Merry Lepper, first US woman to run a marathon, did it in Culver City, 1963; Langers' anniversary; how one woman learned to face death and helped others do the same.
Remember Ray Bradbury; remember summer.
I have an old friend who insisted you had to read the late Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" every summer. It's advice I've tried to take, because "Dandelion Wine" is one of those books that deals with fading, change, and death, yet brings you back to life, reminds you to seize the day. A few years ago, I discovered that KPCC's Molly Peterson shared my feelings about the book, so we talked about it on Off-Ramp, reading our favorite passages, and I've brought back that conversation every June. But this year, instead of just marking the start of summer, it marks the end of an era, when a giant walked the earth. With his prose poetry, whether set in leafy Illinois or a cemetery in LA or on Mars, Bradbury reminded us not just what it was to be human, but how best to be a human. KPCC's Molly Peterson, being our environment reporter, picked a telling excerpt as her favorite.
"Ready now, the rain barrel!"
Nothing else in the world would do but the pure waters which had been summoned from the lakes far away and the sweet fields of grassy dew on early morning, lifted to the open sky, carried in laundered clusters nine hundred miles, brushed with wind, electrified with high voltage, and condensed upon cool air. This water, falling, raining, gathered yet more of the heavens in its crystals. Taking something of the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south, the water made rain and the rain, within this hour of rituals, would be well on its way to wine.
Douglas ran with the dipper. He plunged it deep in the rain barrel. "Here we go!"
The water was silk in the cup; clear, faintly blue silk. It softened the lip and the throat and the heart, if drunk. This water must be carried in dipper and bucket to the cellar, there to be leavened in freshets, in mountain streams, upon the dandelion harvest.
And here's one of mine:
"Tom...does everyone in the world...know he's alive?" "Sure. Heck, yes!" The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow. "I hope they do," whispered Douglas. "Oh I sure hope they know."
Here's a video of Bradbury reflecting on the the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Bradbury is a little salty in the video, but he's in great form. Thanks to John King Tarpinian who sent us the video link.
Ray Bradbury on burning books and "Fahrenheit 451"
(Kitty Felde, then host of KPCC's Talk of the City program, interviewed Ray Bradbury when "Fahrenheit 451" was chosen for LA's One Book, One City program in 2002. We've posted the entire half-hour live Q&A.)
I met Ray Bradbury in high school, when he came to speak to fellow students at Pius X in Downey. I think he signed every paperback copy of every short story collection of his I owned. He made me want to be a writer, to think outside the box, to be hopeful about the future and to love my fellow humans a bit more. And to dream of going to Mars.
His stories still haunt me: the magic walls of that nursery that turned into an African veldt; the Mexican men who shared a lovely white suit; the forgetting that happened on that distant red planet. What other writer left such vivid impressions on my brain?
I loved the fact that he wrote many of his stories at local LA public libraries, that despite living in LA most of his adult life, he didn't drive; and that he was so accessible. For much of his life, you could call him on the phone and talk with this giant of literature. He was a treasure.
Merry Lepper, first American woman to run a marathon: 1963, Culver City
12/9/2013 UPDATE: Tonight at 7, the Culver City City Council will honor Merry Lepper for her accomplishment, which came 50 years ago this month. Lepper will be on hand to accept her commendation. We'll have more on this weekend's Off-Ramp.
In "Marathon Crasher," a great longread on Kindle released today, LA-based sports journalist David Davis tells a story few people know, about a woman everyone should know about. "Marathon Crasher" is about the day in 1963 that Merry Lepper became the first American woman to run a marathon. His story is also about the absurdity that patronizing, un-scientific, misogynist (pick one or all) track and field officials kept women from participating in all but the easiest races for decades. Here's an excerpt that takes us to December, 1963 (Merry's friend Lyn Carman had planned to become the first woman to run a marathon and trained with her husband Bob):
Merry dressed in clothes that were more appropriate for a day at the beach: a light-green blouse, with half sleeves, buttons and a collar, and a pair of white shorts. Over that she pulled on grey warm-up sweats. She had a new pair of white sneakers, flimsy compared to today's cushiony models.
In her haste she forgot to have breakfast. En route, she ate a Baby Ruth candy-bar. That would serve as her fuel—her protein and carbs--for the 26.2-mile race.
Outside Veterans Memorial Park in Culver City, the smallest Western Hemisphere field in years–just 67 men--bunched together by the starting line, stretching their legs, rotating their necks, windmilling their arms, and eyeing the competition.
Bob Carman was a last-minute scratch. Days before the race, he had suffered a fractured skull after tripping and falling inside their home. He had been discharged from the hospital, but he was unable to run or provide his usual support.
Merry and Lyn did not linger at the starting line. After removing their sweats, they hid in the bushes across the street, out of sight from the officials.
Merry felt nervous. "What have we got ourselves into?" she whispered to herself. "They don't want us here, we're not supposed to be here."
She took a deep breath and drew strength from Lyn's grim determination. At the gun, the pair hesitated for a moment as the men began their journey. Then, they jumped from the bushes and took off after them, chasing the field down Overland Boulevard.
Today, Merry lives along the border between Arizona and New Mexico, and Lyn lives in Northern California. They had lost touch until David reached them for his story. As Culver City continues its revitalization, perhaps it's time for a statue commemorating the city's place in history, and Merry Lepper's.
Project Mah Jongg at Skirball Center uses tile game to draw cultural, social connections
Head to the Skirball Cultural Center anytime between now and September 2, and tucked in the museum's South wing you'll find an exhibit on Mah Jongg — a Chinese tile game. At the Skirball, you can learn about the history of the game, see fashion inspired by its tiles and even play a round or two yourself. But what is an exhibit on a Chinese game doing in a place that normally focuses on Jewish cultural heritage? Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson went to find out.
According to Skirball curator Erin Clancey, Mah Jongg, most likely an adaptation of Chinese card games or dominoes, swept America with its popularity after a man named Joseph Park Babcock brought it to the states.
"Babcock, sort of an entrepreneur, felt that the game had great potential in America with American audiences, so he imported sets starting in 1922," she explained. "He literally wrote the book 'Babcock's rules for Mah-Jongg,' which was the first introduction Westerners had for how to play Mah Jongg."
The game finds itself at the Skirball because of its cultural associations with the Jewish American community.
"It came to the United States, became a fad among all people, really, and then became really associated with Jewish women in the 1930s, and maintained popularity among Jewish women's groups until today," Clancey said.
She added that there are a number of theories why that is.
"A game of Mahjongg is an expression of camaraderie, of communal spirit, and I think that's important in the Jewish tradition," she said.
She also said that the Chinese American immigrant community and Jewish American immigrant community shared parallels in cultural experience that may have led to the Jewish community to pick up the game.
"I think there's a certain affinity perhaps the Jewish community might have had for Chinese products. The Chinese American immigrants and the Jewish American immigrants are the two most identifiable and largest non-Christian immigrant communities in the West, so there was a certain understanding, I think. Geographically, they were literally neighbors in the lower-eastside of New York; the Chinatown and the Jewish Quarter were literally next to one another," she said.
Four friends sat at a square table, shuffling the tiles. Jan Esquith, reminisced about her younger years.
"Many of us remember our mothers playing. When I was growing up, my mom used to play with a whole group of women, and every few weeks, the women would play at our house. So I grew up with my mom playing 'Mahj,'" she said.
For Sharon Lerner, another sitting player, the game brings people together. "It's a thinking game, and it's a nice way to get together with your friends and socialize," Lerner said.
Clancey said she wants the exhibit to promote community building.
"I hope that people will come to the Skirball with their community of friends and see the common bonds between cultures, between people, and that maybe they'll even make new friends over a game of Mah Jongg," she said.
Bob Baker's historic Marionette Theater up for sale
UPDATE: In a statement, Bob Baker has announced that ticket sales haven't been enough to cover the overhead of his Marionette Theater in downtown LA, so he's putting the property up for sale. "I will stay in business and the Bob Baker Marionettes will continue to perform to delight the public with the magic of puppetry." Meantime, here's former Off-Ramp Queena Kim's audio and video reports on the venue, America's longest running Marionette Theater.
Facing death: the story of Project Nightlight
In 1992 Gail Bernstein came upon an ad in the LA Times for a 3-month training course on being with people in the final stages of their life. It piqued her interest because she'd just spent 18 months caring for a close friend, Jeffrey, who had AIDS. "Jeffrey was sweet and loving, but this was not the person who was dying. He was a monster," she says, and "after it was over, I felt like I could've done a better job."
Gail knew that death was a part of life, and that she'd have to face it again. So she decided to call the number in the ad. "I went there with a notebook. I thought I was going to get information. And I expected this nurse who only works with terminal patients to be serious, and kind of a downer. Not Cassandra."
This was Cassandra Christenson, who was, "unlike anyone I'd ever met. She's very light-hearted, a very beautiful woman, and she was brilliant. She drew me in."
By this time, Cassandra had been nursing for more than 30 years. 15 years into it, she began to realize that she wasn't very good at her day-to-day tasks. She was taking too long to finish her bed baths and she would finish her charts long after her colleagues went home. But Christenson says she did one thing very well. "When people were dying, my head nurse said, 'Cassandra, you're so good with the dying. I want you to take care of them.' I don't really remember why I was so good at that. I learned what to do by using a certain kind of common sense. If someone's really, really hurt, you touch them. You hold them. Like a child crying - you pick it up."
Cassandra quickly got a sense of what people needed. She learned to talk to them even if they appeared to be tuned out. She learned to get really close - to put the bed railing down and sit up on the bed. She learned how to be comfortable around the dying.
By the early 80’s she was doing private duty nursing around LA and her reputation was growing, but it wasn't until a chance encounter with a kindred spirit that she realized how much more she needed to do. Traveling with a couple named Kevin and Theresa, she was hurrying to catch a connecting flight at Miami International, looked back, and realized they weren't behind her. "So I go charging back through this throng of people, yelling "Theresa! Kevin! Theresa!" and who should come out but Mother Teresa! And she's with this whole bevy of nuns, all in little white outfits with the blue stripes across their foreheads."
"Mother Teresa says, 'Now tell me what you do,' and I say that I work with the dying. And she asks, 'Do you work with AIDS?" and I say 'Yeah.' But I lied. I lied to Mother Teresa! And she takes out this little skinny finger, and almost like this divine directive, she says, 'You work with AIDS!'"
When Cassandra got back to LA, she did some research and partnered with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. She also recruited volunteers that would eventually form the core of her own non-profit, called Project Nightlight. At a time when people with AIDS were being abandoned by their families, Cassandra and her pupils were holding them in their arms.
One of her best volunteers was Gail Bernstein, who still remembers the first person she worked with.
"It was somebody who had AIDS and he had dementia and went crazy. He flipped out, he pulled all the IV's out, and blood was going everywhere, it was really something. There wasn't much I could do with him. But his mother and I got so close, because it was really his mother that needed information and compassion. She had a big family, but nobody knew what to do. Cassandra's work went through me and to the family in that case."
The volunteers met every week. "We called ourselves 'The Death Group,'" says Bernstein. "We did very serious work, but you can't do that kind of work and not laugh - otherwise you're dead, so to speak."
The Death Group kept their chins up largely behind the strength of Cassandra, who over the years began to look at death as a moment to honor and celebrate life. She wanted to help people tie up all their loose ends and feel comfortable when they left.
One of her patients was a man who puzzled his family by how long he kept hanging on. He slept in a room near his office, and when he awoke he seemed to have eyes for his office chair. Cassandra suggested that he get up and sit in it.
"Maybe he just wanted to die with his boots on, so to speak. Of course his family said no - all the worries you'd have, you don't want to push him over the edge. But I just said let's see where he goes. He had a big son who could help him, and he had all this energy. He walked to his office and sat in the chair - and remember he'd been pretty much unresponsive until then - and he reaches for his glasses, looks at his desk, and nods. His son picks him up, puts him back into bed. An hour later he dies. I laugh - I shouldn't laugh - but it's so touching and moving."
Then there was Ray. He was mostly unresponsive until one night, at about 3 in the morning, he opened his eyes.
"And he said, 'I want breakfast!' They all looked to me - I'm the nurse - and I know you shouldn't have breakfast when you're that close to dying because you could choke to death. But his wife Jean says, 'If the man of the house wants breakfast, he shall have it.' She and the housekeeper cook breakfast and arrange it delicately and bring it on a bed table. They give him little tiny bits of scrambled egg and a piece of toast and he sat there upright, like the man of the house, and he ate and chewed and picked up a napkin and spit it out. It was just so dear. It honored him, deeply.”
Meanwhile, Cassandra also remembers the times she drove to people’s homes and couldn’t bring herself to get of the car.
"It's very painful. I think it's in our culture. We cleaned everything up. We have mortuaries instead of the dining room table - that's where they used to put people after they died. Death was something we knew about. Now nobody knows what to do. The person doesn't look like what they used to look like. And there's tubes and monitors and machines. It's very scary. And what to say? People are thinking, I'm not good at intimacy. It's so much easier to send flowers and walk away."
Cassandra Christenson retired in 1997. Gail stopped volunteering at Project Nightlight around 1995. Ten years later, Gail found out her sister-in-law had a brain tumor and had 3 months to live. She says she still had anxieties – about how to handle it, how to make sure the surviving children would be OK – but by that point something had changed.
"The fear of the process of dying was removed," said Gail. "It was suddenly not this mystery, this unknown. It had facts - it had a beginning, a middle and an end. Cassandra demystified it for me. That's what she did."
David Dean Bottrell, TV's favorite psychopath, makes love, life, laughs
UPDATE: "David Dean Bottrell Makes Love" has two performances at the Outlaugh Festival, part of the Hollywod Frings Festival. Sunday, June 10, at 7p; and Saturday, June 23, at 10p. Off-Ramp talked with Bottrell in 2011.
David Dean Bottrell, the screenwriter and actor, is back with another run of his one-man show "David Dean Bottrell Makes Love." The show is a collection of stories about Bottrell's life experiences with love.
Bottrell says he never wanted to do a one-man show, much less an autobiographical one, but the idea came to him after he did a show in which he told a short story about his ex. He felt the idea had potential and began writing and piecing together stories about all his major experiences with love since the age of six.
Bottrell called his first performance at the Comedy Central Stage “like being shot out of a canon.” The show consists of Bottrell alone onstage with a few props and minimal music and lighting. Although the show has been successful, Bottrell describes it as “the single most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.”
“It’s a very mixed bag kind of show,” Bottrell says. Alongside the racy and appropriately vulgar anecdotes are stories of the actor being in love, getting his first date and meeting his first girlfriend. Bottrell reveals much about his life through the course of the show, including his 10-year relationship with his ex, an alcoholic Irish performer whom he calls “the one big love of my life.” Still on the lookout for love, Bottrell says, “I don’t think I’ve had problems finding love. I’ve had problems keeping love.”
The actor also talks about his relationship with a distant father. Bottrell says his father came from a world where men did not express affection. “At one point in my life, I just decided I kinda didn’t want to go to my grave without trying to say to my dad, ‘I love you,’” Bottrell said. He cites the show as his effort to accomplish this task.
Bottrell grew up in a working-class family in Kentucky and said storytelling was a big part of his upbringing. After moving to New York to pursue acting, his mother wrote him letters about recent happenings, which Bottrell says consisted of mostly bad news. “In between the stories of people’s miscarriages or getting in and out of jail would be a paragraph about how many tomatoes that garden had produced,” he says. One “unintentionally hilarious” letter he received became the basis of the first script he ever wrote.
After moving west and finding success as a screenwriter, a casting director from “Boston Legal” approached Bottrell to play the part of oddball Lincoln Meyer in the third season of the show. “I’ve never been a lead man,” Bottrell says, “I’ve always been the odd guy and that’s always suited me fine because they’re the more interesting roles for me.”
"David Dean Bottrell Makes Love" is at Rogue Machine Theatre, 5041 W. Pico Blvd., Nov. 16 to Dec. 15 on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.
Content advisory: The show is cathartic and uplifting, but there is vulgarity and some funny but disgusting descriptions of bodily functions.
Why does LA love Langer's Deli? Langer's to celebrate 65th anniversary with free sandwiches
To celebrate its 65th anniversary, Langer's Deli will be giving out free sandwiches next weekend, June 15th and 16th, at Macarthur Park. The iconic deli will be handing out their popular #19 sandwiches - that's juicy pastrami, swiss cheese, russian dressing and cole slaw - for FREE.
Off-Ramp's Jerry Gorin went down to Langer's during a lunch rush this week to talk to people about what makes Langer's so special and what keeps them coming back after all these years. Here's what some hungry patrons had to say:
"I've been coming here for about 2 years. We work in downtown and try to come down twice a week. We only come for the pastrami."
"I've been coming here for 25 years. I think it's a classic!"
"I live in London, and I specifically asked on this visit to have a reuben sandwich, so where's the best place? And I was told this is the best pastrami."
"I've been coming to Langer's about twice a week for about 10 years. It's the culture of Los Angeles!"
"Probably the best pastrami sandwich I've ever had."
We wish we had counted how many times the word "pastrami" came up; people were talking about it as though it were gold. In fact, we hope next weekend's pastrami giveaway will be well patrolled, because things might get out of hand really fast.