The Art of Wealth tells the untold story of the Huntington family ... ethics and the OC Register ... Texas Loves Lyla! at the Hollywood Fringe Festival ... Bottle Tree Ranch ... Tyris continues his evolution from South LA to college student ... James Gandolfini, c 1990 ... 16-year old starts her own vegan bakery
Recipe: 16-year-old wanted 'yummy' vegan desserts, so she started Clara Cakes
When she couldn’t find "yummy" vegan baked goods, 12 year old Clara Polito took matters into her own hands and started baking her own. Now, at 16, Polito has her own baking company called Clara Cakes.
In the kitchen in her Atwater Village home, Clara Polito pulls out ingredients to bake chocolate cupcakes, one of the first recipes she wrote. Soy milk, cocoa powder, and flour sit on the counter waiting to be poured into metal mixing bowls. "I basically started baking when I became vegan because I wanted to have yummy tasting vegan baked goods, because I couldn't really find any otherwise. So I kind of created a vegan bakery in my kitchen, which was fun," says Polito about her start.
As she bakes, Beastie Boys blast in the background. There are iPod speakers on the dining room table. Concert posters cover her bedroom walls. Music plays a big role in Polito’s life. She started selling baked goods in 2010 at The Smell, an all ages venue in downtown L.A. It was a record release show for the band No Age. Her mom has supported her since the start, driving her to bake sales and concerts.
In her all white 50s inspired kitchen, Polito taught herself through trial and error. She read dessert cookbooks and watched vegan cooking tutorials online.
"I remember making cakes that would constantly taste like bananas because bananas are a common egg replacer, and so that always bummed me out,'" says Polito. "It definitely took a lot of practice to finally get everything tasting how it needs to taste."
Now, Polito has perfected her trade and has a range of original recipes that will make your mouth water. She plays on Girl Scout cookies with her “Not So Thin Mint” cupcakes, makes S’mores Bars, Lemon Pows, and her most popular dessert - The Inception Cookie, an Oreo stuffed chocolate chip cookie.
Clara Cakes does custom orders, pop-up shops, and now has desserts sold at Pizzanista in downtown L.A. Polito dreams of opening up a bakery. She says,"It’d be cool to open a bakery before I’m 20. I definitely want to be a teen. I want the timing to be right."
Chocolate Cupcake Recipe
Ingredients (makes 1 dozen cupcakes):
1 cup soy milk
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 cup flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon
baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon chocolate extract
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and line muffin pan with cupcake liners. Pour 1 cup of soy milk in a large bowl and whisk in vinegar. Let it curdle (it’ll take a few minutes and eventually will look like cottage cheese). While waiting for soy milk mixture to curdle, sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add sugar, oil and extracts to the soy milk mixture and whisk until foamy. Add the flour in two batches. Beat until just smooth. Spoon the batter into the liners. Bake for 20 minutes (or until a toothpick comes out clean). Place on cooling rack until cool, then frost.
Vanilla Frosting
Ingredients:
1/2 cup vegan butter or margarine
1/2 cup shortening
2-2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
4 tablespoons soy milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Directions:
Combine ingredients and beat on medium speed until fluffy.
A colorful forest in the Mojave Desert -- Elmer Long and his Bottle Tree Ranch
Off Route 66, just north of Victorville, there's a forest in the desert. The forest has hundreds of trees -- but they're all made from bottles.
For decades, Elmer Long has collected glass bottles and made trees out of them, displaying them in the desert at what he calls Bottle Tree Ranch. Long isn't sure what compels him to make trees out of bottles. "I don't know," he says, laughing. "People like it, it will put a smile on anybody's face. For me, it's my whole life."
Raised in Manhattan beach, Long joined the military in 1964 and served in both Hawaii and Vietnam. Now he's in the Mojave Desert, attracting both road-trippers and tourists from around the world with his translucent trees. "I got stuck out here," Long says.
Long's Bottle Tree Ranch is a massive work of art, with railroad signs, sun-bleached animal bones, and countless colorful bottles that catch the desert sunlight. But ... "I've never considered myself an artist," he says. "I do see things that other people don't see."
For Long, it's not just about the things he collects, it's about the stories that go with them too. "There's more out here than the eye can see. A lot of times you don't even know what you're looking at."
Don't give up on the kids in South LA. Crenshaw High's Tyris Williams is thriving at UC Irvine
I've been following seniors from Crenshaw High as they make their way into the adult world. In the first piece on Tyris Williams and his grandmother, we looked at the rising cost of tuition. Then, we took a snapshot of Tyris’ life as he was about to graduate from Crenshaw High, headed to UC Irvine, and apprehensive about dealing with the world outside his home life in South LA.
Now, we meet Tyris as he's thriving (sorry for the spoiler) at UC Irvine.
Watch the video of Tyris and his super smart fellow "class of 2012 graduates" as they weighed in on various issues of the day. It was shot at Crenshaw High last year.
Get your curling on at Orange County's first 3-day bonspiel
Americans got pretty excited about curling during the last Winter Olympics. It's a sport that is best described as a sort of shuffleboard on ice with brooms.
This weekend, you can not only try curling yourself, but mingle with the best in the sport. It's Orange County's first 3-day bonspiel, or curling tournament, and it's happening at The Rinks-Westminster Ice, on Springdale in Westminster through 3:30 p.m.Sunday afternoon.
Ryan Harty, Co-Chair of the Surf City Spiel and Vice President of the Orange County Curling Club, joins John Rabe on the line for a preview.
Interview Highlights:
What is curling?:
"Curling is a sport that's kind of like chess on ice. There's a detailed element of strategy involved as well as shot execution. Every single rock has to be placed by the team in the right location and that takes skill, and speed, and stamina by each of the players on the team."
What is a bonspiel?
"A bonspiel is a curling tournament. And our bonspiel has teams coming from all over North America to compete against each other for the right to with the Richard Ramirez Memorial Cup."(And we should point out that this Richard Ramirez is the late founder of the Orange County Curling Club, not this Richard Ramirez.)
How many clubs are there in Southern California?
"There are three clubs in Southern California. There's one in Escondido, there's our club in Orange County, and there's the Hollywood club."
What is it that makes curling different?
"One of the amazing things about the sport of curling is that it's very much a curling community sport. People at all levels get to come and play together and compete against each other. We have members who this will be their first ever bonspiel and they'll be playing against teams who have been to the Olympics. And I think curling is the only sport where people can meet and compete in that way."
How can people learn to curl?
"Nearly every Saturday night at the rinks westminster ice we have a 'learn to curl' session. And people can come out and sign up for the event and join a two hour session to get out on the ice and learn the skills and actually play a short game."
'Simpson's' writer/producer remembers James Gandolfini's early acting days
James Gandolfini, the actor who played Tony Soprano, died of an apparent heart attack Wednesday on vacation in Italy. He was only 51. Gandolfini played mafia boss Tony Soprano from 1999-2007, winning 3 Emmys and helping to legitimize drama on cable.
Ten years before "The Sopranos," Gandolfini's talent was obvious. Michael Price, now a writer and co-executive producer on "The Simpsons," says around 1990, he was running a little theatre in Newark NJ called The Ironbound Theatre, non-Equity, non-paying. For one of their productions, they were looking for a man to play a garbage collector.
James Gandolfini auditioned, and immediately got the part. He came to one rehearsal, Price remembers, but then had to beg off the production because he was offered a role in Death of a Salesman ... a better role, and for pay. Price said he understood, but he remembered those two short encounters for years to come.
"What an incredible capacity for intensity and realness, " Price said. "I mean, that's what I think made Tony Soprano such an indelible character is that you totally believed that he was this guy, you know, that he was capable of all the, of being this huge range of emotions — you know, loving his family, but also a guy who will kill someone who gets in his way. And of course, he was taken from us way too soon. I'm sure there would have been years and years of amazing performances to come."
Book review: SoCal's wealthy Huntington family in Shelley Bennett’s 'The Art of Wealth'
She was a winsome teen who blew into post-Civil War New York with a tin-horn gambler on the run from the law. Soon, she was pregnant and writing to one of the richest men in America, "Dear Mr. Huntington, I am so worried I don’t know what to do.” Yes, that Mr. Huntington.
It’s a story never before told in full, in "The Art of Wealth," Shelley Bennett's spectacular new quadruple biography of Arabella, Collis, Henry and Archer Huntington, a fierce family foursome that gave the Southland the Red Car lines and its most venerated museum, and America two of its greatest fortunes.
Collis Huntington, a former Sacramento storekeeper who became top executive of America’s transcontinental railroad, knew just what to do. He never denied he was father of Arabella Yarrington’s little boy Archer, but just how the married robber baron became such has never been disclosed, according to "The Art of Wealth."
Huntington pulled Arabella and son Archer from her off-Bowery hovel and put them in a house of her own on Lexington Avenue. Thus began her 30-year rise to Gilded Age aristocrat that left her official portrait glowering down through tinted pince-nez at visitors to the Huntington Library in San Marino.
When his wife, Elizabeth, died in 1884, Arabella married Collis and moved in with him — after a courtship of 16 years. But Bennett insists she was never a kept woman. “She was a shrewd investor," she told me.
"When she borrowed from Collis, she paid him back,” Bennett added. By the time the two got hitched, she’d made the equivalent of more than $6 million hustling Manhattan real estate. She had her own mansion on New York’s West 54th Street, which she sold to none other than John D. Rockefeller (it’s now the MOMA sculpture garden).
The pair became formidable collectors of great art: They could afford virtually anything when much of Europe’s art was for sale. They built themselves a Fifth Avenue palace, where Tiffany’s stands now, and bought a mansion on San Francisco’s Nob Hill. They commuted between the coasts and filled both homes with art they bought in Europe.
This is not the book to read if you’d like to learn how Collis Huntington’s railroad became notorious in California as The Octopus. Bennett acknowledges Collis was a notorious robber baron, but notes that he was also a passionate progressive on issues like the abolition of slavery and the education of black people (he was a supporter of Tuskegee Institute), and he opposed Asian exclusion laws. Booker T. Washington was a major admirer of the elder Huntington, who, toward the end of his life, became involved with the Metropolitan Museum where many of his paintings now hang.
After Collis died, Arabella married — wait for this — his nephew, Henry. They had much in common besides a last name. They were the same age, for one thing. (Collis had been almost 30 years older than Arabella.) But they also shared a love of art and great means to acquire.
It’s after Henry Huntington that Huntington Drive, Huntington Beach and Huntington Park are named. He created not only the venerated Red Car system, but also the communities that it served from Ontario to Orange County. As historian Reyner Banham noted, Henry really invented Greater Los Angeles
As Arabella went on collecting, Henry bought 800 acres of San Marino and built his library, plus a bower for his bride that became the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, long one of the Southland’s foremost showplaces of fine art.
Bennett says her book, the consummation of her 31-year career at the Huntington, stems from her finding a cornucopia of Huntingtonia in son Archer’s own museum, the Hispanic Society in New York. It’s a six-year labor of love, with a wealth of reproduced masterpieces and family photos. It leaves her only one unanswered question: “I’d like to see a DNA test to prove that Archer is really Collis Huntington’s son.”
If Molly Ivins and Minnie Pearl had a love child, it might be 'Texas Loves Lyla!' at the Hollywood Fringe Festival
Just once, I'd like to meet a personality-based drag queen who, underneath the huge bouffant, the dowdy dress, and the huge boobs, has a huge bouffant, dowdy dress, and huge boobs. But no, Jeffrey Wylie is almost distressingly normal looking. Handsome even.
Wylie grew up in Corpus Christie, Texas, knew he was gay at the age of ten, felt religion-induced self-loathing until he came out in his mid 20s - until which time he confesses he was a very unpleasant person - and then, some years later, put on drag for the first time.
Wylie says, "I was assistant director on a stage production a group of friends were doing, Go Ax Alice, based on the novel Go Ask Alice, about a teenage girl that runs away from home and winds up OD'ing. This was a drag muscial comedy about it." At which point I do a spit take. But it was a huge success, Wylie says. Humor is, of course, the only way to deal with some subjects.
Five days before the show opened, the typical Hollywood story happened, an actor dropped out and jumped in. "It was so liberating and so much fun." He says at first he did Dorothy Michaels (Tootsie), and here he slips into a pretty good impression of Dustin Hoffman's only known drag performance. But then a friend took him aside. "That's cute," he said, "but you need your own character." The friend came up with the name Lyla KaRug, but the character came from Wylie's own great aunt Gladys Godfrey - her real name - who, as Wylie describes her, was straight out of Central Casting.
Lyla lives in Cooterville, Texas, and does a radio call-in show from her back yard. "If you've got an issue," she says, "I've got a tissue." And so she deals with gay teenage callers, bullying, and suicide.
Texas Loves Lyla! runs through June 29 at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Tickets are just $12.
RIP Lou Schreiber, 80: Dance instructor taught 50,000+ to 'Walk in, Dance Out'
In his 62-year career as a ballroom dance instructor, Lou Schreiber held sway over a studio aptly named “Walk In Dance Out.” Schreiber estimated conservatively that he had taught 50,000 Southern Californians to fox trot, rhumba, salsa and swing. His specialty was teaching people who had never danced a step in their lives to feel confident on the dance floor.
Keith Gayhart, Lou's student for six years in the early 1990s, was one of them. “He was the perfect dance instructor for someone like me — a guy with no natural sense of rhythm. He taught people to dance by simplifying popular ballroom steps and reinforcing them through constant, cheerful repetition. I wouldn’t last long on 'Dancing with the Stars,' but at a wedding or a bar mitzvah, I feel like Fred Astaire ... at least after the second glass of wine.”
Schreiber died on June 8 at age 80. Just days before, he'd taught his last dance class and danced a rhumba with his long-time partner, Luz Diaz, at an event held by USA Dance to honor him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
“Lou Schreiber was a masterful teacher who brought the joy of ballroom dance to thousands in the Southland by creating a warm and friendly atmosphere in his classes, making it fun and easy to learn, help build confidence and giving people an avenue to meet one another through the common denominator of dance,” says Jerry Hernandez, president of the Los Angeles chapter of USA Dance and a ballroom dance instructor. “He was admired by his peers and mentored many in the industry on his methods of teaching, and maintained the awareness and importance of ballroom dance.”
Schreiber gave a start to the careers of many Southland dance teachers, including Debbie D’Aquino, a popular social dance instructor in the South Bay, and Francisco Martinez of Dance Family Studio in Pasadena.
“It was Lou who launched my teaching career as a dance instructor,” says D’Aquino. “I worked along side of Lou three nights a week, every week, for nine years, and we were teaching over 1,200 students every week. He had an amazing system developed to get people dancing who had never danced before and believed less in proper dance technique and more in having fun on the dance floor. Lou was a dear friend and certainly my greatest mentor, and I will miss him greatly.”
Schreiber started his career as a ballroom dance instructor at Arthur Murray’s when he was 18 and rapidly moved to the position of Master Trainer of Dance Instructors, winning First Place in Arthur Murray’s National Dance Teacher’s competition when he was 20. He went independent in 1959, opening Walk In Dance Out. And he had a day job, as professor of psychology and business management at Los Angeles Harbor College for several decades.
Tall and imposing, Lou alternately cajoled, joked and chastised his students. And it worked. He taught a veritable ballroom dance corps of more than 50,000 people, most of whom, like Gayhart, still feel like Fred Astaire on the dance floor. “I have no doubt there are thousands of people spread across Southern California who feel exactly the same way,” Gayhart says. “Not a bad legacy.”
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.
Welcoming summer with this week's photo from the LA Public Library
Our lead photo this week comes from the Ralph Morris collection at the LA Public Library. According to the library, it's just one of thousands of photographs by Morris, a commercial photographer. Here's how his son Michael described the collection when it was donated years ago.
Over 40,000 photographs by commercial photographer Ralph Morris, who had a studio on 8th Street in the Los Angeles area from 1939 until 1981. He and his associates specialized in advertising and industrial photography, and their clientele included department stores, restaurants, businesses, the automobile and petroleum industries. Two of his major clients were Popular Mechanics Magazine and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, plus the Press Club for over 35 years, and the staff photographer for the Jonathan Club (a very prestigious business club) from the mid 1950s through the late 1970s. When he moved to Los Angeles (from Toronto) in 1939 he bought an existing business named Luckhaus Studios. The collection includes all of their glass plate and acetate photographs of architecture, fashion, the movie industry, sports and street scenes from 1910 to the late 1930s.
The collection is online and searchable. Browse through it and get better acquainted with Los Angeles!