I'm digging through my father's journal trying to remember what happened after we moved from the place where the woman was held hostage. According to this page, below, this was when Jan and Riley separated...it's confusing, because Jan said it was at Criswell and Halo's place, but here it looks like the separation happened later, when we moved to an apartment on Homewood Street, which has since been torn down. I remember Jan dumping heaps of powdered milk into a glass of wate

Riley refused to smoke outside, and Jan had a choice, fresh air or security. She often left the front door to our unit wide open. Back in second grade, I didn’t know what a “bad neighborhood” was, and even now I think of areas called “bad” or sketchy blocks as disenfranchised in some way; lead paint, thin walls, slumlords, too close to freeways, unsupervised children and creeps that prey on them, schools that get less tax money, over crowded classrooms, places that “white fli

I stopped posting today's date in these blogs a while ago, because the news has been so depressing, and you know what's going on. However, I'm posting today's date: Saturday, September 11th, 2021, twenty years since 9/11. I was in Seattle when it happened, my husband woke me out of a deep sleep to the bad news that a plane had hit a building in New York. He handed me a cup of coffee, and left for a meeting. I plopped down on the couch in front of the TV, stunned. Our front wi

Recently, my friend Tom was in a run down section of Costa Mesa (in an alley) and he snapped these two photos. He texted me the images and wrote, "I thought this might remind you of your childhood in Hollywood." Which was both depressing and hilarious... it makes me happy to have a friend that knows me so well, and has this kind of humor. Back to Hollywood around 1972. Riley preferred the anchorman Walter Cronkite for the evening news. Ronald Reagan was governor of California