The Mob, Vegas, and Tea

Two things that tap into L.A.:

1) Saturday night I went to see a fabulous tap dance performance at UCLA. Basically these ten to twelve dancers make up the best tap dancers in the universe, and they were all here together in L.A. What a wonderful performance, goes to show at 80, you can still be light on your feet and full of energy. Check out dance writer Rachel Levin's keen review of Women in Tap, printed in the L.A. Times this past week. Click here.


2) Sometimes I read articles that just get to the heart of things. Scott Gold's warm writing about Los Angeles neighborhood, Los Feliz, really highlights what is local in this big city, what brings people together. Leaving secret messages inside a chess board table in a restaurant? Doesn't get much sweeter. In his article "An urban conversation in Los Feliz" he begins his writing with: "I am sitting with Stephanie. Three days in a row now we have met. We click together like Legos. Her lips taste like strawberries."

Urban love notes? I dig it. Click here to read the rest.

I'm super excited to say Las Vegas Noir, which includes my short story
"Three Times a Night, Every Other Night," is coming out May 1, 2008.

Check it out on the Akashic Books website. Click here

Or on Amazon.com. Click here

Cover is pretty, no?

Reading events will be held in Las Vegas this spring.

The other day, I was driving home on the freeway, swerving up the 110. So many red taillights were in front of me, I pictured them as little hearts moving closer and closer to me.

The other side of the freeway was filled with sparkling white headlights, zooming past like a flash.

This daily experience of tangling around this city on these long roads of mass transit is an experience unique to L.A.

The freeways are these frustrating ribbons that bind us together.

I pictured all of us on the freeway that night spelling out a long message with our headlights and taillights. Loopy cursive that could only be read from space. And the message said....

If the L.A. freeways could shout, what would they say?

Joan Didion once wrote about Las Vegas, calling it:
"the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies' room attendants with amyl nitrite poppers in their uniform pockets."

Bizarre and beautiful, no doubt. Vegas keeps people coming back by stunning them with the amount of ways one can have a good time.

Sometimes I look back and wonder if what she describes is the same town I grew up in. To me, as a child, it was always just a peaceful piece of desert land.