The Flesh Eaters reunite to tell the story of their album "A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die," Kevin Ferguson has lunch with Tommy Lasorda at his favorite restaurant, we meet the sole survivor of a disaster you probably haven't heard about.
Sunday Assembly, new atheist 'church' in LA, celebrates 'the one life we know we have'
The Sunday Assembly is a godless congregation that celebrates life. Our motto: live better, help often, wonder more. Our mission: to help everyone find and fulfill their full potential. Our vision: a godless congregation in every town, city and village that wants one.
— Sunday Assembly website
On September 28th, 2014, an international organization founded in England less than two years ago doubled in size when it launched 35 new affiliates in a single day.
It's called Sunday Assembly, and it has a lot in common with the mainline churches its name calls to mind. It was founded as a place for the like-minded to meet and support each other — to sing songs, hold hands and do good works. It has almost everything people turn to organized religion for — except the God part.
WATCH: Sunday Assembly LA's YouTube channel
Sunday Assembly is an atheist organization, one that's riding a huge wave of secularism in the US. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 1 in 5 Americans are now unaffiliated with any religion — a number that rises to 1 in 3 for people under 30.
Still, it's never exactly been easy to be an atheist in America.
Ian Dodd, a co-director of the LA Branch of Sunday Assembly, which meets this Sunday in LA, was raised in a secular-humanist household. He remembers the topic of religion as a fraught one. "I got threatened [by] the neighborhood kids that I would burn in hell," Dodd says. "Fourth grade? The teacher, in violation of the law, asked each student to recite the Lord's Prayer before we started each school day. This was in a public school. "Eventually it came to be my day, and she said, 'Would you like to lead us in the Lord's Prayer.' I said 'No.' She looked aghast and said 'Why?' And I said, 'Because I don't know it.'"
(Amy Boyle, RH Greene, and Ian Boyle. Credit: RH Greene)
At 50ish, Ian's a child of the Cold War era, when the word "Godless" often seemed like a first name for the word "Communism." The Atheist as morally bankrupt.
According to Amy Boyle, co-director of LA's Sunday Assembly, the Cold War may be over, but the stereotype remains. Boyle says people who find out she's an atheist ask her how she can be good "all the time. And I think that idea, it's condescending. We're social people. We feel good when we help people. We feel bad when we hurt people. I didn't learn that from any ancient text. And I don't think we need an ancient text to tell us that we can build great things and make great projects when we build things, and that it's hard to do that if we're all killing each other and running red lights."
So what is Sunday Assembly, exactly? Well, it was created by British comedians for one thing. Which only seems odd until you think about it. Because, what is comedy if not scepticism with a laugh track?
Mel Brooks and the 15, whoops, 10 Commandments
"The genesis of Sunday Assembly," says Ian Dodd, "is that it was the brainchild of two stand-up comedians, Pippa Evans and Saunderson Jones. They were driving to a gig. And they started talking about this idea that 'Gosh, isn't it great when people get together and sing and celebrate. Why do they have to bring all of the superstition along with it?'"
That celebratory aspect sets Sunday Assembly apart from the so-called New Atheists, who have dominated the conversation about unbelief for the past decade or so. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens, engaged in showy debates with clerics and other symbols of religious authority.
WATCH: Richard Dawkins on organized religion
The New Atheists embraced the Culture Wars. Sunday Assembly shuns them, controversially at times.
At Sunday Assembly LA's monthly meetings, there's singing. There's dancing. And there are guest speakers who discourse on brainy scientific and social topics in friendly, everyman terms. Where the New Atheism of the 2000s delighted in confrontation, this is Ted Talk Atheism. And if that sounds disparaging, it isn't meant to be. Molotov cocktails offer one kind of fire. A sing-a-long around a hearth offers quite another, and is probably more suited to a movement attempting to go mainstream.
According to Amy Boyle, "there are all these new [Sunday Assemblies] starting. And they're starting all over. They're starting in Brussels. There's a new Sunday Assembly that wants to start in China. There are Sunday Assemblies blossoming in places where it is not yet legal to leave the religion of the state, where 'apostasy' is still punishable by death."
"It isn't about celebrating atheism. It's about having like values, and finding greater meaning in the world, without mentioning the 'God' word."
Hmmm. A transformative philosophical movement whose acolytes are willing to spread their beliefs under pain of death. That reminds me of a story I heard once...
ATTEND this weekend's Sunday Assembly in LA
Sunday Assembly assembles this Sunday in LA. The host is Brian Keith Dalton, aka, "Mr. Deity," and the guest speaker is Dr. Clifford Johnson, theoretical physicist at USC, with a presentation called "The Origin Has Its Own Origin Story."
Why does the LADWP building have a giant reflecting pool in the middle of a drought?
This past Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced an ambitious new plan to combat the drought in L.A. He wants the L.A. Department of Water and Power to reduce its dependence on imported water by 50 percent before 2024, for starters. The mayor also called for the city to reduce its water consumption 20 percent by 2017.
"The global metropolis that we have here today has been a leader on water conservation. I couldn't be prouder of my city," said Garcetti. "But current measures are simply not enough."
Garcetti made the announcement in front of the John Ferraro Building, the headquarters for the LADWP. The John Ferraro Building is a beautiful, mid-century structure surrounded almost entirely by a 1.2 million-gallon reflecting pool.
Which begs the question — if Angelenos are being asked to reduce their water use by 20 percent, why does the department that provides the water and collects the bills have a giant pool of water surrounding their headquarters?
Guy Lipa, LADWP chief of staff, provided an answer.
"It's easy to look at the reflecting pool and just see it purely as a reflecting pool and think it's a waste of water. But in fact, it's a core function of our building," said Lipa. "The water in our reflecting pools actually represent the ability for us to cool our data center in an emergency situation. So this water can actually get pumped up through cooling towers if the power goes out or during scheduled outages."
In addition, Lipa said the reflecting pool is filled with filtered, recirculated water, including some of the water from the building's air conditioning system.
And while Lipa acknowledges that 1.2 million gallons is a lot of water — it's all relative. It takes just a day for 13,000-14,000 Angelenos to use up that much.
"It's a vision of sort of green building and efficient water use in a building, and I think people should look at it and think about it as opportunities to think about how they can incorporate some of this stuff into other parts of the city," Lipa said.
Sorry, but a magic unicorn won't make your pledge for you
One of the big problems we have in public radio is that our normally logical listeners throw all logic aside when it comes to our pledge drives. They pay their taxes, they pay their cable bills, they pay for groceries and make their mortgage. But when it comes to paying for public radio, they think a magic unicorn will take care of everything.
Luckily, we have a magic unicorn. It's a new desktop toy called Ask the Unicorn. You ask a question and push the button, and it answers. Listen to find out what happened when Take Two producer/director Stephen Hoffman played the role of a hapless listener trying to use magical thinking during the Fall Fundraiser.
And then give now please to keep KPCC wild and free, just like a beautiful unicorn.
LA punk experimentalists The Flesh Eaters remember eclectic album 'A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die'
Long a sought-after collector's item, the Flesh Eaters iconic album has finally been reissued on LP and CD by Superior Viaduct.
"A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die" is an album with a reputation. The music is a whacked mix R&B, jazz, rockabilly, and African chants, pulled through the caustic strainer of 1980s L.A. punk.
Flesh Eaters' musicians came from some of the best bands of the genre and the era: D.J. Bonebrake and John Doe from X, The Blasters' Dave Alvin and Bill Bateman, and Los Lobos' Steve Berlin, along with singer Chris Desjardins.
RELATED: Watch DJ Bonebreak play some of the riffs from "A Minute to Die..."
This line-up of The Flesh Eaters came together in 1981 in the midst of what's now looked back on as the "Roots Punk Revival." Legendary SoCal bands X, The Blasters, and Los Lobos were all exploring the music they grew up with — and so were many of their contemporaries, including The Gun Club, Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs, and The Cramps.
Slash Records, the fanzine turned label, was producing the debut albums of X and the Blasters. Lead singer Chris Desjardins, a Slash employee, was put in charge of the label's subsidiary, Ruby Records. His band, the Flesh Eaters, had existed in various line-ups since 1977, releasing a 45 and an LP of surfy LA minute-long hardcore on Desjardins' own Upsetter Records.
A big fan of R&B, Country, and the blues, Desjardins wanted to get in on what all his friends were doing. He recorded himself singing along to cassettes of African chanting while driving around the city. He then asked Dave Alvin (guitarist) and John Doe (bassist) if they could figure out chords to go with his vocals.
Desjardins is also a pop culture historian, and an expert in Japanese gangster films. Here's one of his lines from "A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die," a good one for Halloween:
Half of my kingdom is about to disappear,
sinking with no mercy in a glassful of beer
The clip joint boss bolted bronze to human lips,
but he made out the words, "I can still feel Jesus' kiss"
Bill Bateman was brought in on drums, Steve Berlin on saxophone, and DJ Bonebrake on marimba and other percussion.
It didn't take long for all of the songs to come together — Alvin remembers something like eight practice sessions. They recorded their album almost totally live, though you can hear raspy vocal overdubs here and there to skin crawling effect. It was released the same year. They played fewer than 10 live shows.
"It's an odd little collection of songs," Alvin remarks. No two tracks sound quite alike. There's "Digging My Grave", the Sonics-style garage rock rave up. "Satan's Stomp," a one-chord, jazzy meditation with Bonebrake on snare drum and Berlin wailing his lungs out.
Audio: 'Satan's Stomp' by the Flesh Eaters
Then there's "So Long," which transitions from African rhythm in the verse to rockabilly in the bridge, to a psych rock freakout reprise of the African rhythm.
"It was Chris's vision," Alvin concedes. "We were just there for the beer."
This isn't a band trying to fit a style or concept. They're simple songs, all revolving around some kind of R&B groove, that play to the strengths and musical knowledge of the band.
Everyone has their moment on the record. It sounds very spur of the moment, and when you listen to the live recordings, you can tell they never quite came out the same way twice.
Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the date the Flesh Eaters were formed. The story has been changed to correct the band's chronology.
'Gertie the Dinosaur,' animation watershed, deserved a bigger 100th birthday party
On September 14, 1914, a man named Winsor McCay stepped onto the stage of the Palace Theater in Chicago and changed the history of animation and popular culture forever.
McCay was a cartoonist, a pioneer animator and a vaudeville star. That night at the Palace, he introduced his latest film, "Gertie the Dinosaur."
RELATED: Go behind the scenes at "The Simpson's" animation studio
It was only 12 minutes long, but no one had seen anything like it. Because there hadn’t been anything like it.
Three years earlier, McCay had made Little Nemo, using characters from his magnificent comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland.”
Earlier animated films by other artists had shown simple line figures performing elementary motions, but McCay's characters moved so smoothly and realistically in three-dimensional space, audiences assumed he had made Nemo with live actors and trick photography.
WATCH: Winsor McCay's groundbreaking "Little Nemo" (1911)
For his third film McCay chose a subject that couldn't be faked.
"Gertie the Dinosaur" was arguably his greatest achievement — and a watershed in the history of animation. On stage, McCay would give a command and the projected Gertie would respond. When McCay coaxed, she shyly emerged from her cave to bow to the audience.
WATCH: The even more groundbreaking "Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914)
In "Gertie the Dinosaur," McCay laid the foundations of character animation, which is the art of delineating a character's personality through an individual style of movement.
Viewers understood Gertie’s endearing, somewhat childish personality from the angle at which she cocked her head while listening to a command — and the impudence with which she flicked her tail while disobeying it.
Audiences finally realized they were seeing something new: a film comprised of drawings. Nearly 20 years would pass before anyone did more polished animation.
For a character who represents both the prehistory of life and the prehistory of animation, Gertie wears her years very lightly: the audience acted with surprise and delight when historian and animator John Canemaker recreated McCay’s vaudeville routine in a lecture at LACMA.
Sadly, beyond the Motion Picture Academy’s presentation of Canemaker’s talk, no one did much to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this landmark film that blazed the trail for Walt Disney, Chuck Jones, John Lasseter and countless other animators.
There’s no Gertie commemorative stamp. President Obama is awarding Jeffrey Katzenberg the Presidential Medal for the Arts, but the President has never spoken McCay’s name in public. In Paris, the rue Méliès honors that French pioneer of animation, but there’s no Winsor McCay Boulevard in Los Angeles or New York.
WATCH: The trippy "A Trip to the Moon" from the Méliès brothers
It’s another example how shabbily America treats the films that influence the art of animation and pop culture around the world. Despite that neglect, "Gertie the Dinosaur" continues to entertain and inspire audiences — and will for another 100 years.
Charles Solomon latest books are "The Art of the Disney Golden Books" and "Once Upon a Dream: From Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty to Maleficent."
Norman Lear, legendary TV producer, got Americans laughing — and talking
Norman Lear — who wrote, produced and created shows like "All in the Family," "Sanford and Sons," "The Jeffersons" — told KPCC's Patt Morrison that he feels he got America to talk to each other.
"People who meet or see me and recognize me will say, 'I can't forget having spent those years looking at the show with my family, because my father was like Archie, my mother was like Edith,'" said Lear, who is promoting his new memoir. "And that's what I got, mostly. It caused people to talk together."
Lear's new book, titled "Even This I Get to Experience," chronicles his childhood, his career creating some of America's most beloved TV shows, and his history of progressive political activism. Lear spoke with Morrison at his office in Beverly Hills.
Interview Highlights:
On the lasting effect his creations had on American conversation:
You know, I think the major effect was that it helped Americans to talk to one another. People who meet or see me and recognize me will say, "I can't forget having spent those years looking at the show with my family, because my father was like Archie, my mother was like Edith." And that's what I got, mostly. It caused people to talk together.
You know, as writers, we sat about scraping the barrels of our own experience. Everybody read the newspapers, everybody paid closer attention to their children, to their wives, to their families. And that's where we got our stories. And that's why so much of it was volatile or edgy. It was current, is the way I looked at it.
On what made his shows so revolutionary for American TV:
What I used to hear before anything else was, "Listen, if you want to send messages, there's Western Union." I didn't know how to answer that until I began to realize that before "All in the Family" went on the air, the "Beverly Hillbillies" of the world — the edgiest subject they worked with was something like "the roast is ruined, and the boss is coming to dinner."
Well, if that's all you're doing on television, and that's the kind of problem families faced, then look at that statement. There is no race issue in America, there are no economic problems, we're not facing war, we love everybody that's elected to office — that's a heavy message.
On the controversial character Archie Bunker:
There was no doubt that he had bigoted attitudes. But I had a father that used to call me the laziest white kid he ever met. I would scream at him, "You're a bigot! Why do you have to put down a whole race of people to call me lazy?" "That's not what I'm doing! And you're the dumbest white kid I've ever met!"
But in terms of impact, I remember thinking constantly, where racism is concerned, "If a couple of thousand years of the Judeo-Christian ethic didn't blunt or stop racism, my little half-hour situation comedies weren't going to do the job."
Visit amazon.com to purchase Norman Lear's "Even This I Get to Experience."
Sole survivor of 1971 Sylmar tunnel collapse tells his story
Angelenos — natives or transplants — learn about the big disasters as a matter of course: the Northridge Earthquake, the 1993 Malibu wildfire, the bursting of the St. Francis Dam. But the lore usually doesn't include one of the nation's worst industrial accidents: the 1971 tunnel collapse that killed 17 men. And it should.
The story starts near the corner of Fenton and Maclay in Sylmar. Here, there's a giant pit with a tall concrete wall at one end. That's the start of a Metropolitan Water District tunnel that was to bring water from Lake Castaic, and it's the emergency operation staging ground for the photos in our slideshow.
On June 23, 1971, miners hit a pocket of methane five miles into the tunnel. A few were injured by a small explosion, but work wasn't stopped. Instead, according to Ralph Brissette, they decided to try to dilute the methane by pumping in regular air.
"And I guess it didn't work," Brissette says.
He should know. The methane exploded when work resumed the next day, killing all of his coworkers: 15 miners, one electrician and an inspector. Brissette says he was apparently shielded from the blast by the radiator of the train used to transport men and materials to the job site.
"I was working as a 'brakey,' a person who rides the locomotive back and forth in case there's a derailment," Brissette recalls. "It was really cool then, and [for heat] I was standing on the front of the locomotive near the radiator, and all of a sudden there was an explosion. It was a hell of a blast. I guess I lost consciousness." He was stuck in the tunnel for seven hours.
Lockheed, the tunnel contractor, was found guilty in criminal and civil court and forced to pay almost $10 million.
READ THE CASE: People v. Lockheed Shipbuilding & Constr. Co.
The disaster, the worst tunnel disaster ever in California, also brought about the stiffest safety regulations in the country.
But it wasn't until 2013 that the MWD erected a memorial to the 17 victims. Peter Rosenwald, a librarian, community activist and friend of Brissette, says, "I first heard of [the disaster] in 2011. I was talking to Ralph. and he told me about the incident. I said, 'Was there ever a memorial?' And he said, 'No'. And I said, 'Let's try to work on it.'"
(Ralph Brissette at the dedication of the memorial to his fallen co-workers. Image: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.)
Brissette doesn't know what to make of the fact that he survived when his friends didn't — men like miner Danny Blaylock, with whom he'd go hunting for deer and rabbit. "Out here in the Valley. We were close. Very close ... family," he says.
Del Casher invented the wah-wah pedal and changed rock and roll history
Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, George Harrison — none of them would sound quite like they do without Del Casher. In the mid-'60s, Casher helped develop a device he envisioned as the new voice of the guitar. He called it the wah-wah pedal.
The wah made it possible to take the electric guitar from a harsh sound to a softer one with a simple rock of the foot. Here's a demonstration of a wah-wah pedal in action:
Dunlop GCB95F Crybaby Classic Wah Pedal Demo - Sweetwater Sound
Now in his 70s, the pedal's inventor runs a studio in Burbank and still writes and performs. But before Casher came to California, he was an Indiana kid fascinated with musicians like Django Reinhardt and Les Paul.
Casher's dad bought him a Sears Roebuck guitar for $9.95 Casher got to work modifying his electric guitars just like Les Paul. It was also Casher's father who suggested he go to Los Angeles to pursue music further — but like so many who come to Southern California to pursue a dream, Casher wasn't thinking realistically.
His big plan was to ask Lawrence Welk (of "The Lawrence Welk Show") if he had a job for him during an autograph signing.
"As I approached him I said, 'Mr. Welk I'm not here for an autograph, I'd like to play guitar in your orchestra, because I'm from Hammond, Indiana and I play really great guitar," Casher said. "And he looked at me and he said 'Absolutely not!'"
After Welk turned him down, Casher landed a job playing with the Three Suns at L.A.'s hottest night club: The Coconut Grove. Before long, it was Welk who was calling Casher to solo with his orchestra.
Del Casher "Dark Eyes" - The Lawrence Welk Show
Casher says he always tinkered with his sound, looked for ways to make his guitar do new things. His biggest idea came while he was playing guitar with a traveling group of musicians' Vox amplifiers put together in order to show off their products.
"I turned a knob. And I turned the wrong knob because that knob went 'wow.' And I said, 'That's the sound I've been looking for!' So I went to Stan Cutler, who was head of engineering, and I said 'Stan, you know that little knob over there on that amplifier, could you put that in a pedal?'"
The wah-wah pedal was born. Now Casher keeps the original in a bright red case
But to Casher's surprise, the people at Vox didn't get it. Casher got Joe Banaran, the chairman of Vox, to take a listen. But, according to Casher, Banaran saw the wah-wah pedal for trumpets and trombones — not guitars.
Casher knew he had to sell people on the wah-wah for guitar, so he got creative. He made a Vox Wah-Wah demo record in his own garage studio. Casher even tried showing the pedal off for James Brown, but Brown wasn't interested either.
It wasn't looking good for the wah.
"I got nobody on my side," Casher said. "I'm thinking I'll call up my friend Frank Zappa. I told Frank, 'The wah-wah pedal is really something you should consider, because I can't get anyone else to go for it.'"
Zappa found plenty of uses for the wah — and Casher says that's how Jimi Hendrix got turned on to it.
"The biggest fame that Jimi had got with the wah pedal was playing Woodstock, which was 1969," Casher said. "Everybody said, 'how's he getting that magical sound?' Well, just call me up, I'll tell you how to do it, I already been doing it for two years."
Once you start listening for the wah, you'll hear it everywhere. From Funkadelic solos, to Led Zeppelin licks, to Isaac Hayes' Academy Award-winning theme for "Shaft."
George Harrison even wrote a song called "Wah-Wah" and in it gave the pedal plenty of playing time.
"The wah-wah pedal was a device that was allowing him to express a particular feeling," said Casher. "That was exactly my vision for the pedal. Everybody has whatever they want it to be and the wah-wah enables them to do that."
New Los Angeles poet laureate Luis J. Rodriguez: ‘My refuge was the public library'
Writer Luis J. Rodriguez has done time in jail. He's been homeless and a member of a gang. But Rodriguez has also published 15 books and run for California governor.
Now he's Los Angeles's second poet laureate.
RELATED: Frank O'Hara's lunch poems turn 50
For Mayor Eric Garcetti, Rodriguez was the clear choice for the job. "Luis Rodriguez is the embodiment of Los Angeles. Our struggles, our challenges. Our successes and our triumphs," Garcetti said.
During his acceptance speech, Rodriguez shared his difficult past and some of his first experiences with the library:
"At 15, I dropped out of school, got kicked out of the house, and briefly ended up homeless, mostly in downtown L.A. I slept in abandoned cars, alongside the L.A. river, church pews, behind dumpsters, in shuttered warehouse buildings. My refuge was the central public library, where I'd go during the day and spend hours reading books. I loved books."
Now, with five grandchildren, a great-grandson and a successful career both as a writer and activist, Rodriguez finds himself back at the place that inspired him all those years ago.
"Full circle, here I am. At that same Central Library, standing before you as the city's poet laureate," Rodriguez said. "I'm apparently going to have an office here as well."
Rodriguez calls poetry his "deep soul-talk," a "transformative energy" he hopes to foster in L.A. How does he feel about his new job?
"It's destiny. I don't know how else to explain it," Rodriguez said.
The "Extra Audio" on this page is Rodriguez reading from his "Love Letter to Los Angeles" at the announcement.
World's most traveled gather for the Travelers' Century Club
Most people only talk or dream of visiting other countries. But members of the Travelers' Century Club (TCC) have visited hundreds of countries.
Bert Hemphill founded this exclusive social club sixty years ago in the L.A. offices of his travel service. Known as the "Dean of Travel," he wanted to give explorers a place to swap stories and knowledge. The only qualification? Members must have visited one hundred or more countries.
Event planner Elisa Kotin gave a presentation at a recent meeting for the L.A. chapter. She's traveled for over twenty-five years and visited eighty-two countries, making her a provisional member.
"I remember thinking when I heard about Travelers' Century Club, 'How fascinating would it be to go to a luncheon and sit at a table with nine other people who had been to over one hundred countries each?'" Kotin says. "Where else are you going to get that kind of global knowledge with people that are so involved in knowing more about the world?"
Filmmaker and member Craig Forrest says he learned the importance of humility throughout his travels. "I got sick in the country of Senegal, and we had to travel to Casablanca, Morocco that day," says Forrest. "I was so sick that when we stood in front of the check-in desk at the Hyatt Regency in Casablanca, Morocco, I completely soiled myself."
(Scans of one of the first TCC country lists. Image: Travelers' Century Club)
Kotin researches her destinations before traveling but she still likes to keep things open-ended. "Part of travel is leaving it to chance," says Kotin. "Just the days when you meet someone who's so fascinating that you stop and stay in their village for hours on end. And by then the sun's going down so you don't even go back to the hotel you paid for. You stay in the village of the hut of the matriarch who invites you into her home."
Past TCC president Pamela Barrus makes a point of visiting historic sites she read about as a kid. "One of the last big trips I did was going down the length of Africa for two and a half months," Barrus says. "I was fascinated with the old British explorers and explorations and I wanted to stand on the spots, like Ujiji, where Stanley and Livingstone met."
Inspired by the travels of primatologist Dian Fossey, Kotin took a month-long journey through Uganda and Rwanda. She got more than she bargained for when she met a blackback gorilla.
"While I was on the Uganda gorilla trek, I was hit by a seven-year-old male blackback," says Kotin. "Like you would tap someone on the shoulder, he flicked his fingers across my shoulder and I flew in the air and he almost dislocated my shoulder."
Kotin plans to take a break from gorillas and spend her birthday in Antarctica. "My dream is to celebrate my fiftieth birthday in Antarctica, sleeping on an iceberg."
To learn more about the TCC, including where to find your local chapter, visit their website.