Posts Tagged ‘growing up in Beverly Hills’

Happy Hour

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

paparazzi photo from rivabella

 

What the hell is Happy Hour and why is everyone talking about it?  The happiest hour for me is when I eat.  But if it means standing around with drinks in your hand, eating from some communal barrel of glop, count me out.  I don’t think Happy Hour would have appeal for me even if it were at a restaurant I wanted to go to.  It just sounds awful.  Or am I a snob?

The other day, I was recommending my new favorite restaurant in L.A., Tar and Roses, to someone who then asked, “Do they have a Happy Hour?”  I was baffled by the question.  It’s so foreign to me.

And then I got an invitation to join my daughter and her best friend Cody and a bunch of their hot 27-year-old friends for what I thought was dinner.  But it wasn’t.  It was Happy Hour at some Mexican restaurant’s bar (Marix Tex Mex).  And while I think it’s brilliant for young people not yet making big money to be able to eat like that, I just couldn’t do it.  I asked for a proper menu. (more…)

Red Leather Booths

Friday, March 1st, 2013

IMG_4760

There was one prerequisite for our birthday dinner for Robin.  A red leather booth.  Where to find one?  So few places left with that old Rat Pack-era feel.  I still miss them.  One of my all-time favorites was Sneaky Pete’s.  On the Sunset Strip.  It was next door to Whisky A Go-Go, where Duke’s Coffee Shop was until recently.  Waitresses were dressed in really short-skirt barmaid outfits.   A place where Johnny Carson sometimes sat in on drums with the musicians.   How great was that?  Good that it’s been closed for a hundred years, or it might make me miss my father too much.  I went there with him all the time for steak and a baked potato with tons of butter, sour cream & chives.

Peggy had gone last week to Dan Tana’s, the dimly lit, checkered-tablecloth, celeb- oriented Italian in West Hollywood.  Libbie thought it was perfect for the Robin dinner.   Since I never went to Dan Tana’s much back in the day, it would be a nostalgia-free zone – no memories with my dad to weigh me down.  Still, I spent the rest of the week toying with the idea of changing restaurants.  Many texts and phone calls back and forth between the girls.  Robin said she would be just fine if we all met at Nate n’ Al’s, the Beverly Hills deli we all grew up in, but some of us just couldn’t envision a birthday celebration there.  So, I never cancelled the reservation — and here is how retro Dan Tana’s is: they never called “to confirm.” (more…)

Paintings

Friday, January 11th, 2013
Mary Lou Rutenberg painting of my stunning mother, Evelyn Duke, 1960's

Mary Lou Rutenberg painting of my stunning mother, Evelyn Duke, 1960’s

I posed nude, you know.  Several times.  Me and my two good buddies.  All three chicks, totally naked.  In a bathtub.  It was for an artist who thought this would make a great painting.  Or, perhaps, it was a commissioned painting.  Either way, I was asked, and I was in.  It got cold because we sat in that water for hours.  Or did it only seem like hours?  The two friends of mine were sisters, Lori and Lesly.  I slept at their house a lot.  We were kind of inseparable.  Only, secretly, it was Lesly, the younger one, who I was closest to; she looked up to me because I was older.  Lesly rocked herself to sleep in this crazy, enviably violent manner that totally intrigued me.   I guess I should reveal that I was nine years old, though I was trying to figure out a way to tell the whole story without saying how old I was, to make it funnier.  However, it’s probably not all that funny to imagine an adult woman after you hear the tale.

 Here is what happened, one fateful day, in that water-filled tub.  I farted.  Yep.  As a kid, I was pretty much constantly constipated.  Truly, I spent my whole childhood blocked up, because I ate no fiber and consumed mostly mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread (which you would know, if you’re following my blog), so it’s not a surprise, really.  There we three girls were that day, and when their mother, the artist, told us to get out of the bath, I looked back at the water and saw a turd floating about.  A little rabbit sized pellet of a thing, just like the one that I was used to expelling — to use a polite word.   I’m trying very hard to keep this polite and not say shit.

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340 South Roxbury Drive

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

 

me and my mom at our beach house

In our family, life is six degrees of feline separation.

I often tell people I was meant to grow up in Malibu.  That is where we lived — right on the beach – but my mom’s cat Jezebel was killed by a car, and that incident turned my life around.

My mother decided it wasn’t safe on the highway (PCH) and we moved to the house on Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills.  The year was 1955.   The former owners sold it to us with one perfect provision: the cat comes with the house.  What are the chances of this?  We move because a cat gets killed and instantly we have this new one.  Hangover, who came with his name, was a rather large, slightly feral black & white street boy.  The name, in the lore of our family (and from what the previous owners told us), came from this big-ass cat’s habit of hanging over the sides of trees that he climbed.  He was not a drunk.  He was really frisky, almost unsafe for a small child.

Hangover the cat!!!

On days when I was sick at home, Sheriff John would be playing on the TV, but I wouldn’t be watching — because I was too busy forcing Hangover’s paws to crayon  pictures with me getting scratched by the real leader of our family.  He kept me/us in line.  He was also the first creature I would love. (more…)