Happy Quasquicentennial, City of Orange!

(Originally posted at OC Tastemakers on April 6, 2013.)

Today, April 6, is a special day in Orange County.

The City of Orange – one of our most tasteful cities – will be celebrating its 125^th anniversary.

This city of 140,000, the county’s third incorporated city, is the home of California’s largest historical district. This dedication to preserving what is best about the past – while keeping one foot on the pulse of the present – brings people back to this community over and over again.

What is it that makes the City of Orange a city of good taste?

1. A dedication to preservation. It takes the combined efforts of city government, business owners, and property owners both commercial and residential to keep this town beautiful.

2. Keeping it independent. With few exceptions, most of the business in Old Towne is non-chain and owned by dedicated individuals seeking to give customers a unique, personalized experience. From high tea at Paris in a Cup to the nostalgic cornucopia of Mr. C’s Rare Records to the endless gifts (for others and yourself) to be found at the antique malls and vintage stores, you will not regret spending your dollars here.

3. Easy walking spaces. Let me elaborate on that.

When I have a problem that defies an easy sitcom solution, when I want to open my mind to new tasteful ideas, or when my feet just need to move in a beautiful place, I will get in my car and drive to the Orange Circle and its surroundings – usually the area framed by La Veta on the south, Cambridge on the east, Batavia on the west, and Walnut on the north.

I turn off Glassell, either left or right, and tuck my car on a quiet residential street, like a little mouse finding a burrow. I open my trunk and take out my walking stick, which I don’t need for health but which my husband Chris insists on for protection. It’s not really necessary in the Circle, but I bring the stick anyway because it’s such a small thing to do to make Chris happy.

With stick in hand, I set out on my walk. I always also bring a pen and paper for ideas (I don’t have a steel-trap memory).

I am grateful that Orange holds on to its tall, sprawling trees, instead of cutting them down to make room for big boxy houses with puny patches of lawn. (I admit that I am ashamed that I can’t name the trees on sight; to me it feels as much of a handicap as dyslexia to a creative writer). I am glad that Orange holds on to its older, human-scale homes; using only what you need is going to be tomorrow’s great virtue. I am pleased that Orange keeps the residential and the commercial close together; you don’t know the joy of being able to walk to a restaurant or art gallery until you actually can.

I have been here on sunny days and cloudy days, in the morning and the evening, in each of the four seasons. Every walk has been good for me; every walk has taught me something.

Each section has its own charm. The southwest is where the apartment buildings are, where Chapman students and families just getting their toehold in Orange stay. It’s the place of fruition, of ideas newly born.

The southeast is where the classic Orange homes are, the ones painted in pastel colors, guarded with tall trees. I wonder how we lost the ability to build large two-story homes with generous porch and lawn space. Here’s where I find the porches I wish I had, places to gather friends to sip wine and tell stories (but why is it I usually find the porches empty?).

The northeast is where Chapman University sits. I can smell the education wafting in the air like the aroma of cinnamon buns. It’s the place which tells me to take action, to turn thoughts into action.

The northwest is an industrial area. The homes are smaller and flatter, as if the thunder of the railroad tracks acts as a check on growth. But it’s not a place of cowering. It takes a strong people to live here.

4. (most important to me) It’s where I met Chris. On February 25, 2007, I decided to eat breakfast in Old Towne Orange instead of at home. I am not sure why – perhaps it was the sunshine beckoning me, perhaps it felt like a special day because it was Oscar Sunday. I set out, stopping to buy a Sunday paper at 7-11, and found myself in Orange minutes later.

My first choice of restaurant was Café Lucca, and I was hoping for a croissant there. They didn’t have any, a fact for which I will be forever grateful, for it sent me down the street. (Don’t let this stop you from going to Café Lucca, which among other things has fine gelato.)

I did not expect to eat at Felix Continental Café, but a handsome man in a silver fake-fur coat and a cigar case next to his coffee made me stop. I sat near him and gently tried to get his attention. When he finally smiled at me, it was like the sun rising all over again. More than six years later, the happiness that each day together brings still amazes us.

I’m glad that we both had good taste that day!

This is the bench where Chris proposed to me.

True Facts

As a college student, one of the friends who stuck with me through study burnout and hot secluded afternoons in the Venice ghetto was National Lampoon. This was the magazine which Mad readers graduated to - the same fearless iconoclasm and gleeful parodies of pop culture, now fortified with “fuck” and “shit” and other words not meant for kiddies (except in the schoolyard). I ignored the preponderance of naked tits (with no naked dicks as balance), and the vaguely depressing riffs on nuclear holocaust (illustrated with giant rats and crabs and children with octopus tentacles for limbs). But my favorite section was “True Facts”, newspaper articles and photos that were too strange, too out there, too WTF not to be true.

Years later, I gave away most of my NatLamps, but not the all-True Facts issues. Not then, and not ever. I will hold on to these until the day you have to pry them from my cold dead hands, and I will go back to them from time to time - not because I wish to be twenty years old again (my body maybe, but not my mind), but to show me an America where the tragic wand of corporate perfection has not touched.

In True Facts America, neon signs swing on rusty hinges in front of brick or stone establishments in towns where the only places you can go for enjoyment are the movie theater, the pizza parlor, the bar, and the church. Signs with moveable letters in plastic tracks lie out in plain sight, just ready for clever hands to pocket a few letters to announce, “SMURF ASSES ARE HERE.” Letters are more theft-worthy than diamonds in True Facts America, leaving Chinese restaurants that sell “GOO FOO” and gas stations where “vice is Our Business.”

In True Facts America, your local newspaper (with the rotogravure lifestyle section on Sunday the one highlight) will tell you the important news of the day, such as “Lebanon Will Try Bombing Suspects,” “Matches linked to fire”, and “Honeywell’s Profit From Operations Fell As Wang’s Rose.” Turn the page, and you’ll find that your local grocery is selling “Reg. or Sugar” Kotex tampons and tuna “chunk light in brothel.” Over on the social page, Fried marries Rice, White marries Nuckles, and Love marries Organ.

In True Facts America, entrepreneurs are slow to board the clue train, naming their businesses “Back Door Meat”, “AA Liquors”, and “Nazi’s Ice Cream.” Property owners have no problem putting a sign out, with big black letters, telling prospective renters they have reached “FAGG’S APARTMENTS.”

At the cemetery, you can see the final resting places of the Surprise, Boring, Wait, Hamburger, Croak and Schmuck clans. You may walk upon the grave of someone who hung himself with tube socks, or got hit with a bowling ball tossed from a car window, or fell into a vat of gravy, or got hacked to death by an son-in-law who thought she was a “large raccoon.”

It would be almost refreshing to live in a town where a “really good tape” in your car will inspire you to run down eleven traffic signs. Where middle school kids are still innocent enough to eat Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax because, after all, it’s “The Best For Your Stick.” Where zookeepers exhibit rubber coral snakes because real ones “tend to die.” Where Santa Claus may ask your child, “Do you want a big fucking dog?” Right down the big fucking chimney, of course!

It is a world I thought was on its last legs, smoothed away under the tan and beige of mini-malls and mega-shopping centers, scared away by the Vaderish silhouette of lawsuit panic, shooed away by kids who would rather update their MySpace pages than prowl the urban jungle, liberating letters from signs, transforming “THE CLOCK SHOP” into “THE C OCK SHOP”, “The FLAG POST” into “The F AG POST”, and “PENNI’S” into “PE NI’S”. We have no time anymore for True Facts -- we’re too busy trying to live life without trouble.

But one late summer afternoon, riding away from the parking lot of Las Vegas’s Texas Station, I saw this one little white sign, missing one important letter: “NO  XIT.”

I smiled to myself. True Facts America is messy. It’s unexpected. It’s profane. It will creep from the cracks of perfect and bite us on the nose, just to let us know:

Look around.

Pay attention.

Life is more interesting than you think.

Saturday night



Photo credit: killfurby (stock.xchng) P.S. I wish my bedroom was this cool back then!

Saturday night. Two words, ordinary by themselves, but when they link together, they hold awesome magic power for those between the ages of fourteen and the age of marriage, first child, or military enlistment, whichever comes first. These words have the power to excite when anticipation breezes in as early as Wednesday, dancing upon multicolored, eight-pointed Disney stars. They also have the power to break hearts when the night finally gets here and you have nothing, no one to turn to; it will be just another black X at the front of the long line of black Xs that compose a lonely life.

The Saturday nights of my youth started at the Hughes supermarket several blocks north from where my family lived in Venice, where I would invariably put these two items into the shopping cart:

            1. A two-liter bottle of Coke (the kind with calories in it), and

            2. Hime brand ramen, with its yellow coils as tight as the cord of an unopened box of Christmas lights. One more item would go in, if there was none at home:

            3. Chun King soy sauce with the stop-sign red label, promising extra-salty enjoyment.

At around 11 p.m., when my mother and stepfather would go to bed, taking their inhibiting presence with them, I would grab a small saucepan to boil the ramen in -- both squares in the package, not one per serving as I would learn later. When the ramen was done -- just enough to soften it, not so much as to make the noodles too floppy -- I would strain it, drop it into a cereal bowl, and drizzle the Chun King over it, the brown sauce sinking into the tight coiled crevices. I still get hungry just thinking about it.

Then, I would take an eight-ounce tumbler and fill it with the Coke -- pouring at least twice to make sure all the fizz went down first. The two-liter bottle was, of course, handy for refills, and the amount of Chun King in the bowl guaranteed at least one.

By the time my late-night meal was ready, it was time to sit in front of the couch (not on it), and turn on the black-and-white television (we would not have a color TV until 1980) for “Saturday Night Live.” Watching this show connected me to the hip, witty milieu which I thought would be waiting for me in adulthood. I wove a dream about New York that made it a magical metropolis where excitement was around every corner (and if I had grown up in the New York area, I would probably have felt the same about Los Angeles).

This was during the Belushi-Aykroyd-Radner era, and when those good folks drifted away from the program, I did, too. Then, the ritual changed. Now I spent Saturday nights seated on my bedroom floor, huddled next to my record player, fat cushioned earphones linking me to the music of the Beatles, Vanilla Fudge, and the Rascals. Here, I wasn’t looking for hip; this was the music I loved, not the music I was supposed to listen to according to Billboard and my classmates. I wove dreams here, too, more open-minded geographically, about VW Beetles speeding up Pacific Coast Highway and hot kisses under New Jersey streetlights.

These Saturday night rituals made me forget, if only for a few precious hours, that I was frizzy-haired, chunky, poorly-dressed, either ignored or held in contempt by both family and classmates, and didn’t feel that I deserved anything better. Even now, when I have straight hair and a more toned body and a much-improved wardrobe and the knowledge that I was not and am not responsible for the attitudes and behavior of others, a hint of insecurity remains, like text written in fresh concrete that you can still read decades later.

But those Saturday nights did bring to me a gift, a gift I have only recently begun to appreciate: the ability to spend Saturday night in my own company without succumbing to self-pity or rage at the universe. Some people never learn to be happy all by themselves, and they do anything and everything they can not to be in that place -- with alcohol, drugs, sex with unsafe strangers, fast cars, cheap bars, anything that muffles the howl of the unfettered self. If they had chosen the tumbler of Coke and earphones filled with Vanilla Fudge and their own imagination, they would have understood. If you are reading this now, it’s not too late to try.

 P.S. A cup of hot tea would be fine, too.