Okay, he just didn't want to have to slog through all those pages in a box, himself, but it turned out to be great for me. If a word or sentence or passage felt clumsy in the mouth, or sounded tinny out loud, even to me, then out it went. Or, at least, it had to be finessed.

We were partners in my literary adventures, just like we were partners in everything else. Flying solo into new terrain still feels weird to me, but I just have to start viewing my own work through the lens of James' logical common sense and healthy skepticism.

Think of all those movies we saved, I tell myself.

We can write this!


(Top: A Book Is a Wondrous Thing, by James Aschbacher)

THE IMPOSSIBLE MEME

Okay, we've all seen that meme: William Shakespeare wrote King Lear while under quarantine in London during the Bubonic plague.

The intention of circulating this (probably relatively true-ish) factoid, of course, is to make us all feel like a bunch of whining slackers. Want to feel even worse? Remember that Anne Frank wrote her famous Diary while hiding from the Nazis in a cramped attic in Amsterdam with her family of four and three other people. For two years. 

The fruits of these labors, composed under impossibly stressful conditions, are inarguably masterpieces, Frank's Diary for its honesty, optimism and compassion, and Lear for its brilliant and enduring insights into the human condition.

So what are the rest of us waiting for? Now that we're all under house arrest, we have nothing but time.

But consider too that Lear is one of Shakespeare's darkest plays, in every respect. It's full of howling storms and furious rages, delusion, betrayal, calamity, madness, folly, treachery and despair. Hard not to see at least a psychological parallel between the work itself and the temper of the times in which it was written.

Colette: Holed up like a Parisienne

So, if I wanted to write something gloomy and despondent, this would be the perfect time to do it! Indeed, there would be no excuse not to spend these grey, wet, solitary days hammering away at the keyboard, grappling angst and uncertainty into something (hopefully) brilliant.

But, no. Me, I'm trying to cobble together a lighthearted romantic comedy, full of magic and music, for Young Adult readers.

It's the second book (although not a sequel) stipulated in my contract for Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, which was already too dark and perverse for the general YA readership, according to my Goodreads reviews. This new one is supposed to be fun and upbeat.

Hah.

Blissfully untarnished by reality

Not that it couldn't be done. When the Nazis marched in to occupy France, the celebrated novelist Colette was 67 (the same age I am now), and nearly bedridden. Yet, holed up in her Paris apartment for the duration, she produced Gigi. Harking back to France's golden age of the Belle Epoque, it told the sunny tale of a spirited teenage girl raised to be a courtesan who defies expectations by charming her designated client into marriage.

And I have no doubt that if my Art Boy was still here to shelter in place with me, he would have turned out three or four of his magical paintings by now, and sketches for many more.

His work was always blissfully untarnished by everyday reality; his ideas bubbled up directly out of the teeming wellspring of his own imagination — flying fish, joyous dancing figures, pink bunnies and all. How he would have relished the excuse to stay home and paint all day!

I'm trying to view this temporary (we hope) dystopian sojourn as an opportunity to be relished. That's what James would do! And who knows? If the present coronavirus lockdown stretches on for another eternity, a deep plunge into the imagination might be just the escape I need.



(Above: Act of Creation, James Aschbacher)

THE LEGEND OF MONDAY NIGHT PIZZA

Pizza Boy to the rescue!

Blame it on Good Times.

When I first met James in his comic book store, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had already been writing for Good Times for two years. Six months later when we moved in together, we only had one rule as we made up our freestyle new life: every Monday night, I had to do the (dreaded) Film Guide.

The Film Guide was the section in the paper that listed every movie theater in town, what new movies would be opening at each one that week, and all their showtimes. There was no iMDB in those days, so TV and newsprint ads were all I  had to go on when it came to blurbing new titles.

But the gnarly part was getting those showtimes. Way before there were personal computers (certainly not in our house), let alone FAX machines, I had to call each theater manager on the phone and scribble down (usually in pencil) every single showtime for every single movie in the course of the week — daily schedule, weekend schedule, holiday matinees, midnight movies, the works. Then I typed them on a typewriter (look it up, kids) into my master list, three pages of hard copy I delivered by hand to the GT office first thing Tuesday morning, deadline day.

With me on the phone for hours, Mondays were a little hectic around our house, especially at dinner time. One theater manager in particular never decided what he was going to play on any given week, until he knew what everybody else had booked. Some nights, I wouldn't get off the damn phone before 8 pm — by which time, I was In. No. Mood.

The yeast goes on: why mess with a good thing?

But trust my Sweetie to step into the breach! Even though he had not yet discovered the cooking gene within himself, he knew how to bake a frozen pizza. While I was stewing on the phone, he'd be in the kitchen chopping up real food — green onions, red peppers, black olives, mushrooms — and grating extra cheese.

His next move was to pop a tape into the VCR and record Jeopardy — my favorite way to chill — at 7 pm. As soon as I could finally hang up and finish typing, he would assemble his pizza, stick it in the oven, and pop a cork. (Okay, he usually didn't wait around for me for that part!)

Et Voila! Whenever I was finally ready to sit down and eat, we had hot pizza, cold bubbly, and Jeopardy! Pizza, champagne, and Jeopardy was our Monday night ritual for years — even after theaters started faxing their info to GT and I was liberated from the Film Guide. The tradition continued through the rest of our married life, and continues for me to this day. Why mess with a good thing?

It wasn't until years later that we started making our own pizzas from scratch. (Well, almost, thanks to Trader Joe's pizza dough balls.) I wouldn't have remembered how many years, except that I found the top photo above of our very first home-made pizza! It's dated November, 2003! Notice how shiny and silvery the pizza screen is. It's completely black now, untold thousands of pizzas later — and, yes, I still use it!