And Another...

Writing with Rox WEEKLY—It's just another perfect day...

Beverly Boulevard!

We love it!

Finding a clam!

Greetings from the Hometown! Some photos as promised... More to come. Enjoying the sun, the food, the flowers and trees... not enjoying the traffic, the leaf blowers, the drama!!! Off to to Venice Beach... So far my highlight: Yesterday my cousin and Godmother who is 93 says, over lunch at Canter's Deli, "Happiness is an inside job." Love to you all, Rox 

Santa Monica Pier! 

We love it!

Remember the Randy Newman Song? We love it! We love LA!

Ma

We love it!

Just another perfect day!

Canter's Deli!

CBS where I once watched them film Young and the Restless

My first job...

Write with me? Do you love LA? LA Story?

Writing with Rox WEEKLY—I'M Grateful for YouTube

I don't watch TV. I don't do Facebook. But hot damn, I love YouTube.

I love the funny cat bloopers. I love the interviews with actors and musicians from my childhood, the obscure clips from the Love Boat or Z Channel. And god knows, I love those 80s videos. I love that I can YouTube my childhood summer camp, go back in time to a simpler place, long before personal video cameras were on anyone's radar.  I love that I can join a kirtan any time of the day, practice yoga with Saul David Raye, learn to play the ukulele (or sousaphone for that matter), brush up on my tap dancing, learn Arabic, attempt origami, prepare pompous pastries (or pom-poms if I dare!) make my own drum if I so choose, make my own feature film, be read to by famous poets, sang to by long gone musicians, welcomed into communities (and living rooms) just about anywhere.  Not to mention, if I look hard enough, I know I can find myself doing something rather silly out there in Bhaktiland, but why bother with that? I've been there!

I'd rather travel timelessly, across the planet to gape at wild animals, to ski the alps, to bathe in Kawaiian waterfalls, dance with Fred Astaire, run with wildfire, remember the Santa Anna's, blow with the soft spring breeze in Palm Canyon. I'd much rather go back to that stretch of Oregon I biked with my dad in the early 90s, round the long green bend we did that one summer afternoon. I'd rather bike around the world, in fact. 

Heck, I'd rather fly a plane, chase a train, stop the rain... all possible in the Seusville that YouTube has become.


Of course I can go somewhere really dark with an intro like that. I can talk about how even though we  have such a cool thing—that we can go anywhere, anytime with a simple click—we are lonelier now than ever before. We are isolated in our abundance. 

But no, I won't go there. Not today. 

Because what I really love about YouTube are the helpful tips that folks are putting out there, free of charge, where the shiny human spirit comes blazing through, all the better when it comes blazing through someone's tacky, unkept, dusty, one-bedroom apartment, where cats or wild children or drunken uncles are coming in and out of the frame wily-nily. More and more, this is what I seek out in YouTube: the unedited, raw, human condition that has nothing to do with show business or sparkly anything put on.

In fact, my YT du-go-to usually takes me to someone's dining room or kitchen in a town I've never heard of. Year after year I find myself searching for DIY fixes or projects, my version of cyber thrift shopping or better yet, the matrix free-for-all.  Just yesterday in fact, like every winter when my skin begins to turn a rougher shade of reptile, I began the search for a homemade humidifier, given the ten I have cost a lot to run, don't last long, don't really work, and are generally a pain in the ass. I'm convinced that SOMEONE out there has an easier solution, fully aware that YouTube has perhaps warped my psychology in this way. But can you blame me? No sooner than I type in "DIY humidifiers," pages upon pages load with everything from bomb lookalikes to model airplanes coming at me in multiple languages.

I'm not saying it's all good. Overwhelm sets in rather quickly.

Just about to give up,  I come across a man who talks to me like the two year old I am... "First you take a bowl..." He pulls one of those cheapie ceramic-platstic (cerastic? plastamic?) Target type bowls out of his dark wooded cupboard, demonstrating, in case we don't know how to work our own cupboards. "Next, you take the bowl and set it on the counter." He does. Meanwhile, all we see of this man is his Buddha belly and his arm with the occasional profile working diligently in the same apartment kitchen we have all seen in our lives; I know I've lived in many apartments with that same kitchen. (And if you are not sure where this prompt is going, take "apartments;" there's a goldmine of prompts in that one!).

Well this is getting interesting. I wonder where this is going. I'm tracking so far. 

"Then you take your bowl and fill it with water." Okay. I can do that. But he demos just in case. "And there it is. That's your homemade humidifier." You can put it just about anywhere, he tells us. And for better results you could put it atop or next to your radiator. 

Of course, failing that,  you could always do the old reliable humidifier thing, he says.

Old reliable—?

You could just take a wet towel and hang it up. 

Well, I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't try them both. 

From there, things get a bit more complicated, but I won't spoil the surprise; let's just say a coat hanger is brought into the frame and leave it at that. Oh, and "surface area" is mentioned quite a few times.

Why am I so endeared to these videos? Is it the raw truth of the "characters" we are seeing? The good will nature of it? The reminder that life a'int so bad because good folks are out there helping us save money and heartache, not for self promotion, but out of their own good hearts?

I suppose I oughta pay if forward and make a little Writing with Rox You Tube vid of my own; would you watch it? Maybe I'll send it to the humidifier guy as a little token of thanks.


WRITE WITH ME?
WHICH YOU TUBE VIDEO ARE YOU MOST GRATEFUL FOR?
IF YOU MADE ONE, WHAT WOULD IT BE? WOULD YOU EVER MAKE ONE? 
FAILING THAT: "APARTMENTS." GO!

Writing with Rox WEEKLY—A funny thing happened on the way to love

There was no point in trying to hold it in any longer. Once the innuendo had worked it's way around the table, there was no going back, and I was going down fast. It wasn't obvious the first time she read it. Not even the second time. In fact, they were just four innocent words in a seemingly innocent poem about a seemingly innocent time of life. Before our minds hit the gutter, in fact, it was a very moving, insightful poem about how, as parents, we struggle to let our kids learn their lessons in their own time without us having to save them from inevitable strife. Well... that's what I heard. Others heard the poem as a spiritual journey, which naturally led to a lot of excitement. Another member was caught up in punctuation.  But I don't know... you throw in a little Buddha, a little Jesus, add that to the Lotus blossom and one thing leads to another. And like I said, once someone goes to the bedroom, well... that there leads to dancing. And at that point, the image just replicates itself, over and over, the meaning new and fresh and expanding. 

It reminded me of the time in my young adulthood where my dad and his brother Charlie came over to Ma's for a holiday dinner of some kind, having not seen one another for a long time since my dad had been doing a few months locum tenem in West Virginia. Ma, knowing dad and Charlie were regular tennis partners asked what Charlie had been up to since my dad left him without a tennis partner for the regular Saturday game. "Well... " Uncle Charlie said, in his cool, So Cal manner, "I've been playing with myself quite a bit.." 

The dinner was shot.

Now, one might argue that this is no way to run a family dinner, let alone a writing group. But there's no changing what was and where our minds went and what our bodies needed and quite clearly mine needed to heave with hysteria, roll along the blissful wave of out-of-control laughter. I can just assume we all needed a good laugh last Wednesday. Who knows why. Heck, it's Halloween time—the veil is thin—that's why. 


Inevitably after the fits of laughter died down, somebody said, "god, I haven't laughed that hard in a long time." Doesn't someone always say that? It always takes me back to my brother's Bar Mitzvah in 1981, where friends and family gathered to celebrate in my sunny backyard in Los Angeles in the dead of winter, fleeing their native winterlands to see my brother off to manhood. The service was held beneath a long white canopy between the line of cypress and cumquat trees, transforming the basketball court into a temple, including the inevitable house of emotions which resulted from Ben's reading from the torah. Immediately following, we descended to the patio, where the reception and luncheon awaited us in paradise; elders stood around in circles with little plastic glasses of wine, a klezmer band played, kids dashed around lemon trees and founds things to throw and chase, adolsecents stood around awkwardly with their parents, wishing they could join. I must have been somewhere in between the worlds, harrahing around with my girlfriends, but also proud, obligatory, sister of the Bar Mitzvah boy. Amidst the merry celebration, suddenly, all eyes were on my Uncle Melvin, rotund, red faced, Irish in another life, perhaps, always jovial, engaged in a fit of indestructible laughter, loud, born deep in childhood, cooing and cawing as he tried to catch his breath, at last giving way to reverent, silent, laughter, his head bowed and bobbing, eyes crimping and crinkling.

The whole thing stopped us kids in our young tracks; was something wrong? Was he alright?

 "Man!" Uncle Melvin said, finally returning to his circle, "I haven't laughed like that in a long time!"

How could that be? I remember thinking in my young kid mind. How could laughter like that be so hard to come by? Of course, how could I have known then, on a day so idyllic and bright, that things would change? Somehow, the day my brother became a man was also the day I glimpsed life beyond the merry laughing lemon trees of my childhood. The lens shifted a bit toward serious, beyond the castle walls.

Last week at Wednesday Writers I was reminded that laughter is undervalued when it comes to appreciating writing. Typically, we don't expect to find ourselves laughing hysterically writing and/or workshopping a group member's writing; we don't think, "Gee, I hope this makes me laugh hysterically for reasons I do not even understand." We are more often geared to be moved, impressed, changed somehow by the good grace of well-used adjectives, perhaps because "good writing" has become oh so literary and perfect in it's old age of pretty bound books and polished perfect poetry. In this wise, erudite age of google university, we are in a battle of wits, on and off the page. All good, too, I say, but what happens if we come back down to earth, lower our expectations and simply expect to be gifted by merely being together in truth, perhaps expect to be enchanted? The point is, though I fear I've lost it somewhere along the way, is that whether we laugh or cry or argue, or fear or question, etc, as we are listening to someone's writing, this is all a sign of a strong piece of writing. And, no, we weren't laughing at her or her poem; she was laughing with us. 

And perhaps that laughter had nothing to do with the poem, but it was the catalyst to something deeply needed. Because later in the afternoon, the sky turned dark and, like all things, my mood had changed. I called TCF, hoping that sharing the morning's guffaws would lighten me up... but inevitably the lens had reverted back to seriousness by then. I remember thinking, but not saying, why don't we laugh anymore? Not saying because I knew it wasn't really true, but simply just true in the moment. Still, I'd already forgotten the deep gift of the morning, the reminder of another way of being in the world. I'd already forgotten about enchanted. As I write this, I remember.

So where does the love come in? To write with someone is to love them. To share writing together in community, whether it brings tears of laughter or joy or all in between, reminds me of my own humanity—that I am a being with a large spectrum of emotions, memories, thoughts, ideas, dreams, etc. If I didn't love the people I wrote with and the things they wrote (which can happen fairly quickly when you write together), I don't believe I would have laughed as hard and recklessly as I did last Wednesday; to write with someone or an entire group is to know them in a way where you can't help but love them. 

Ironically, it's hard to put into words.

WRITE WITH ME?
LAST TIME YOU HAD A GOOD LAUGH?
LAUGHING HARD MEMORY?
MOMENT YOU STOPPED SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH INNOCENT YOUNG EYES?
ANYTHING ELSE? GOD KNOWS I WENT EVERYWHERE WITH THIS ONE. DO YOU KNOW WHAT I WAS SAYING? :)