We’ll talk with Ed Asner about what his autistic son and grandsons have taught him, and with Matt Asner about Aut-Fest, a film festival for and by people with autism ... We to go Disney Hall and sample the sound during an actual concert from all the performers’ perspectives. Surprise: the people with the best seats … are in the audience. ... Meet Carol Downer of Eagle Rock, a pioneering abortion rights activist who championed a less invasive abortion procedure that could be performed at home, by the woman’s friends ... We hear a tribute to a man who had it made, and gave it all up: writer Roy Battocchio.
The secret home abortion movement that started in LA two years before Roe v. Wade
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following story may be disturbing for some people. It includes frank discussion of abortion and somewhat graphic clinical descriptions of abortion procedures.
Norma McCorvey — better known as the "Roe" of Roe v. Wade, which established a woman's right to an abortion in the U.S. — died in February at the age of 69. She was credited with taking abortion out of the back alley, although she switched sides in the last part of her life.
But two years prior to the 1973 Supreme Court decision, a woman from Eagle Rock had made it her mission to take abortion from the back alley to the living room. Her name is Carol Downer and she helped create an underground network of unlicensed women who performed home abortions. She wrote books on female anatomy, went to jail, and ran a women’s health and abortion clinic in Hollywood which burned down in 1985.
Downer was born in 1933 in Oklahoma, but she’s lived in Los Angeles since she was a small child. By the late 1960’s, Downer was politically involved in the Chicano movement, fighting gentrification in East L.A., but she wasn’t active in the women’s movement at first. "The women at UCLA," she remembers, "were having a protest because there was no birth control services on the campus, and I, right in this very living room we’re sitting in, watched it on TV and said, 'Well, what are they expecting, something for nothing?'”
Over time, Downer felt forced to reexamine her thinking: "Well, it’s called having six kids and not having that much money, and struggling. And I was very lucky in that there was a women’s movement there for me to become part of, and I jumped in with both feet."
Downer had her first abortion in 1963, after having four children. "The first time was when I had just separated from my first husband, after a considerable period of marriage counseling, to finally arrive at this decision to make this big, big step — what do you know, I’m pregnant."
So she set about finding someone who would perform an abortion.
"I was in a typing pool, and I had joined in in action with the black women because they were being discriminated against, so we were close friends, and I asked them, and they referred me to an abortionist on Central Avenue in Downtown LA.
I walked up upstairs and walked into this completely empty room, and there was a nurse there, at least I presume she was a nurse. And she took me in the other room, all it had was an obstetrical table, you know, where you put your legs in the stirrups.
And she said, ‘take your clothes off and lie down,' and I did. And then the person who I presume was a doctor came in, and he proceeded to give me what they call a D and C.”
In a D and C, the cervix is dilated, and metal curettes are used to scrape out the uterus. (Suction is now also sometimes used in a D and C.) Downer’s D and C was performed without anesthetic and was extremely painful, but she counts herself as one of the lucky ones:
"Some abortionists made the woman give him her panties, he kept them as souvenirs. Others required that they let them have sex with them. Other times they were just blindfolded and taken places, and had no idea, and left semi-abandoned when everything was done, and then they had to find their way back. And some died."
Other times, abortions were done with caustic liquids, folk remedies, and makeshift pokers. Pinning down just how many women died is difficult. The Guttmacher Institute says that in 1930 there were 2,700 cases in the US where abortion was the official cause of death. By 1965, it had dropped to 200, which Guttmacher attributes to antibiotics, but the institute also stresses that those are official deaths; the real numbers were probably much higher.
Downer’s quest to make abortion safer began in the early '70s. She joined the L.A. chapter of NOW’s abortion committee and met a West L.A. man named Harvey Karman. He didn’t have a medical license, but he had developed a less intrusive way of aborting an early-term fetus. "Instead of the cold steel," Downer says, "he had a thin plastic cannula that could be inserted into the uterus, and then attached to a 50 cc syringe that he pulled back to develop suction."
Importantly, it could be done at a woman’s home. Downer dubbed it “menstrual extraction,” and in 1971, she began teaching it to other activists. The "menstrual" in the title comes because Downer says the procedure was only performed when a woman’s period was due, and they wouldn't take a pregnancy test beforehand. That way, everyone had plausible deniability.
Dr. Brian T. Nguyen at USC’s Keck School says menstrual extraction is not safe enough by today’s standards. He says there could be bleeding and infection, so it’s a job for trained professionals in a clinical setting. Nguyen admits he hasn’t seen cases of complications from menstrual extraction, but because it’s a secretive procedure, complications may go unreported. Nguyen says it’s still being practiced abroad, and Downer says it’s still happening here in the US.
Despite the medical concerns, Downer and her collaborators felt in the early '70s that it was safer to have a menstrual extraction performed by women, for women. "Then we needed to expand," Downer says, "so we called a public meeting of women to come and talk about opening up an illegal abortion clinic." The turnout was good, but the stigma was high. "They were almost fainting, just even hearing about it and seeing this equipment, so I said, Well, just a minute.” She took out her speculum and did a practical demonstration on her own body, "and all of the feelings of disgust and fear and everything that they had was gone."
Downer had most of her direct involvement in teaching menstrual extraction before Roe v. Wade. Once the law changed, she opened the Hollywood Feminist Women’s Health Center, with a licensed doctor on staff giving traditional D and C’s, as well as providing birth control and minor outpatient treatments. But she continued to give counseling and training to new menstrual extraction groups because there were and still are obstacles ...
Like the parental consent laws that exist in 37 states: "If they go into the clinic and their parent is there and signs for them, fine. Otherwise they have to go through a judge," says Downer. Or the Hyde Amendment from 1976, which said, “Women are gonna get abortions, but at least the federal government should not have to pay for it.” So indigent women were not able to get help. They had to pay cash." And the Texas law that just a few years ago required doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. And for abortion clinics to meet surgical center requirements: "Meaning they have to have a certain width of halls; they have to have certain emergency equipment that is not relevant at all to the abortion procedure."
And, Downer says, ever since Roe v. Wade, clinics have had to contend with protesters.
"What happens more often than you would think, the people who are picketing us actually show up to get abortions, and when they do, people ask them at the clinic, 'Well, I thought you were against abortion! Why are you here? How does that square with you being out in front picketing our clinic every week, and now you want to have an abortion?'
You know what their answer is?
'Well, in my case it’s different.'"
And, speaking with us from her home in Eagle Rock, 44 years after Roe v. Wade, Downer says women may take abortion into their own homes again.
"It’s looking that way, at least in certain parts of the country. The places that provided abortion pre-Roe v. Wade will stay there; California will probably be one of those states, and New York. The South will be where they’re not available. So we’re gonna have a situation where women have to travel, or there are pills that if they can obtain them, they can give themselves an abortion. Or they can use herbs. Or they can use menstrual extraction, but I think one way or another, abortion will continue as it always has."
Off-Ramp Recommends: Get off your keister this Easter!
These cool tips would have landed in your in-box with no extra effort on your part IF you'd subscribed to Off-Ramp's weekly e-newsletter. We send out a recommendation every week, along with all the latest Off-Ramp news. Sign up now!
This Sunday is Easter Sunday, but it's easy to get overwhelmed or to forget the spiritual side of the holidays. So here are some ideas for reconnecting, or just getting out of the house.
Why not volunteer at the Skid Row Midnight Mission! Every year the shelter puts together a massive brunch for both Easter and Passover. This year they expect to serve 4,000 pounds of chicken and all the sides for a 10am-1pm brunch. Some celebrities will be spending the day there as well: Mr. T will be distributing new clothes, and Dick Van Dyke will be lending a hand. The Easter Bunny may also be making an appearance inside the "Easter Village." To help out, email: volunteer@midnightmission.org.
Our Lady of Guadalupe Church hosts an actual Sunrise Service on the sands of Hermosa Beach. You'll have to get up early for this parish's tradition. At 6am Sunday, congregants gather at 11th Street & The Strand. They recommend you bring their own chairs, a sweatshirt, and blanket to take in the mass and enjoy the sunrise over the horizon.
Check out Pasadena's funky Bunny Museum! This museum is the product of a lifetime collecting rabbit figurines, memorabilia, and pictures. The owners have a Guinness World Record for their hare collection, and the museum has been ranked "#1 Best Weird Museum in Los Angeles" as well as "#1 Cutest Museum in Los Angeles". The premise does have live rabbits running around. Admission is $8 and you're asked to bring a treat for the bunnies.
Matt and Ed Asner on their autistic sons and the AutFest Film Festival
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with actor Ed Asner and his son Matt Asner about their sons who have autism, and about the AutFest International Film Festival. Tickets are on sale now for the festival, held at the AMC Orange 30 on April 22 and 23. The fest includes awards for actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck and Pixar animators Pete Docter and Jonas Rivera.
"The treacherous thing about autism is that you show one view of autism and you are going to piss off a lot of other people. You are not showing their view of autism; you are showing one person’s view of autism or one element of autism." -- Matt Asner
You know the basics about Ed Asner — "Mary Tyler Moore," "Lou Grant," "Up!," and his aversion to spunk — but you probably don't know that he has an autistic son, Charlie, and three autistic grandsons, and has become an autism advocate. The grandkids are his son Matt's kids.
Matt Asner has long been an autism advocate. He started the AutFest film festival, which is working to alleviate one of the big problems with autism: although 1 in every 68 people are on the autism spectrum, they're "invisible," Matt says.
From the Off-Ramp Archive: John Rabe talks with autistic journalist Robert Moran
Use the audio player to hear all of our interview at Ed's house, but here are some highlights:
What Ed Asner has learned from his autistic son, Charlie:
"He has taught me patience. I have to even improve far more on that. I tend to snap and rush things. You have to plod through the explanation and make sure that each word counts and each thought counts."
What Matt Asner has learned from his autistic children:
"I think you learn something from meeting someone with autism that no one else can teach you — to look at life a different way. We neurotypical people are the ones that have to do the changing. There has to be a paradigm shift because there is 1 in 68 people with autism. We are a better place, it's a better world, because people have autism."
Why Matt Asner started AutFest:
"I honestly have always wanted to do a film festival relating to autism. I think it’s a subject that needs to be done. You look at all the films that are in this incredible festival … and it's amazing that they have all come out within the last two to three years. And it’s because it’s a part of our life now. It’s a part of everyone’s life — it’s invisible — and that’s why I think awareness celebrating the way we work in film with autism is important. It’s not just about content; it’s about people working in film who are autistic. The festival celebrates both those things."
What can AutFest change:
"I don’t think if you go to someone on the street and say, 'What is autism?' that they are going to tell you, 'It’s a spectrum disorder' … they aren’t going to say that. They are going to say, 'It’s "Rain Man"' — what they saw about autism … that’s what they are going to say. I want the world to see autism as it is."
Among the short films at AutFest, "Even in Death" and "The Adventures of Pelican Pete: A Bird is Born," have autistic writers and directors. The feature films include "The Accountant," with Ben Affleck; "Asperger's Are Us," a documentary abut four friends on the spectrum; and the animated Pixar movie "Inside Out." Check out AutFest's full schedule online.
Joe Goode: The Milk Bottle and the Infinite (Review)
Off-Ramp arts correspondent Marc Haefele reviews Joe Goode's “Old Ideas with New Solutions." See it at the Kohn Gallery through May 13.
One of Joe Goode’s fond memories of the New York art scene of the '60s was when the great Andy Warhol invited him to dinner at “my favorite restaurant.” Goode, who was then so poor he had hitchhiked to Manhattan, was dazzled. Would it be Grenouille or maybe the Cote Basque, where Truman Capote nestled among his entourage of millionaire fashionistas?
But the “favorite” turned out to be the Walgreen’s drug store lunch counter. Painter Goode, just turned 80, likes to recall experiences like that. And maybe that one helped confirm his decision to remain a California painter for the rest of his life. He's one of the eminent West Coast artists of the last century and this one besides.
In the strictest sense, despite a year spent studying at the Chouinard Institute, Goode invented himself as a painter. His father was a skilled professional commercial artist, but even as he left Oklahoma City as a high school dropout in 1959, Goode didn’t know he wanted to paint. He was just another Sooner kid who came to LA for the weather.
BONUS: Listen to Marc Haefele's 2016 interview with Joe Goode
But the sprawl and variety and intensity of the fast-growing Western metropolis stimulated him, even as he struggled to stay alive and solvent, to look inward and find himself as a major visual creator.
Now he has a major show at the Kohn Gallery, focusing on the last 5 years of his output. With it comes a magisterial catalog-bio book by Kristine McKenna, offering a sympathetic and intelligent analysis and sampling of 56 years of his work.
As Goode puts it himself, “The thing that excites me is making something I have never seen before, and I make that happen as often as I can.” Yet he also likes to work with what he has seen before. And so much of his recent work incorporates motifs of his earliest. Take the famous four-square milk bottle, for instance.
It was a shape he first noticed on his Eastside front porch in the early 60s. It spoke to him at a time were “objects” were speaking to a new generation of painters, many of them called “pop,” a description Goode was often assigned, but personally rejected. Yet he kept painting the rectilinear shapes in his early period, when he emerged as a major figure at the historic Pasadena “New Painting of Common Objects” show in 1962.
Over the years since, Goode painted a whole lot of pictures minus the bottle, but somehow, it remained his signature symbol. It’s bounced back: it appears on the cover of McKenna’s new book, it appears in front of some of his latest work, with an active, rather than its former passive personality—splashing milk-white liquid explosions all over the canvas, or hurling the sparse, pale shadow of milk against a background as deep an indigo like a darkened sea. It suggests infinity but is also a remanifestation. McKenna calls Goode’s evolved painting a “winding journey through…rich terrain for almost six decades.”
Increasingly, over the later years, Goode’s work has become involved with nature—evocations of fires, tornadoes, waterfalls, dark oceanscapes subtly woven out of elusive night-time hues, trees, moons, tornadoes and sunspots. These pictures come in sequences, but the sequences tend to overlap. A disastrous hiatus transpired in 2005, when Goode’s studio, along with the lion’s share of his work in progress, was destroyed by fire.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, his first show following the fire (in 2008) was called “Paint is Nature,’’ raising to its zenith Goode’s terrific skills with acrylics. But this was work like nothing he had ever done before, at the dawn of his eighth decade.
The ongoing Kohn show gives us newer work on archival board. It includes two pictures referring to two other great painters: “Braque and Picasso on Fire” and “Braque and Picasso Still Talk About it.” The colors refer to his Forest Fire paintings of decades ago, but that fury is contained, evolved, almost charming. There is a good deal more here that shows us how Goode keeps returning, and keeps progressing, as he enters his eighties, painting strong. Staying ahead of us.
10 years after his death, Vonnegut's books are still 'dynamite in our hands'
"I think they feel like they're dangerous books. I think especially if you are a teenager, or a college student, there's a way they feel like dynamite in your hands. And it feels like he's saying things that other people aren't telling you." -- dAvid pAddy, Whittier College
Ten years ago Tuesday, writer Kurt Vonnegut died. His novels - notably "Cat's Cradle," "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," "Slaughterhouse-Five," and "Breakfast of Champions" - are still devoured by readers young and old.
But Vonnegut's message seems to really draw young readers. Professor of English Literature at Whittier College dAvid pAddy* says it's because of Vonnegut's irreverent voice:
It's a comic voice but it's also subversive. There's a giddiness about reading him. And I sometimes think back, like when I first read him and there was a feeling of 'Oh, it's funny!'... then I'd go back and reread and think 'Why did I find this funny?' They're actually dark and serious.
pAddy says Vonnegut connects with readers because he was speaking truths, at least about the world as he knew it. As a college student, pAddy says, "We never had Vonnegut assigned in classes but that's what you did in college, you read Vonnegut. He's an easy person to pick up and start reading."
Listen to the audio to hear pAddy read from "Breakfast of Champions."
Vonnegut's most acclaimed and somewhat autobiographical novel, "Slaughterhouse Five" includes a re-imagining of the Allied fire bombing of the German city Dresden. Vonnegut was captured by the Germans but survived the firestorm because POWs were routinely held in underground meat-lockers. His was labeled Schlachthof Fünf - Slaughterhouse Five.
"There's a core of trauma at the heart of all of his books. Obviously the personal experiences -in Dresden- and I think depression in his own life. There's a sadness at the core of everything he writes... but I think where he differs and why he really matters for us now is: as much as his works are about trauma, they're not about indulging in that trauma. They're not about indulging in the misery or just sort of dropping down in the mire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2XDniq7azM
But to pAddy, it's the element of hope in Vonnegut's writing that makes it so critical for readers now. He says, "He was a liberal humanist that believed in the essential good of people and I think he was always being tested by it. We need to hear that. That sense of both how you respond to a feeling of destruction, apocalypse, chaos, trauma but then, what's the hope you hold onto, despite how bleak it all seems?"
So why do we still read Kurt Vonnegut? Says pAddy, "Because we have to."
And so it goes.
*From pAddy's website: "For some reason, he will not explain why his name looks so funny."
Remembering a father-in-law who gave up fame and money for creative bliss
Off-Ramp commentator Branden Morgan's first film, "Jimmy the Saint," is showing in June at Dances with Films.
“I was told there may be some people from New Jersey listening, so ... I’ll ... be ... sure ... to ... speak ... slowly.”
That’s how my late father-in-law Roy began his speech when I married his firstborn child. And, being from New Jersey, I laughed until I cried.
Just before our second child was born, I asked Roy for advice on a topic I’d been struggling with: playing favorites with your children. Had he ever struggled with the same issue with his two daughters?
“Of course not” he replied. “I never really cared for either of them.”
Roy Battocchio was a tall, handsome New York Italian who had great hair until the day he died. Born into the Depression in Mount Vernon, New York, Roy went on to great success in the music industry as an A&R man for Capitol Records. He worked side-by-side with The Beatles, Nat King Cole, and Bobby Darin and later John Denver and Hall & Oates. When he realized the artists he repped were no longer asking him to get them into a party but, rather, to get prostitutes and cocaine up to their hotel room he figured it was time to move on.
It was then that Roy was finally able to answer that nagging voice in his head that had for so long sought an audience: comedy. He used some of his industry contacts to begin a writing career that would span the next three decades. He wrote 5 episodes of “The Love Boat” and jokes for “The Hollywood Squares,” but hated having to compromise his writing for the suits. So he transitioned to stage-plays -- “Thicker than Water,” “Dead Wrong,” and dozens more -- that are still put on at smaller theaters across the country.
But it was Roy’s act, his shtick, that got him out of bed in the morning.
One night, years ago, at a family dinner at the old Mazzarino's in the Valley. We’re all there, the big, extended family. I return from the can to find that the food had arrived.
I’m a few bites into my chicken piccata when I notice something buried beneath my side of spaghetti. I look and it’s a folded piece of paper, a love note, it turns out from one of the busboys who was apparently somewhat infatuated with me. It was written sloppily, in broken English, but I could discern that this guy thought that I was cute and wanted to share a moment with me behind the dumpster in the alley.
I was mortified, looking around trying to figure out who this guy was. Also, I was a little interested to see if he was handsome or not … but I was trying to be cool about it. After a few minutes of this Roy bursts out laughing. He had written the note earlier in the night, -- with his left hand mind you, to hide his tracks I guess – slipped it under my pasta and just watched. And laughed. No one else at the table knew. It was the epitome of performance art. It was just for him. And me, I realize now. Roy only pranked the people he loved.
Roy’s legacy is his writings and our laughter. The laughter of his two daughters and his four grandchildren. And the sounds of their joy now fill my world and wear his smile.
It wasn’t long before his sudden death in February that he got me, really got me, one last time.
It was during a small family dinner over the holidays when Roy very casually asked me if I was aware that New Jersey was in the running to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ.
“Um, excuse me?” I said.
“Sure, sure” Roy said. “They just couldn’t find three wise men or a virgin.”
And, being from New Jersey, I laughed until I cried.