party's over for laguna beach artist

Some man is roaring outside the house this Saturday night. It sounds like he's losing it. It is probably some random drunk, but it's getting seriously psycho. Uh, oh, I know who it is and it's damn dumb of him! (No one I know personally, thank Whomever in Wherever.)
So on to the real story...my new artist acquaintance,who lives behind us in the one-room art shack, got an eviction notice. Eight years here, and thirty in Laguna total. "It's the only place where I feel good," he said wanly, barefoot at his doorstep when he told us the bad news. His times have been hard indeed lately, and getting kicked out is another blow. "Greedy," he said, indicting the landlord for buying an investment property at the height of the market and trying to pay his rent by insisting that his tenants do so too. "I've taken good care of this place for him," he added, his eyes red and face puffy from a hard night of drinking and worry. But I didn't blame him for being hurt and wounded. You can't help feelings in the face of loss.
"What can I do? I got no place to go." His face creased slightly. "I'm thinking about getting some camping equipment. Me and the guy down the end--" and he hitched his thumb north a bit--"he's out of work too, and we're thinking about getting it, so we can camp."
He's a Vietnam vet and his daily investment of time on the phone with the VA has not yet paid off in a solid disability income stream, despite serious health problems. I've grown fond of this man in a few short weeks, and I wish I could take him in, can't bear the thought of him being homeless. But where could I put him? I have four people to shelter and feed already total, and I'm not sure that a grown man older than me would make a reasonable roommate for anyone. At his age, people like their solitude if accustomed to it, although they hate it if they're not. Anyway, I was just getting used to being his neighbor myself, and now I might not be able to anymore. I didn't see this one coming. Sometimes you think you have all of the time in the world, or if not in the world, at least in your own backyard. And maybe you do. Or damn it, maybe not.

Making a video with a cool young Czech film maker

Sitting at my kitchen table, but it's just like being back in the video edit bays and recording studios I've been in before in my career as a video producer and paid hack...from Northrop Grumman in lavish Century City CA, to a big rich insurance company in Madison,Wisconsin ("Wisco" to tha cool natives), to NPR recording studios in LA, etc... when you're recording and cutting, it's the same thing still, only now the technology is seriously portable. My Czech film maker friend Joachim Vesely and I made a short little video recently that got him into film school in Scotland, one of only 13 choice spots in the whole college of art in Scotland's historic hard-drinking Edinburgh. He doesn't see dead people, he sees drunk people...nightly, stumbling, and "old" (in their late thirties! he says). So happy that our little video road trip to some of Orange County's stores and the evil Trinity Broadcasting Network ended up getting him a place in Euro film history! Right now we're editing and putting the final touches on our video, and I'll link to it when it goes live...very soon, can't wait. You know what they say---"The devil finds work for idle hands."

party behind us!

We went to a party this Sunday in a one-room artist's house, the walls lined with his own oil paintings, which were like rustic baroque wallpaper that refuses to be dislodged. There was a white-haired surfer with big green eyes and smooth olive skin playing a guitar, and the birthday boy, the gray-haired artist himself, a former Vietnam combat vet, was drinking the red wine his neighbors had bought him and singing a surprisingly good version of "Knights in White Satin" by the old Moody Blues band. This song is from his generation, and I could see the boy in him, the high school boy who would have turned up his car radio with the coolest new eight-track player really loudly in the driveway, before shipping out to Nam and, if what they say is true, having his best buddy die in his arms. Why is it always the best buddy dying in the arms? Perhaps war makes best buddies, and if you get lucky enough to hold them after they're wounded and you aren't, that further cements the guilty, loving bond. I don't know, I've never been in that kind of war, so I wouldn't claim to judge.
Anyway, he still suffers from the war, and the hard parts of being a struggling artist for 30 years in a changed Laguna Beach, but Sunday, he was the king of the neighborhood. I'd thought until then he was sort of tolerated, on the fringe, but as more people crowded into the tiny house with more guacamole, more salsa, more wine, I came to see he was the nucleus of several people who like and even love him. If he can be loved, not only for his talent, which gives people permission to love him, but for his sad days when his body won't work and he hurts so much he can't paint or play guitar, for when he's smiled the hazy, happy smile of alcohol and slurringly gone to bed at 6pm, then perhaps we all can be loved--at least modestly. This makes me say, let's allow people in the spaces where we live. And more than one, or three, but maybe 6 or 7. We need each other. And to find one another, we need a place to gather.

A big house means more to clean

Wood floors collect dust bunnies. Windows get rain- splashed and coated with pollen-and-bird-DNA. Woodwork needs wiping. The pale stucco front of the Tudor house reveals the tiny dried brown feet of ripped-down vines, which will need water-blasting and hand-removal. The scent of old wood that reveals itself on entry to the house needs a new lemon-scented candle, which I bought and lit to enjoy the reputed scent that was created for Madame Pompadour in the reign of Napoleon, but which smells like lemongrass spa lotion to me.
Lots of flower-watering is called for. Lots of sweeping, and of course, the picking up of sweatshirts and jackets flung by my 12-year-old son and 24-year-old stepdaughter (and me of course). It looks like I'll have some housekeeping duties I didn't expect with this house. I did expect the clothes and the cooking and the dish-washing (at which my husband excels). But the allegiance I swore to this home when we made our way through two months of counter-offers and financing agony to buy it calls for very specific care.
"Murphy's Oil Soap," counsels Lupe, my dear friend of 14 years and now cleaning woman again. "And only little on the mop, nothing too much, can cause prrroblem on the floor." I used to know how to nurture and take care of wood, from antiques to doors. Growing up going to an auction house filled with old brown furniture in the Civil War battlefields of Virginia taught me that. Reverence for wood is fealty to history. I am the head of a house now, a large one, although not overly, and it's filled with rooms, glass windows that open to the sound of the faint sea, and old and new furniture made of burled, inlaid, leather-covered and polished wood. Flowers in big pots out back thirst for attention. I must give it to them. I owe them that.

Laguna Beach nutjobs

The nutjobs of Laguna Beach are the most disorienting yet charming surprise in this town. These are people who pop up around its corners dressed in bizarre costumes, toting dogs, umbrellas, large wacky purses or similar stage-show props. This has nothing to do with gender either. In our first week of our residence, Ive seen about four honest-to-god nutjobs. The first was around his late fifties to early sixties. He was tall, slim and surly, and had--that day--bleached-blond hair with multi-colored feathers in it. He wore short shorts and something sparkly to complete the look, and walked a small hot-dog dog wearing multiple bejeweled collars in pink and ruby. This was only the hardware store in the day, so I look forward to catching him in evening attire.
Nutjob number 2 was a lady around 60 (see a theme emerging here?) outside the Whole Foods store downtown. She wore a panties-high WIDE flounced miniskirt, bare legs with cowboy boots, a jeweled cummerbund around her waist, long, twisted blonde locks to her mid-back, and some kind of accoutrement on her head...the nutjob piece de resistance is always to be found on the head. Tony and I were both dumbstruck by this vision as she sashayed ahead of us, until he broke the reverent silence with, "That is awesome! Thank God!"
Yesterday was a big nut-job day, a Sunday rich with fine weather and nutjob-enticing tourists for the early pre-spring tourist season. First sighting? As we stood on front the patio of the Unitarian church, chatting after services had ended, a woman came whizzing up on roller skates, like a drug-fuled version of a witch from the Wizard of Oz. She wore fur buskins wrapped around her legs, a very short skirt as well, long hair, was around 60, and displayed multiple garments on her relatively fit body (another nutjob commonality). Her strange tall hat flaunted a "Dr. Dope" button and she carried a parasol. She was blathering and gibbering at top speed next to the doughnuts, and I worried that she was a late-coming congregation member. But she didn't enter, and she seems to have her own theology going on. You could feel the white-hot smoke and sparks shooting from her brain, her smiling and contorted face the portal to an energy as palpable as an odor or loud as an electic guitar. Someone gave birth to her, but she is a creation only of herself, a collision of femininity and chemicals and toxins and wild color found in this particular pocket of ocean called Laguna Beach. To top off our Sunday, there was one milder sighting downtown. Outside the gelato store, there were two middle-aged males who seemed to be friends, probably part of a "Puppy and Papa" playgroup, both respectably dressed, with their tiny dogs in baby strollers by the gelato store. One was acting the part of Daddy by telling his doggie the gelato was "All gone," making big sad eyes and flopping his hand-paws sadly at the dog as it begged upright in the stroller. Lat, I saw a young blonde woman with enormous cannon-ball-sized breast implants, but how boring she was in her tight jeans and black spandex tube top next to the old attention-seeking pros! Thanks to our nutjobs, a walk downtown is a potential rabbit hole of pleasure, but with a painful frisson of cognitive dissonance, as I wonder how they live like this. But whatever worries THEY had are dead and buried, and they live the way they want to. Now THAT is awesome.

our new neighborhood --live Laguna Beach camera

This is the real-time view nearby...we can walk to this beach in around 4 minutes. OK, the minute-counting is obnoxious....I guess I'm being so precise because I hate the way every realtor-humanoid says "five minutes from (fill in the tourist attraction here)," when that means anything from five minutes to 15 or 20. Or, maybe it's because I am precise, so live with it :-).

New home, new life, same old stuff

Our move is complete. We officially live in Laguna Beach now. The house is somewhat old, and actually very charming, with creaking wood, high ceilings and lots of character...part of which is a pretty quirky kitchen, with hand-painted tiles, hand-painted cabinets, hand-painted beams...yes, you get the picture. Who knew blue and pink could get on your nerves so badly?
We have a sense of ravishing newness, and happiness, Tony and I. We can't believe we can wake up and walk to a breathtakingly beautiful beach, reminiscence in geography of Waikiki and Diamond Head on Honolulu, where we vacationed last year. We go home and start our day, in a large home with dark wood, white walls made of real plaster, a wide sunny courtyard, and so many locks and doors that I feel like a castle chatelaine with a giant bunch of keys at my waist. We are faced with an unpleasant truth though...some of our furniture looks plain ol' bad in this house. Although we bought a new pale cocoa brown microfiber sectional for our previous house, it's as unsuitable as white vinyl go-go boots in church in this one. We also have the Virginia-made desks, wooden English tables, about a thousand different-colored towels (including a set of tired yellow ones with my previous marriage initials, which I happily threw out today), and weird curios from our separate career travels around the country and world. Who knew we both had shot glass collections? We didn't know we did. I'd thrown mine out yesterday without telling him, so when we found out we were both "shot-glass-guilty," he bravely picked up the banner of NO REMORSE/NO HOARDING and voluntarily threw his out too! Now that's marital solidarity. So long, Galveston, Mackinac Island, San Antonio, Australia, Boston, North Carolina, New Orleans, Detroit, San Antonio and Death Valley shot glasses! I only hope we can dispose of our tired furniture in the same remorseless manner.