California Girl Quotes

But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.

They write songs about California girls for a reason.

The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden.

In these fast and fickle times, it’s nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.

She was probably my age, maybe a couple of inches taller, and a whole lot more athletic looking. With her deep tan and her curly blond hair, she was almost exactly what I thought a stereotypical California girl would look like, except her eyes ruined the image. They were startling gray,like storm clouds; pretty, but intimidating, too, as if she were analyzing the best way to take me down in a fight. She glanced at the minotaur horn in my hand, then back at me. I imagined she was going to say, You killed a Minotaur! or Wow you're so awesome! or something like that. Instead she said, "you drool when you sleep." Then she sprinted off down the lawn, her blond hair flying behind her.

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls--blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked--stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).

One’s options in this world are as vast as the horizon, which is technically a circle and thus infinitely broad. Yet we must choose each step we take with utmost caution, for the footprints we leave behind are as important as the path we will follow. They’re part of the same journey — our story.

Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.

Trains tap into some deep American collective memory.

I’m a Texas girl, with a California soul.

We tell our stories, especially as young people, in part because we want them to be true. We want life to be full of adventure and creativity and daring that might, just might, be real.

[Lennie meets Joe - he works out that she was named after John Lennon] I nod. "Mom was a hippie." This is northern Northern California after all - the final frontier of freakerdom. Just in the eleventh grade we have a girl named Electricity, a guy named Magic Bus, and countless flowers: Tulip, Begonia, and Poppy - all parent-given-on-the-birth-certificate names. Tulip is a two-ton bruiser of a guy who would be the star of out football team if we were the kind of school that has optional morning meditation in the gym

There are two Venices I know about and one of them is a hotel in Vegas. The other is an L.A. beach where pretty girls walk their dogs while wearing as little as possible and mutant slabs of tanned, posthuman beef sip iced steroid lattes and pump iron until their pecs are the size of Volkswagens.

The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in." So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.

I’ve always felt there’s something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians—that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want. It’s new, and they’re escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It’s a variation of what Freud called the “death instinct.

Schooner and CJ. Like Ken and Barbie come to life. They were the epitome of every out-of-stater’s fantasy of what the quintessential California boy and California girl looked like. Schooner and CJ. They were beautiful and they looked like they belonged together.

From morning until sunset — and sometimes by moonlight — the surfer dudes ride waves onto shore worried about nothing more than impressing the gorgeous girls watching them. Sometimes those bikini-clad California sweethearts let a boy get to second base to a romantic Leslie Gore or Connie Francis song. If she's really in-love, and trusts him not to tell his buddies, she'll let him round third and wave him home. When that happens, it usually isn't long before Nautica is all abuzz about an impending beach wedding.

Big girls had been pulling fine men since the dawn of time, but everyone knew how Hollywood social culture worked.

Before we were the Monsters of Brickhouse Lane—before everyone from Connecticut to California knew us by that tagline, and blogs ran pictures of our faces, and searching our names led to sites that crashed from all the traffic—we were just girls, and there were only two of us.

Girl, you’re just like Grandpa Walter. Going over the river and through the woods to get to Bill’s house when he lives right across the street. Cut to the chase and tell me what happened!

I miss being young. I miss being young and strong. Young and fast. Young and in love. Nothing like it. Old love is good, too. But you get the feeling that the world mainly just wants you out of the way.

Another hour it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street, and the eleven teeming hills. I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I'd fall down as in a dream, clear off the precipice. Oh where is the girl I love? I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had looked everywhere in the little world below. And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded -- at least that's what I thought then.

The only teenagers in town seemed to kill themselves in gruesomely rural ways—I heard about their pickups crashing at two in the morning, the sleepover in the garage camper ending in carbon monoxide poisoning, a dead quarterback. I didn’t know if this was a problem born of country living, the excess of time and boredom and recreational vehicles, or whether it was a California thing, a grain in the light urging risk and stupid cinematic stunts

You aren't like your mom." "I am.But I don't want to be like that anymore,I want what I want." He turns to me again,his face anxious. "I told my father's friends that I'm studying at Berkeley next year.It worked.He's really,really angry with me,but it worked.You told me to go for his pride.You were right." "So." I'm cautious,hardly daring to believe. "You're moving to California?" "I have to." "Right." I swallow hard. "Because of your mom." "Because of you. I'll only be a twenty-minute train ride from your school,and I'll make the commute to see you every night.I'd take a commute ten times that just to be with you every night." His words are too perfect.It must be a misunderstanding,surely I'm misunderstanding- "You're the most incredible girl I've ever known.You're gorgeous and smart, and you make my laugh like no one else can.And I can talk to you. And I know after all this I don't deserve you,but what I'm trying to say is that I love you,Anna.Very much." I'm holding my breath.I can't talk,but my eyes are filling with tears. He takes it the wrong way. "Oh God.And I've mucked things up again,haven't I? I didn't mean to attack you like this.I mean I did but...all right." His voice cracks. "I'll leave.Or you can go down first,and then I'll come down,and I promise I'll never bother you again-" He starts to stand,but I grab his arm. "No!" His body freezes. "I'm so sorry," he says. "I never mean to hurt you." I trail my fingers across his cheek. He stays perfectly still for me. "Please stop apologizing,Etienne." "Say my name again," he whispers. I close my eyes and lean forward. "Etienne." He takes my hands into his.Those pefect hands,that fit mine just so. "Anna?" Our foreheads touch. "Yes?" "Will you please tell me you love me? I'm dying here." And then we're laughing.And them I'm in his arms,and we're kissing,at first quickly-to make up for lost time-and then slowly,because we have all the time in the world.And his lips are soft and honey sweet,and the careful, passionate way he moves them against my own says that he savors the way I taste,too. And in between kisses,I tell him I love him. Again and again and again.

So now, not only did my best friend leave, but the cheerleaders and their mindless followers assumed I was personally responsible for the petition (which, yeah, I was) and started being openly rude to me - shutting doors in my face, leaving nasty notes on my desk and in my locker, making fun of me when I could obviously hear them. That's when I started keeping really quiet in class, and finding ways to show the other kids I wasn't afraid of them - like staring them straight in the eye when they looked at me, taking a step toward them when they talked to me, or walking right up to them and getting their personal space if I heard them say my name. Saying the meanest things I could think of whenever I had the chance - repeating rumors, embellishing them. I found out Kira Conroy had been arrested for shoplifting at the mall, and made sure everyone knew about it. The girl who burped in a boy's face during her first kiss, the girl who tripped and fell off the stage at the Miss Teen California pageant - I shared those stories the moment I heard them. All's fair in war, right? Suddenly I wasn't a nobody anymore. I was a somebody. Somebody everyone was afraid of.

She read absorbedly books found in boarding-house parlours, in hotels, in such public libraries as the times afforded. She was alone for hours a day, daily. Frequently her father, fearful of loneliness for her, brought her an armful of books and she had an orgy, dipping and swooping about among them in a sort of gourmand's ecstasy of indecision. In this way, at fifteen, she knew the writings of Byron, Jane Austen, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Felicia Hemans. Not to speak of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Bertha M. Clay, and that good fairy of the scullery, the Fireside Companion, in whose pages factory girls and dukes were brought together as inevitably as steak and onions. These last were, of course, the result of Selina's mode of living, and were loaned to her by kind-hearted landladies, chambermaids, and waitresses all the way from California to New York.

I asked why he was so angry all the time. I told him that while I agreed with Alabama blacks who boycotted bus companies and protested against segregation, California blacks were thousands of miles, literally and figuratively, from those Southern plagues. "Girl, don't you believe it. Georgia is Down South. California is Up South. If you're black in this country, you're on a plantation. You have to deal with masters. There might be some argument over whether they are vicious masters, but be assured that they all think they are masters . . . And if they think that, then you'd better believe they think you are the slave. Maybe a smart slave, a pretty slave, a good slave, but a slave just the same.

I pulled the lever repeatedly not even paying attention to whether or not I was winning anything. Her voice startled me. “You look like you have something on your mind.” “I do?” “Who is he, and what did he do?” I’d never see this woman again after today. Maybe I should just let it all out. “You want the long version or the short version?” “I’m ninety, and the dinner buffet opens in five minutes. Give me the short version.” “Okay. I’m here with my stepbrother. Seven years ago, we slept together right before he moved away.” “Taboo…I like it. Go on.” I laughed. “Okay…well, he was the first and last guy I ever really cared about. I never thought I’d see him again. His father died this week, and he came back for the funeral. He wasn’t alone. He brought a girl he supposedly loves. I know she loves him. She’s a good person. She had to go back to California early. Somehow, I ended up at this casino with him. He leaves tomorrow.” A single teardrop fell down my face. “It looks to me like you still care about him.” “I do.” “Well, then you have twenty-four hours.” “No, I don’t plan to screw things up for him.” “Is he married?” “No.” “Then, you have twenty-four hours.” She looked at her watch and leaned on her walker to stand herself up. She gave me her hand. “I’m Evelyn.” “Hi, Evelyn. I’m Greta.” “Greta…fate gave you an opportunity. Don’t fuck it up,” she said before she scooted away on the walker.

WHEN YOU LOVE MAKE EVERY MOMENT AN EXPERIENCE THE HEART CAN HOLD ONTO.

The concrete can’t stop the separation of rotor from plane, the separation of father from daughter. There are crashes and then the walking away, the bleeding, and the shaky ride back.

In July 1970, the Women’s Liberation Basement Press, in Berkeley, California, launched an underground comic book called It Aint Me Babe. The cover of its first issue featured Wonder Woman marching in a rally protesting stock comic-book plots. Inside, Supergirl tells Superman to get lost, Veronica ditches Archie for Betty, Petunia Pig tells Porky Pig to cook his own dinner, and when Iggy tells Lulu “No girls allowed!” she has only one thing to say: “Fuck this shit!

My friend also noted that it was harder to meet girls online here in blue-state California, where it seemed “Where do you stand politically?” had become the question most frequently asked by females, replacing the previous: “How tall are you?

They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.

I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl’s knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.

If Father Dominic died, I would have lost the best mentor I'd ever had, and, absurdly enough, one of the best friends I'd ever had, as well. If someone had told me that the first day I'd walked into his office so many years ago, I'd never have believed it. What could an agnostic girl from Brooklyn and an elderly Catholic priest from California possibly have in common? The ability to help wayward spirits find their way home, it turned out ... even if, as Father Dom had pointed out, we hadn't always agreed on our methodology.

Did I ever tell you I went to school in America?" "What? No." "It's true,for a year. Eighth grade. It was terrible." "Eighth grade is terrible for everyone," I say. "Well,it was worse for me. My parents had just seperated,and my mum moved back to California.I hadn't been since I was an infant,but I went with her,and I was put in this horrid public school-" "Oh,no. Public school." He nudges me with his shoulder. "The other kids were ruthless. They made fun of everything about me-my height,my accent, the way I dressed.I vowed I'd never go back." "But American girls love English accents." I blurt this without thinking, and then pray he doesn't notice my blush. St. Clair picks up a pebble and tosses it into the river. "Not in middle school, they don't.Especially when it's attached to a bloke who comes up to their kneecaps." I laugh. "So when the year was over,my parents found a new school for me. I wanted to go back to London,where my mates were, but my father insisted on Paris so he could keep an eye on me. And that's how I would up at the School of America.

She looks to be about three, the same age as his daughter at home in California...the girl's eyes are open. She seems to be cowering...Graves reaches in to pick her up- thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her...when the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out.

California during the 1940s had Hollywood and the bright lights of Los Angeles, but on the other coast was Florida, land of sunshine and glamour, Miami and Miami Beach. If you weren't already near California's Pacific Coast you headed for Florida during the winter. One of the things which made Miami such a mix of glitter and sunshine was the plethora of movie stars who flocked there to play, rubbing shoulders with tycoons and gangsters. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the latter two. Miami and everything that surrounded it hadn't happened by accident. Carl Fisher had set out to make Miami Beach a playground destination during the 1930s and had succeeded far beyond his dreams. The promenade behind the Roney Plaza Hotel was a block-long lovers' lane of palm trees and promise that began rather than ended in the blue waters of the Atlantic. Florida was more than simply Miami and Miami Beach, however. When George Merrick opened the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables papers across the country couldn't wait to gush about the growing aura of Florida. They tore down Collins Bridge in the Gables and replaced it with the beautiful Venetian Causeway. You could plop down a fiver if you had one and take your best girl — or the girl you wanted to score with — for a gondola ride there before the depression, or so I'd been told. You see, I'd never actually been to Florida before the war, much less Miami. I was a newspaper reporter from Chicago before the war and had never even seen the ocean until I was flying over the Pacific for the Air Corp. There wasn't much time for admiring the waves when Japanese Zeroes were trying to shoot you out of the sky and bury you at the bottom of that deep blue sea. It was because of my friend Pete that I knew so much about Miami. Florida was his home, so when we both got leave in '42 I followed him to the warm waters of Miami to see what all the fuss was about. It would be easy to say that I skipped Chicago for Miami after the war ended because Pete and I were such good pals and I'd had such a great time there on leave. But in truth I decided to stay on in Miami because of Veronica Lake. I'd better explain that. Veronica Lake never knew she was the reason I came back with Pete to Miami after the war. But she had been there in '42 while Pete and I were enjoying the sand, sun, and the sweet kisses of more than a few love-starved girls desperate to remember what it felt like to have a man's arm around them — not to mention a few other sensations. Lake had been there promoting war bonds on Florida's first radio station, WQAM. It was a big outdoor event and Pete and I were among those listening with relish to Lake's sultry voice as she urged everyone to pitch-in for our boys overseas. We were in those dark early days of the war at the time, and the outcome was very much in question. Lake's appearance at the event was a morale booster for civilians and servicemen alike. She was standing behind a microphone that sat on a table draped in the American flag. I'd never seen a Hollywood star up-close and though I liked the movies as much as any other guy, I had always attributed most of what I saw on-screen to smoke and mirrors. I doubted I'd be impressed seeing a star off-screen. A girl was a girl, after all, and there were loads of real dolls in Miami, as I'd already discovered. Boy, was I wrong." - Where Flamingos Fly

The morning, like all San Francisco mornings, promised spring. In California, the seasons come daily: spring, the dewy mornings draped lightly in gray mist; summer, when the sun burns through and rises directly overhead at midday; afternoon autumns, crisp breezy, when colors show off and the air smells clean into twilight; winter is the night.

If you're lucky, life teaches you to survive. The California sky is blue, you wake up, you make coffee, you fry eggs, and you don't look back. You don't think about the freckled maid who served smoked meats and pickled asparagus when you were a girl. You don't think about yesterday or what's been lost. Even when you hear the dead whispering, you go on.

Because a girl can’t inherit. So here I am, all the way out in California, trying to rebuild some of what I lost. As a single girl, I can, you know. But once I get married, everything belongs to my husband. Even my own self. I have to give up the name Westfall and change it to my husband’s. Don’t you see? Once I get married, I lose everything all over again.

THAT masquerade as summer in northern California, as the wind whipped across the long crescent of beach, and whiskbroomed a cloud of fine sand into the air. A little girl in red shorts and a white sweatshirt walked slowly down the beach, with her head turned against the wind, as her dog sniffed at seaweed at the water’s edge. The little girl had short curly red hair,

Somewhere in the sun-washed space between Southern California’s hills of sand and the present desolate volcanic sprawl I was crossing, my legs had strengthened, but – invisibly – so had my will. The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I’d felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn’t move further. No longer.

It's an old story," Julia says, leaning back in her chair. "Only for me, it's new. I went to school for industrial design. All my life I've been fascinated by chairs - I know it sounds silly, but it's true. Form meets purpose in a chair. My parents thought I was crazy, but somehow I convinced them to pay my way to California. To study furniture design. I was all excited at first. It was totally unlike me to go so far away from home. But I was sick of the cold and sick of the snow. I figured a little sun might change my life. So I headed down to L.A. and roomed with a friend of an ex-girlfriend of my brother's. She was an aspiring radio actress, which meant she was home a lot. At first, I loved it. I didn't even let the summer go by. I dove right into my classes. Soon enough, I learned I couldn't just focus on chairs. I had to design spoons and toilet-bowl cleaners and thermostats. The math never bothered me, but the professors did. They could demolish you in a second without giving you a clue if how to rebuild. I spent more and more time in the studio, with other crazed students who guarded their projects like toy-jealous kids. I started to go for walks. Long walks. I couldn't go home because my roommate was always there. The sun was too much for me, so I'd stay indoors. I spent hours in supermarkets, walking aisle to aisle, picking up groceries and then putting them back. I went to bowling alleys and pharmacies. I rode buses that kept their lights on all night. I sat in Laundromats because once upon a time Laundromats made me happy. But now the hum of the machines sounded like life going past. Finally, one night I sat too long in the laundry. The woman who folded in the back - Alma - walked over to me and said, 'What are you doing here, girl?' And I knew that there wasn't any answer. There couldn't be any answer. And that's when I knew it was time to go.

The girls thought the altar and the candles and the Mass very cute; one of them had been sometimes to that kind of service in Cambridge, Mass., at a place she called the Monastery, which Father Chantry-Pigg said was where the Cowley Fathers in America lived, but the other girl and her parents were not Episcopalian, they belonged to one of those sects that Americans have, and that are difficult for English people to grasp, though probably they got over from Britain in the Mayflower originally, and when sects arrive in America they multiply, like rabbits in Australia, so that America has about one hundred to each one in Britain, and this is said to be in on account of the encouraging climate, which is different in each of the states, and most encouraging of all in the Deep South and in California, where sects breed best.

Bryce looked like a California underwear model. Not that I’d thought about him in his underwear. Much. He was talking with his friend Nathan. Where Bryce had the whole tan, blond, hazel-eyed thing going on, Nathan was fair with dark hair and dark eyes. They looked like opposite sides of the same coin. A really hot, totally unreachable coin that a collector would keep in a special locked case, which normal girls like myself were not allowed to touch.

The girls noticed that Volodia, who was generally so talkative and gay, seldom spoke now and never smiled and on the whole did not seem glad to be at home. He only addressed his sisters once during dinner and then his remark was strange. He pointed to the samovar and said: “In California they drink gin instead of tea.” He, too, seemed to be busy with thoughts of his own, and, to judge from the glances that the two boys occasionally exchanged, their thoughts were identical.

I would've given up without her - not on you, never on you, but on myself. I suppose I can tell you this now, but I wasn't a very good student. I wasn't smart enough to just get by. I wasn't focused enough in class. I rarely passed exams. I skipped assignments. I was constantly on academic probation. Not that your grandmother would ever know, but at the time, I was thinking of doing what you were later accused of doing: selling all my belongings, sticking out my thumb, and hitchhiking to California to be with the other hippies who had dropped out and tuned in. Everything changed when I met your mother. She made me want things that I had never dreamed of wanting: a steady job, a reliable car, a mortgage, a family. You figured out a long time ago that you got your wanderlust from me. I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: That restless feeling dissolves like butter.

I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I’d fall down as in a dream, clear off the precipice. Oh where is the girl I love? I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had looked everywhere in the little world below. And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded—at least that’s what I thought then.

The West is full of girls like me, victims of circumstance, or poor choices, or good old-fashioned bad luck. We harden into diamonds under the pressure, keeping our chins up and soldiering on. It’s one of the things I love about this wild land. In the East, the dead could get you just as surely as pneumonia or yellow fever—quick, quiet, hard deaths. But in California it would be bears or bobcats or maybe a claim jumper, all noisy, violent ways to go. California was a wild land full of strong, ferocious people, and I liked that.

i get why manufacturers play to pink- it makes good business sense. A marketing executive i spoke with at LeapFrog which is based in Emeryville, California, told me that her company even had a name for it> the pink factor. If you make a pink baseball bat, parents will buy one for their daughter, she explained. then if they subsequently have a son, they'll have to buy a second bat in a different color. Or, if they have a boy first and then a daughter, they'll want to buy a pink one for their precious little girl. Either way, you double the sales.

He peered up at the house. “I know you’re finished in there, Blake. May as well come out.” I breathed a silent sigh. Blake strolled onto the deck wearing low-slung skater shorts and flip-flops. Being shirtless must’ve been mandatory in California. I kind of wished they’d get dressed so I could focus properly when I told them about the prophecy. Blake joined us beside the pool. “So . . . ,” said Blake, rocking back on his heels. “Lover’s quarrel over?” “We’re not lovers,” Kaidan and I said together. “What’s stopping you?” Blake smiled. “What’s stopping you and Ginger?” Kaidan asked. “An ocean, man. Fu—” He glanced at me. “Uh . . . eff you.” “Eff me?” Kaidan asked, grinning. “No, eff you, mate.” Blake put a fist over his mouth when he caught what must have been a seething look on my face, and he laughed, punching Kaidan in the arm. “Told you, man! She’s pissed about the cursing thing! Ginger was right.” I shook my head. I wouldn’t look at them. I was too humiliated to deny it. “Girl, all you have to do is say the word, and Mr. Lusty McLust a Lot here will be happy to whisper some dirty nothings in your ear.” Kaidan half grinned, sexuality rolling off him as wild as the Pacific below us. I took a shaky breath. “I don’t appreciate when people are fake with me.” I pointed this statement at Kaidan. Okay, calling him a fake was overboard, especially if he was just being respectful. But my feelings were bruised and battered. If Kai wasn’t going to forgive me or be willing to talk, I couldn’t hang around and deal with his bad attitude. It hurt too much, and the unfairness frustrated me to no end. “If you guys will sit down and shut up for a minute, I’ll tell you what I came here to say, and then I’m out of here. You two can find someone else to make fun of.” They both wiped the smiles from their faces. I pulled a padded lawn chair over and sat. They moved a couple of chairs closer, giving me their attention. 

When it was all over, Margaret's father and mother forgave her, and she went back home to wait—to WAIT. Oh, it is so dreadful just to WAIT, and do nothing else. Margaret waited for nearly a year. How long it must have seemed to her! And at last there came a letter—but not from Alan. Alan was DEAD. He had died in California and had been buried there. While Margaret had been thinking of him and longing for him and praying for him he had been lying in his lonely, faraway grave." Cecily sprang up, shaking with sobs. "Oh, don't—don't go on," she implored. "I CAN'T bear any more." "There is no more," said the Story Girl. "That was the end of it—the end of everything for Margaret. It didn't kill HER, but her heart died.

Sadness softened her nasal twang, that ubiquitous accent that had drifted out of the Appalachian hills and hollows, across the southern plains, across the southwestern deserts, insinuating itself all the way to the golden hills of California. But somewhere along the way, Rosie had picked up a gentler accent too, a fragrant voice more suited to whisper throaty, romantic words like Wisteria, or humid phrases like honeysuckle vine, her voice for gentleman callers. “Just fine,” she repeated. Even little displaced Okie girls grow up longing to be gone with some far better wind than that hot, cutting, dusty bite that’s blowing their daddy’s crops to hell and gone. I went to get her a beer, wishing it could be something finer.

Part 3 Anna: St. Clair… Etienne: And that. Why don’t you call me Etienne any more? Anna: But … no one else calls you that. It was weird. Right? Etienne: No. It wasn’t And every time you say St. Clair, it’s like you’re rejecting me again. Anna: I have never rejected you. Etienne: But you have. And for Dave. Anna: And you rejected me for Ellie on my birhtday. I don’t understand. If you liked me so much, why didn’t you break up with her? Etienne: I’ve been confused. I’ve been so stupid. Anna: Yes. You have. Etienne: I deserve that. Anna: Yes. You do. But I’ve been stupid, too. You were right. About … the alone thing. Etienne: I’ve been thinking lately. About my mum and dad. How she gives in to him. How she won’t leave him. And as much as I love her, I hate her for it. I don’t understand why she won’t stand up for herself, why she won’t go for what she wants. But I’ve been doing t he same thing. I’m just like her. Anna: You aren’t like your mom. Etienne: I am. But I don’t want to be like that any more, I want what I want. I told my father’s friends that I’m studying at Berkeley next year. It worked. He’s really, really angry with me, but it worked. You told me to go for his pride. You were right. Anna: So.You’re moving to California? Etienne: I have to. Anna: Right. Because of your mom. Etienne: Because of you. I’ll only be a twenty-minute train ride from your school, and I’ll make the commute to see you every night. I’d take a commute ten times that just tob e with you every night. You’re the most incredible girl I’ve ever known. You’re gorgeous and smart, and you make me laugh lilke no one else can. And I can talk to you. And I know after all this I don’t deserve you, but what I’m trying to say ist hat I love you, Anna. Very much.Oh God, And I’ve mucked things up again, haven’t I? I didn’t mean to attack you like this. I mean I did but … all right. I’ll leave. Or you can go down first, and then I’l come down, and I promise I’ll never bother you again… Anna: No. Etienne: I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. Anna: Please stopl apologizing, Etienne. Etienne: Say my name again Anna: Etienne. Etienne: Anna? Anna: Yes? Etienne: Will you please tell me you love me? I’m dying here.

Bruce Wayne Carmody had been unhappy for so long that it had stopped being a state he paid attention to. Sometimes Wayne felt that the world had been sliding apart beneath his feet for years. He was still waiting for it to pull him down, to bury him at last. His mother had been crazy for a while, had believed that the phone was ringing when it wasn’t, had conversations with dead children who weren’t there. Sometimes he felt she had talked more with dead children than she ever had with him. She had burned down their house. She spent a month in a psychiatric hospital, skipped out on a court appearance, and dropped out of Wayne’s life for almost two years. She spent a while on book tour, visiting bookstores in the morning and local bars at night. She hung out in L.A. for six months, working on a cartoon version of Search Engine that never got off the ground and a cocaine habit that did. She spent a while drawing covered bridges for a gallery show that no one went to. Wayne’s father got sick of Vic’s drinking, Vic’s wandering, and Vic’s crazy, and he took up with the lady who had done most of his tattoos, a girl named Carol who had big hair and dressed like it was still the eighties. Only Carol had another boyfriend, and they stole Lou’s identity and ran off to California, where they racked up a ten-thousand-dollar debt in Lou’s name. Lou was still dealing with creditors. Bruce Wayne Carmody wanted to love and enjoy his parents, and occasionally he did. But they made it hard. Which was why the papers in his back pocket felt like nitroglycerin, a bomb that hadn’t exploded yet.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing. In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress-tree come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls from Dora's emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crosses the street to Lee Chong's grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale through the junk in the grass-grown lot for some pan or piece of wood or metal he needs for the boat he is building. Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes on in front of Dora's-- the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row. Callers arrive at Western Biological to see Doc, and he crosses the street to Lee Chong's for five quarts of beer. How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise-- the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream-- be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

Gaman. I've fought my whole life against it, but looking back, it's all I know how to do. I used gammon when I saw that first text to Dad when I was twelve. I used gammon with Trish when she got popular and made all those new, popular friends. I used gaman when I had a crush on her. I thought I'd changed when we moved to California and I finally made real friends, finally kissed Jamie, finally started to live a little. I thought I was done with gaman. But I was wrong. I tried to do something about Dad, and I failed. I tried to tell Mom the truth about me, and I chickened out. I tried to take action when I thought Jamie might leave me, and I screwed up. So I've resigned myself to my fate like a good Japanese girl, and I'm doing my best to pull myself together, squelch the complaints, and endure, endure, endure. Gaman. This is what Mom has been training me for since I was born, and it's clearly what I'm best at.

The bus trip from Denver to Frisco was uneventful except that my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frisco. Cheyenne again, in the afternoon this time, and then west over the range; crossing the Divide at midnight at Creston, arriving at Salt Lake City at dawn—a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean to have been born; then out to Nevada in the hot sun, Reno by nightfall, its twinkling Chinese streets; then up the Sierra Nevada, pines, stars, mountain lodges signifying Frisco romances—a little girl in the back seat, crying to her mother, “Mama when do we get home to Truckee?” And Truckee itself, homey Truckee, and then down the hill to the flats of Sacramento. I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air—air you can kiss—and palms. Along the storied Sacramento River on a superhighway; into the hills again; up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of a bay (it was just before dawn) with the sleepy lights of Frisco festooned across.

As they rode Tissoyo spoke of the death of all the old people when his father was young, from the sickness that had come with the wagons that were going west. The wagons were all full of men and they were anxious to get to someplace called California. The fever was a malediction that grew and spread and ate people. It was invisible in the plains air but slaughtered whole villages nonetheless. They lay down and died and rotted in their tipis and whoever could walk or get on a horse left them there. Once a small girl lived through the fever in one of those decaying tipis, alone among the dead. She walked out on the empty land and a man called Twisted Horn came upon her but did not know whether she was still inhabited by the hostile, acidic beings, and so he left food and blankets for her, and stayed by her at a distance for days until it was clear she was going to live and that the fever had left her. Then he took her up behind him. Her face was full of holes as if she had been shot with birdshot.

Thus, I have always been more of an envious observer than a participant in physical activities, but there have been glowing exceptions, such as what happened at the end of a summer-solstice celebration I attended in California, on a ranch in the foothills of the Sierras. The women at the event were of all ages. But in the evening, when they had found a swing, they became a group of young girls. The swing was on a long rope and swept out over a slope. In the twilight, it was like flying to the stars. Or so they said. Everyone had tried it except me. When the others had wandered indoors, I stayed, looking at the swing and feeling that old shame of being the scaredy-cat, even though probably no one had noticed. Then a woman much younger than I appeared and offered to show me how to use the swing. I said no, I didn’t want to. But she ignored that. She promised she would never push me harder than I wanted. And she held out the swing. It took some time. But somehow I felt safe with her, and I built up the courage to swing out toward the stars like the others. I never saw that young woman again, but I will always be grateful not only for the experience but for the respect and understanding she showed as she taught me how—one gentle swing at a time.

Inside the Galleria it was dark and dank, with fountains and foliage unchanged from the 1980s. I instantly knew it—an old friend—despite having never stepped foot inside, and the loneliness that had been haunting me all day lifted in an instant. Even though I was two thousand miles from it, I was home. I had just moved from Philly, and I didn’t know a soul. My new life was feeling so empty, I needed cheap stuff to fill it up, and there was something particularly alluring that drew me to the Galleria that day—a store I had heard about that was becoming ubiquitous in Los Angeles, popping up faster than a rash of Starbucks in the cityscape. It was a fast-fashion empire to rule them all—pitch-perfect knockoffs of designer styles on an endlessly rotating trend carousel that changed out daily. If you couldn’t afford a Murakami Louis Vuitton monogram bag or the Miu Miu pleated micro mini, you could pacify yourself with their bogus cousins for a fraction of the price, and not feel bad tossing them when the trends shifted in a month or two. I spotted the store’s golden logo overhead. Forever 21. The name alone was pure poetry written in the California sand. Forever 21—like the spirit of a roller-skating bikini girl riding into the Venice Beach dusk. Forever 21—like Madonna, like Angelyne—faces and bodies sculpted into youthful approximations of their aging corporal forms. Forever 21—the true spirit of Los Angeles. I felt it enter me, I was possessed.

Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope. He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterwards in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it. Yossarian tried to help him. ‘Don’t be a dope,’ he had counseled Clevinger when they were both at cadet school in Santa Ana, California.

What does one wear to a ranch early in the morning? I wondered. I was stumped. I had enough good sense, thank God, to know my spiked black boots--the same boots I’d worn on basically every date with Marlboro Man thus far--were out of the question. I wouldn’t want them to get dirty, and besides that, people might look at me funny. I had a good selection of jeans, yes, but would I go for the dark, straight-leg Anne Kleins? Or the faded, boot-cut Gaps with contrast stitching? And what on earth would I wear on top? This could get dicey. I had a couple of nice, wholesome sweater sets, but the weather was turning warmer and the style didn’t exactly scream “ranch” to me. Then there was the long, flax-colored linen tunic from Banana Republic--one I loved to pair with a chunky turquoise necklace and sandals. But that was more Texas Evening Barbecue than Oklahoma Early-Morning Cattle Gathering. Then there were the myriad wild prints with sparkles and stones and other obnoxious adornments. But the last thing I wanted to do was spook the cattle and cause a stampede. I’d seen it happen in City Slickers when Billy Crystal fired up his cordless coffee grinder, and the results weren’t the least bit pretty. I considered cancelling. I had absolutely nothing to wear. Every pair of shoes I owned was black, except for a bright yellow pair of pumps I’d bought on a whim in Westwood one California day. Those wouldn’t exactly work, either. And I didn’t own a single shirt that wouldn’t loudly broadcast *CLUELESS CITY GIRL!* *CLUELESS CITY GIRL!* *CLUELESS CITY GIRL!* I wanted to crawl under my covers and hide.

Hold On" They hung a sign up in our town "If you live it up, you won't live it down" So she left Monte Rio, son Just like a bullet leaves a gun With her charcoal eyes and Monroe hips She went and took that California trip Oh, the moon was gold, her hair like wind Said, "don't look back, just come on, Jim" Oh, you got to hold on, hold on You gotta hold on Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you gotta hold on Well, he gave her a dimestore watch And a ring made from a spoon Everyone's looking for someone to blame When you share my bed, you share my name Well, go ahead and call the cops You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops She said, "baby, I still love you" Sometimes there's nothin' left to do Oh, but you got to hold on, hold on Babe, you gotta hold on and take my hand I'm standing right here, you gotta hold on Well, God bless your crooked little heart St. Louis got the best of me I miss your broken China voice How I wish you were still here with me Oh, you build it up, you wreck it down Then you burn your mansion to the ground Oh, there's nothing left to keep you here But when you're falling behind in this big blue world Oh, you've got to hold on, hold on Babe, you gotta hold on Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you gotta hold on Down by the Riverside motel It's ten below and falling By a ninety-nine cent store She closed her eyes and started swaying But it's so hard to dance that way When it's cold and there's no music Oh, your old hometown's so far away But inside your head there's a record that's playing A song called "Hold On", hold on Babe, you gotta hold on Take my hand, I'm standing right there, you gotta hold on

AIA is about this girl named Anna (who narrates the story) and her one-eyed mom, who is a professional gardener obsessed with tulips, and they have a normal lower-middle- class life in a little central California town until Anna gets this rare blood cancer. But it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck. Like, in cancer books, the cancer person starts a charity that raises money to fight cancer, right? And this commitment to charity reminds the cancer person of the essential goodness of humanity and makes him/her feel loved and encouraged because s/he will leave a cancer-curing legacy. But in AIA, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna Foundation for People with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera. Also, Anna is honest about all of it in a way no one else really is: Throughout the book, she refers to herself as the side effect, which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible. So as the story goes on, she gets sicker, the treatments and disease racing to kill her, and her mom falls in love with this Dutch tulip trader Anna calls the Dutch Tulip Man. The Dutch Tulip Man has lots of money and very eccentric ideas about how to treat cancer, but Anna thinks this guy might be a con man and possibly not even Dutch, and then just as the possibly Dutch guy and her mom are about to get married and Anna is about to start this crazy new treatment regimen involving wheatgrass and low doses of arsenic, the book ends right in the middle of a I know it’s a very literary decision and everything and probably part of the reason I love the book so much, but there is something to recommend a story that ends.

In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23 The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die. Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.” Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war.

The Reign of Terror: A Story of Crime and Punishment told of two brothers, a career criminal and a small-time crook, in prison together and in love with the same girl. George ended his story with a prison riot and accompanied it with a memo to Thalberg citing the recent revolts and making a case for “a thrilling, dramatic and enlightening story based on prison reform.” --- Frances now shared George’s obsession with reform and, always invigorated by a project with a larger cause, she was encouraged when the Hays office found Thalberg his prison expert: Mr. P. W. Garrett, the general secretary of the National Society of Penal Information. Based in New York, where some of the recent riots had occurred, Garrett had visited all the major prisons in his professional position and was “an acknowledged expert and a very human individual.” He agreed to come to California to work with Frances for several weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for a total of kr 4,470.62 plus expenses. Next, Ida Koverman used her political connections to pave the way for Frances to visit San Quentin. Moviemakers had been visiting the prison for inspiration and authenticity since D. W. Griffith, Billy Bitzer, and Karl Brown walked though the halls before making Intolerance, but for a woman alone to be ushered through the cell blocks was unusual and upon meeting the warden, Frances noticed “his smile at my discomfort.” Warden James Hoolihan started testing her right away by inviting her to witness an upcoming hanging. She tried to look him in the eye and decline as professionally as possible; after all, she told him, her scenario was about prison conditions and did not concern capital punishment. Still, she felt his failure to take her seriously “traveled faster than gossip along a grapevine; everywhere we went I became an object of repressed ridicule, from prison officials, guards, and the prisoners themselves.” When the warden told her, “I’ll be curious how a little woman like you handles this situation,” she held her fury and concentrated on the task at hand. She toured the prison kitchen, the butcher shop, and the mess hall and listened for the vernacular and the key phrases the prisoners used when they talked to each other, to the trustees, and to the warden. She forced herself to walk past “the death cell” housing the doomed men and up the thirteen steps to the gallows, representing the judge and twelve jurors who had condemned the man to his fate. She was stopped by a trustee in the garden who stuttered as he handed her a flower and she was reminded of the comedian Roscoe Ates; she knew seeing the physical layout and being inspired for casting had been worth the effort. --- Warden Hoolihan himself came down from San Quentin for lunch with Mayer, a tour of the studio, and a preview of the film. Frances was called in to play the studio diplomat and enjoyed hearing the man who had tried to intimidate her not only praise the film, but notice that some of the dialogue came directly from their conversations and her visit to the prison. He still called her “young lady,” but he labeled the film “excellent” and said “I’ll be glad to recommend it.” ---- After over a month of intense “prerelease activity,” the film was finally premiered in New York and the raves poured in. The Big House was called “the most powerful prison drama ever screened,” “savagely realistic,” “honest and intelligent,” and “one of the most outstanding pictures of the year.

Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might

About the Author Native San Franciscan Erika Lenkert fled the dot-community to find respite and great food and wine in Napa Valley. When she’s not writing about food, wine, and travel for the likes of Four Seasons Magazine or InStyle, or promoting her book The Last-Minute Party Girl: Fashionable, Fearless, and Foolishly Simple Entertaining, she’s in search of Wine Country pleasures to share with Frommer’s readers. She also remains subservient to her owners—two Siamese cats and most recently, her new daughter Viva. In addition to this guide, Erika authors and co-authors a number of other Frommer’s guides to California, including Frommer’s California and Frommer’s San Francisco

San Francisco,” she answered. “Ah, I should have guessed that you’re a California girl,

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In those days, when my mother visited Seattle to see her grandchildren, she brought books. On the inside cover she always inscribed the same message. It was what she told the girls on the phone from California . . . Grandma loves you all the time. As the girls grew, they learned to parrot my mother, they said it together at the end of phone conversations or when she was leaving after a visit. Their high, chirpy voices blended with her own low tones to make a chant, a chorus, a call to arms. She would start and they would join in: "Grandma loves you all the time." They thought it was a game, a joke. Only I knew the sad, scared place it came from. Only I knew what it really meant: a little girl with a single memory of her own mother. A little girl who did not remember ever being loved. Even if she is not here, even when you cannot see her, even if she dies, even if you don't remember her: Grandma loves you all the time.

About page warm and casual on her blog, The Pioneer Woman: Howdy. I’m Ree Drummond, also known as The Pioneer Woman. I’m a moderately agoraphobic ranch wife and mother of four. Welcome to my frontier! I’m a middle child who grew up on the seventh fairway of a golf course in a corporate town. I was a teen angel. Not. After high school, I thought my horizons needed broadening. I attended college in California, then got a job and wore black pumps to work every day. I ate sushi and treated myself to pedicures on a semi-regular basis. I even kissed James Garner in an elevator once. I loved him deeply, despite the fact that our relationship only lasted 47 seconds. Unexpectedly, during a brief stay in my hometown, I met and fell in love with a rugged cowboy. Now I live in the middle of nowhere on a working cattle ranch. My days are spent wrangling children, chipping dried manure from boots, washing jeans, and making gravy. I have no idea how I got here . . . but you know what? I love it. Don’t tell anyone! I hope you enjoy my website, ThePioneerWoman.com. Here, I write daily about my long transition from spoiled city girl to domestic country wife.2

A banker’s wife with two children, Woodman undertook the story-gathering pilgrimage and was soon writing one of the most respected dramas of early radio. One of the sponsor’s employees in California, a self-styled “desert rat” named W. W. “Wash” Cahill, was lined up as her guide. Her trips into the desert became annual events, and soon she was well versed in the ways of prospectors, outlaws, and saloon girls. She spent up to two months a year prowling through ghost towns, interviewing oldtimers, sifting through museums, and poring over yellowing newsprint. She packed into the back country, scaled the mountains west of Death Valley, talked with small-town newspaper editors, old men who ran gas stations, lonely wives on the fringes of nowhere, and—when she could get into the saloons—bartenders. Then she returned to New York to write the stories she had gathered, and the next year she did it all again.

So that wasn’t much help. I was torn. I wanted to be judged on what I did, not on what I represented or what people projected onto me. But I understood how much this breakthrough would mean to the country, especially to girls and boys who would see that there are no limits on what women can achieve. I wanted to honor that significance. I just didn’t know the best way to do it. I carried all that uncertainty with me back from California, all the way to David Muir’s interview room in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Tuesday night. Results were starting to come in. I won the New Jersey primary. Bernie won the North Dakota caucus. The big prize, California, was still out there, but all signs pointed to another victory. Bill and I had worked hard on my speech, but I still felt unsettled. Maybe it was about not being ready to accept “yes” for an answer. I had worked so hard to get to this moment, and now that it had arrived, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. Then Muir walked me over to the window, and I looked out at that crowd—at thousands of people who’d worked their hearts out, resisted the negativity of a divisive primary and relentlessly harsh press coverage, and poured their dreams into my campaign. We’d had big crowds before, but this felt different. It was something more than the enthusiasm I saw on the trail. It was a pulsing energy, an outpouring of love and hope and joy. For a moment, I was overwhelmed—and then calm. This was right. I was ready. After the interview, I went downstairs to where my husband was sitting with the speechwriters going over final tweaks to the draft. I read it over one more time and felt good. Just as they were racing off to load the speech into the teleprompter, I said I had one more thing to add: “I’m going to talk about Seneca Falls. Just put a placeholder in brackets and I’ll take care of it.” I took a deep breath. I didn’t want the emotion of the moment to get to me in the middle of my speech. I said a little prayer and then headed for the stage. At the last moment, Huma grabbed my arm and

So what do you say Ashley-girl? Want to see California with me? I'm sure they have cloying heat and old roller coasters and most of all, they'll have me. I can't imagine going without you.

Hey, baby girl. Daddy needs your chocolate ass to get better. Me and you got some unfinished business, young lady. Plus, daddy needs some more of those scrubs. They are working for my hair and my face, Nae. I never told anybody this before, but I need you, baby.” Wait a minute… I think I know that voice, or do I? Damn it, my brain is starting to hurt. “She smilin’ a lil’ bit, bro. Keep talkin’.” “Baby, you need to get better so we can figure out what hoe ass nigga did this to you. I promise they are gon’ die. You mine, shorty. I don’t care about that wack ass nigga you got. You can believe that shit, T-Rose.” Is this the guy from California my dad was talking about? He knows me. He sounds good as hell and he likes my scrubs. I hope he looks as good as he sounds. T-Rose? Someone called me that before. Damn it! No one can hear me. Why can’t nobody hear me? “We have to go now, Trenae. Get better.” Finally,

California during the 1940s had Hollywood and the bright lights of Los Angeles, but on the other coast was Florida, land of sunshine and glamour, Miami and Miami Beach. If you weren't already near California's Pacific Coast you headed for Florida during the winter. One of the things which made Miami such a mix of glitter and sunshine was the plethora of movie stars who flocked there to play, rubbing shoulders with tycoons and gangsters. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the latter two. Miami and everything that surrounded it hadn't happened by accident. Carl Fisher had set out to make Miami Beach a playground destination during the 1930s and had succeeded far beyond his dreams. The promenade behind the Roney Plaza Hotel was a block-long lovers' lane of palm trees and promise that began rather than ended in the blue waters of the Atlantic. Florida was more than simply Miami and Miami Beach, however. When George Merrick opened the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables papers across the country couldn't wait to gush about the growing aura of Florida. They tore down Collins Bridge in the Gables and replaced it with the beautiful Venetian Causeway. You could plop down a fiver if you had one and take your best girl — or the girl you wanted to score with — for a gondola ride there before the depression, or so I'd been told.

He worried about Michelle. Jack knew she wasn’t the type to run off. She’d never leave Aunt Haddie. She loved her foster mother dearly. He hoped she just went out to California to check it out. She could have a boyfriend and took some time between classes. She’d be twenty-four now.

I've been a California girl all of my life and have spent much of it on the many highways that intersect all over Los Angeles County.

She ran a streak of foundation under each eye, highlighter down the bridge of her nose, and bronzer beneath each cheekbone—a layer of armor before battle. Because that’s what these parties were to her, a war on all the heartbreaking boys in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As our car drives along a sunny avenue lined with palm trees, it seems bizarre that we are heading to a morgue filled with dead bodies. But that’s just California for you. The perfect temperatures and the cheerful sunlight are almost insulting in a bleak situation. Couldn’t the sky show a little decency and muster up a few clouds at least? A bit of rain, even just a drizzle? Nope. Even misery, death, and grief need to be felt while being bombarded with pure paradise.

Look at the boy from Cambridge, Massachusetts, always too thin, now so tired he can barely move. He's uninjured, but that doesn't matter: he's still wounded. He holds the body of his sister, and if she's alive, it's only barely, survival measured by the thinnest of margins. His clothing is stained with her blood. His hands ache with splinters and with their own stillness, as if through motion he might have redeemed her and, by redeeming her, redeemed himself. Look at the girl from Palo Alto, California, so motionless that it's clear how close she is to the transition from person to past. She is crumpled and cast-aside, exhausted from her own efforts to become something more than a consequence. The wound in her shoulder has crusted over; the bleeding has stopped. That doesn't matter. There was more than enough damage done to take her to the edge, and over, into what waits beyond. She is ready to return to the Up-and-Under via the graveyard path. When she goes, she knows she will not go alone.

For a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation's multibillion-dollar line of so-called princess products, the five sisters of Keeping Up with the Kardashians were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle, unabashedly focused on the pursuit of beauty treatments, expensive fun, and luxury brands - the latter a national fixation spawned in the "luxury revolution" of the last thirtysomething years, in which most of the wealth of the country had traveled into the hands of a few, with the rest of the population looking on longingly as the beneficiaries of a new Gilded Age flaunted their high-end stuff. And entertainment media, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to Keeping Up with the Kardashians, provided them with ample opportunities to do just that.

I can feel it. The music. It feels as real to me as the Pacific wind caressing my face. As real as the rhythm of Landon's heart beating next to mine. And I think he can feel it, too.

I often felt nervous passing through the hallway of my own home, and the Golden State was simply where I lived. For me, there was no California Dreaming. I just was, at the center of it all.

Even today, with no spaces left on the shelves and walls, my octo-genarian mother builds stock off fanciful garden decor: a patch of copper whirligigs among the crepe myrtles, concrete tortoises creeping around the succulents, a ceramic Mediterranean pot that could house a small family.

Only 15-20% of Rossmoor houses are “originals”—structures unchanged from their construction in the 1950s. The land is what’s valuable. People knock down the gingerbread cottages to build Mediterranean villas with no yards between them. I don’t want our family’s house to suffer that transformation.

My parents were from a generation where you tended to your own problems, one where psychotherapy was an indulgence. They both came from families where you kept your problems to yourself and got on with life. If Keller was starting to act a little out of the ordinary, wasn’t everybody trying to quote-unquote find themselves in Southern California in the early seventies? Not to mention that psychiatry had a cuckoo’s-nest edge of paranoia about it.

Hmmph. This was a sorry excuse for a baby-sitting club.

the girls

Hers was not an easy sleep. Through her dreams there came and went the young girls of her mother’s stories: girls who had left their little houses against the rules and custom. Some of them were bitten by snakes and died at once; some of them lived long enough to bring shame and sorrow to their families, and then died; and there was the one who cut herself and sucked her own blood and liked the taste so much, she ate more and more of herself, becoming nothing but a head—a Cannibal Head—which devoured her parents and her brothers and sisters and then rolled horribly over the earth with an insatiable need always to eat human flesh, more and more and more.

In Sunnyvale, I used to think I was adopted. Some of my friends there were Chinese girls adopted by ordinary California parents, but I felt like the opposite, like an ordinary California girl adopted by Japanese parents, who were strange and different, but tolerable, because in Sunnyvale it was kind of special to be Japanese.

When I look back, Elizabeth Duncan's trial is linked inextricably in my mind to the sound of my father's voice--his dramatic, profanity-laced, sometimes humorous stories about witness testimony and crazy antics in the courtroom. Stories of blackmail, a Salvation Army man and a phony annulment, too many husbands to count, and Mrs. Duncan breathing fire to the end, often told in snatches between more chaotic attempts at home repair. I read every work of his newspaper articles, and I scrutinized the front page photos of all the trial participants. But his nightly accounts brought the bizarre and brutal characters to life around our dining room table. Daddy had no filter. I hung on every detail of his spellbinding tales, and although I'd never met any of these people, I knew them all very well.

Dr. Breuning, Professor Emerita at California State University, explained this very well in Psychology Today.[1] When a man touches a woman (yes, one intimate touch is enough) and definitely after sex, she gets the love hormone called oxytocin rushing through her body. This is a very tricky and deceptive little hormone. It’s nature’s way of creating a bond between you and that man. Nature doesn’t know contraceptives exist, so after sex, a woman might become pregnant. That’s why it’s imperative the guy sticks around to protect and provide for the mother and child. So she gets oxytocin. The effects of oxytocin, however, are where the traps lie.

I'd give anything to go to school in California,” Diamond admitted as she bought two slices of cheese pizza. “Why is that?” He glanced around, evidently looking for his daughter. “I don't know. Close to Hollywood. Movie stars. The ocean. All that stuff,” Diamond replied. Thane tilted his head. “You have that look, if you don't mind my saying so.” “Huh? What look?” He checked his watch. “Where can that girl be?” Then he looked back at Diamond as if he'd just remembered her question. “That star look. You're a dancer, right?” Diamond's eyes went wide. “How did you know?” “Well, you walk like a queen, tall and graceful. And it says 'dance' all over that bag you're carrying.

Date of birth: March 10, 1948 Aliases/Nicknames: The Hollywood Slasher, The Sunset Strip Killer, The Sunset Strip Slayer Characteristics: Necrophilia, pedophilia, decapitation Number of victims: 7 Date of murders: June 1980 - August 1980 Date of arrest: August 12, 1980 Murder method: Shooting Known victims: Karen Jones, 24; Exxie Wilson, 21; Marnette Comer, 17; Jack Robert Murray, 45; Gina Narano, 15; Cynthia Chandler, 16; unknown girl Crime location: Burbank and Los Angeles, California Status: Sentenced to death, awaiting execution. Background