Tall tales at the bar

A friend of mine, Patrick Mott, who writes for a local newspaper finds the juciest stories going on about town. Following is a recent article he wrote regarding a favorite local hang-out.

If you think the art of storytelling is dead in 21st century
America, just drop into a good lively bar. Because bars, at their core, are not about drinking – they are about stories. Great stories. Stupid stories. Tall stories. Sob stories. Appalling stories. Hilarious stories. True stories that are all lies and impossible, stories that are all true. And all good bars have a pantheon of stories that mutate over time into genuine legends.

I don’t know what category the Eccentric Evangelist story is going to fall into 10 or 20 years from now at the Village Inn on Balboa Island, but bet on this: Whatever the actual truth of the story, it’ll get inflated, edited, redacted, chopped, channeled, raked, lifted and tuck-and-rolled into the hairiest shaggy dog tale since Adam and Eve.

Here’s the nut of it: Anne Lemen, a 58-year-old nurse and self-styled Christian evangelist who used to live in a cottage on Balboa Island across the alley from the Village Inn, apparently decided some time ago that the inn and its owner and patrons were up to no good. So, according to court documents, she decided to tell anyone who would listen all about it.  

The inn crowd, she said publicly on several occasions, makes porn videos, engages in child pornography, distributes illegal drugs, encourages lesbian activity, operates a brothel and sells tainted food. Court documents also said that Lemen videotaped Village Inn customers going to their cars, called them “whores” and “Satan” and shot flash photos through the restaurant’s windows.

The inn’s owner, Aric Toll, said that on one occasion Lemen parked her car in front of the restaurant and blew the horn nonstop for 30 minutes. On another occasion, she approached people reading the inn’s window menu and told them the food was poisonous and the inn was filled with rats. The would-be patrons beat a retreat.

She also helped organize a campaign to persuade the city to deny the inn an expanded entertainment permit. The campaign failed.

She also claims “the bar” – she routinely reduces the inn, its owner and patrons to a single entity – has tried to kill her. The police will do nothing, she says, because the cops are in league with “the bar.”

The cottage nearly adjacent to the inn that Lemen owns and rents out has a replica of the Statue of Liberty in the front garden. The statue holds a Bible. A large stone Bible with scripture verses also is in the garden, along with a little lighthouse emblazoned with the words, “The Lord Is Our Light.” Free booklets about Christianity also are available.

Toll sues. Case goes to court. Judge finds that Lemen’s statements about the inn are untrue, rules that Lemen must clam up, even though she denies making many of the statements.

If it ended there, it would be a great story. A classic. Good for decades of yuks over another round of cold ones.

But wait. There’s more. Maybe a LOT more.

Appeals court hears the case. Strikes down most of the original order. The problem: that pesky First Amendment. Judge says muzzling Lemen constitutes prior restraint—prohibiting speech before it has actually occurred.

Case goes to the California Supreme Court late last month. Justices are split. Three of them say they think the case justifies prior restraint. The other four aren’t so sure. Heavy hitter shows up: Duke University constitutional law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. Pays his own way, works for free, in order to tell the court that if they tell Lemen to shut it they’re violating the U.S. Constitution.

The California Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on the case sometime before May 1. If the justices say the order is constitutional, the case likely will go to the United States Supreme Court.

Tricky, this free speech business.

But if you tell that story with panache 20 years from now at the Village Inn, somebody should buy you one. They really should.

At 93, she’s still going …

My all time favorite columist of the LA Times is Steve Lopez.  Sometime ago, he wrote this wonderful story about amazing Mae.

From the summit of Marine Street and 4th in Santa Monica, it’s a steep drop straight into the ocean and Mae Laborde, 93, is gunning down the hill in a canary yellow 1977 Oldsmobile the size of the Love Boat.

I’m Mae’s passenger, and I don’t know if I should watch.

The road is narrow enough as it is, but there’s a truck coming up the hill, and a car just blew a stop sign in front of us on 3rd Street. I can’t tell whether, at 4 feet 10 inches tall, Mae is looking over or under the top of the steering wheel.

“Oh, I hate that,” Mae says, calmly braking behind the car that has just cut her off and threading a needle to squirt past the truck. “I sure wish I had the time to write down his license number. He didn’t even stop.”

I had gone to see Mae right after an appointment with my eye doctor. The vision is starting to go, and I figured if anyone could advise me on negotiating L.A.’s roadways in my graying years, it would be Mae, who got her driver’s license in 1926.“

Oh, honey, I still drive three freeways,” she told me.

In my last pass through L.A., I lived on the Venice-Santa Monica border, and Mae was my neighbor. The first time I saw her yellow car go by, I thought it was a runaway, because I couldn’t see a driver. As it drew closer, I could see a little tuft of white hair, and then a set of eyes, as if a cricket were driving a tank.

The Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale has a hood the length of a shuffleboard court and, given Mae’s line of vision over the distant grille, her focal point had to be roughly six blocks up the road. But she handled the car like a champ, and she was no light foot either.

Even after I moved away, Mae stayed in touch, reporting virtually every single development in her life.

She was selling her homegrown tomatoes to Michael’s restaurant. She was in a Sears commercial. She was on a TV program on KCET. She won a gumbo cooking contest and was flown to New Orleans. She was on the Santa Monica College advisory board. She was on the radio with Mr. KABC. She went dancing at Pepperdine. Her tamale pie recipe was featured in the L.A. Times. She graduated from the Santa Monica Citizens Police Academy. She got an ovation at the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna for not missing a show in 48 years.

I always feel like a slug when I talk to Mae, who has twice my years and three times my drive. I don’t know a better time than Thanksgiving week to tell you about her, because no one is more thankful to wake up each day and hit the gas.

“I don’t feel an age gap between us,” says Judy Lee, Mae’s 47-year-old neighbor and pal. A couple of years ago, Mae told Lee she ought to check out this Ricky Martin character.

“I really dig him,” Mae said at the time.

She used the word dig? I ask.

“Yes. She said dig.”Lee, an advisor to international students at Pepperdine University, often takes Mae to school weddings and social functions.

“There’s no keeping her off the dance floor,” says Lee. “At a recent wedding, the whole room lit up when she started making eyes at the deejay and using her finger to lure him onto the floor to dance with her. He looked like he was in his 20s.”

When I called Mae about my eye problem, I wasn’t sure she’d be able to squeeze me in. She agreed to give me a Driving for Seniors lesson on two conditions:

First, she wanted to read my tea leaves again. (Mae cranks up the yellow bomber and goes barreling all over Los Angeles, fortunetelling for a growing number of devotees. When she read my leaves this time, she saw a plane trip in the very near future, and I was on a plane within a week.)

Second, the column couldn’t be exclusively about driving. Mae wanted her life story in print.

It’s like dealing with a rock star.

Mae moved south from Fresno as a young girl and got a job at the Kress store in downtown L.A. After work, she’d hop aboard a Red Car for the ride back to her aunt’s home in Venice, and a conductor would flirt with her. Mae married Nicholas Laborde and they had a daughter who died in her 40s. Mae lost her husband a short time later. “I eat a very nutritious diet and I think positive thoughts,” says Mae, who worked as a secretary for Lawrence Welk for several years, which explains the dancing bug. “And I don’t drink or smoke, honey. Make sure you get that in there somewhere.“

Back behind the wheel, Mae is cruising Santa Monica in the Delta 88. Throw a bouquet of flowers on the hood, and we could be a float in the Rose Parade. With her eyes barely skimming the top of the dash and my head scraping the ceiling, we’re getting stares from other drivers.

She’s my driving instructor, I want to tell them. You got a problem?

“You have to drive more defensively as you get older,” Mae advises, saying I should assume that everyone else on the road is a maniac. “It’s a speedway out here, and people don’t even look where they’re
going. “

I ask Mae to drive me to Michael’s on 3rd Street, so I can check out her tomato story. She double-parks the Delta 88 and I run inside, where general manager Mark Goldfarb greets me.

“They’re high-octane tomatoes,” he says. “We use them in our gazpacho, our appetizers, the heirloom tomato salad. You mean she’s out there now? She’s her own little PR machine.“Goldfarb dashes out to say hello to “our little celebrity.” Mae smiles, then hits the gas.

On Wilshire, she sees someone exiting a parked car half a block away. “You see that leg coming out?” she asks, applying the brakes.

If there’s a center lane, Mae advises, take it. That gives you a little more maneuverability, especially on the freeway.

I ask Mae if she’s caused an accident in 77 years of driving.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “I never even hit a bird.”

The heck with driving in my old age. I may just hire Mae as my chauffeur.

Memorial to a wife

I’ve had the garden tidied up,
As she would have me do.
This little pal who couldn’t stay
To see the season through.
The flowers were her dearest friends,
The garden was her own,
I’ve watched her work, but never knew
The things that she had grown.
Her, catalogues keep coming, and
Her garden magazine;
I run across the queerest names,
And study what they mean,
I read them all, from end to end,
And when the spring is here,
I’ll have a garden just like hers,
As though my wife were near.
Albert H. Pedrick

Happiness Code

In order to be happy, you must be successful in all three of these areas:

1. Relationships
2. Health
3. Income

Realistically, you will only have time to accomplish any two of those goals while bitching about the third. The day isn’t long enough to do them all.

When I see a well-dressed, chubby, 40-something guy in a nice SUV with his family, all happy and laughing, I know he gave up health. He’ll be dead in 10 years. When I see a totally fit person in the gym, I always wonder if he’s a lonely loser or just underemployed. It’s one or the other.

There are rare exceptions. A friend of mine makes a great living by working a few hours per day from his home or his boat. He has a great family life and an ideal body mass index. I expect the universe to smite him any minute. He’s violating some sort of natural law and it’s only a matter of time before things revert to the mean.

Which of the three requirements of happiness are YOU giving up?

Scott Adams via The Dilbert Blog

 

“No Left Turns”

This wonderful essay was written by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and President of NBC News.  In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

My father never drove a car.

Well, that’s not quite right.

I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:

“Oh, bull——!” she said. “He hit a horse.”

“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none. My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

Our 1950 Chevy

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.”

It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

The ritual walk to church

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church.

He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. (In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”) If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.

As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?” “I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

“No left turns,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”

“What?” I said again. “No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support. “No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”

But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. “Loses count?” I asked. “Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”

I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.) He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

A happy life

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.” At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.” “You’re probably right,” I said. “Why would you say that?” he countered, somewhat irritated. “Because you’re 102 years old,” I said. “Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day. That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: “I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet.” An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life.

Or because he quit taking left turns.

A horse, of course

   

 Whoever said that money cannot buy happiness …    

    has never owned a horse.

 

Something to think about

The mighty oak tree was once a little nut that held its ground.

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There’s a fine line between a groove and a rut.

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To the world you might be one person,  but to one person you might be the world.

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May you never forget what is worth remembering and never remember what is worth forgetting.

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Teach us … that we may feel the importance of every day, of every hour, as it passes.   from a prayer by Jane Austen, circa 1811

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That which we elect to surround ourselves with becomes the museum of our soul and the archives of our experiences …   Thomas Jefferson, Architect & U.S. President

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Even if you are on the right track, …  you’ll get run over if you just sit there.   Will Rogers

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Kindness is the language the blind can see and the deaf can hear

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Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us. Oscar Wilde

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  I expect to pass throught life but once.  If therefore, there can be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.    William Penn

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DECISIONS

      Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,          

and you’re hampered by not having any idea,   

the best way to solve the dilemma,

you’ll find, is simply by spinning a penny. 

No – not so that chance shall decide the affair

while you’re passively standing there moping;

but the moment the penny is up in the air,

you suddenly know what you’re hoping.” 

Piet Hein, Danish Poet (translation)