sweetheart redux

If you are a frequent reader of the blog, you know that much of what appears on here is an exploration of two of the main characters of my life, my mom Jill Crane and her best friend Bill Tunilla , and the years spent with them in Pasadena.   Whenever I walk around my old Pasadena stomping grounds (often), I take note of the changes versus all the things that have stayed the same, and I take it all so personally, thinking things like “When I was a kid, I had no idea they would build a Target on this block someday.”   I have a hard time keeping up, and often give Geof (who is unfamiliar with the area) directions that apply to the Pasadena of two decades ago, like the other night when we went to a movie at a Pasadena theater he hadn’t been to before and that I guess I hadn’t been to since I saw “Me and You and Everyone We Know ,” which seems like just last year or something but was actually released in 2005 (I looked it up).   I told him “Just park behind this bui...

  "cheer up, son":  Apocalypse Now Death Cards scene Sad: -In fourth grade my teacher was a flamboyant gay drama coach whom I adored even though sometimes he was high-maintenance, requiring constant attention and adoration from his students.  He had a very lesbianish friend he'd known for forever who was a part-time flight attendant - because she loved adventure - and also a substitute teacher; she taught our class whenever our teacher was out sick.  They were probably both in their forties.  He wore a professorial cardigan and a goatee.  She was tiny, with thinning short hair and an appealingly ugly face, and when I saw Rocky Horror years later I was reminded of her by the character of Columbia.  I was very attached to them and always imagining what they were like in their regular lives outside of school, just hanging out with their friends, and what their respective apartments may have looked like and what music each listened to.  One day, ...

When I was a little kid my mom lived in this rooftop apartment on Marengo Street in Pasadena.  But rooftop apartment isn’t quite the right description – it wasn’t an open-air bar atop a fancy hotel.  It was this building:    My dad had custody of me during the week, letting my mom have me for the weekends. This apartment was the first and best location for my mom weekends.  I was still crazy about her and she wasn’t out of control yet.  She was an alcoholic but she managed to keep the same part time job for years.  In her later years she became a hoarder; but at the apartment on Marengo she was just a scatter-brained collector with a perfect eye trained towards trash and cheap stuff that was beautiful.  In this apartment, the vintage children’s books weren’t on the floor and soaked in cat pee like they were in her last apartment, and the old toys weren’t mixed in with clothes she never wore in the bedroom she couldn’t ope...