Lifestyle
After fires, L.A. teens just want to feel normal. New all-ages venue is ‘a way to escape’
Through a veil of dark hair tendrils, Audrey Cymone stares intensely into the darkened room. The 16-year-old singer of the high school band Kim Theory croons the melancholy-tinged lyrics from “Growing Pains,” their song about adolescent angst.
Why can’t things just be the same?
The question hangs in the air as the sound thickens during soundcheck — guitars climbing, drums cracking. It carries double meaning here at Backyard Party, a new all-ages music venue in a nondescript business park on the border of Pasadena and Altadena.
The band, the venue’s team and the audience share an undesirable connective tissue. All have been affected in different ways by the Eaton and Palisades fires. Some watched their homes burn to the ground. Others live as expatriates from their own community because their houses in the burn zones are still uninhabitable. And some simply bear witness to the grief that, almost a year later, still bubbles up.
Before this rainy November night, the all-female band self-described as Riot Grrrl-adjacent mostly performed at house parties and small downtown L.A. venues. To celebrate the release of its EP, “Bitch Scene,” Kim Theory chose Backyard Party.
“This is a big deal,” says Lula Seifert, 16, the guitarist, watching the line of people snake through the door. “This is an awesome venue.”
When Cymone, wearing a dress fashioned out of a trash bag, and Seifert take the stage later with drummer Zoey Su, and bassist Lucy Fraser, the sold-out room crackles with energy. Teenagers crowd around the stage. A mosh pit breaks out. Bodies collide in a whirl of elbows and flying sneakers.
Attendees dance in the crowd during the band Kim Theory’s EP Release Party at Backyard Party on November 15.
The back of the room — populated with parents, guardians and supervisors — is more sedate. Linda Wang, 45, the drummer’s mom, likes the all-ages venue because it provides a safe space for teens to experience live music. Nearby, a dad vigorously bobs his head. Hugs are exchanged between community members torn apart by January’s wildfires.
At Backyard Party, where live music happens every weekend, the vibes are good, the guest list is family friendly and the house rules are straight-edged. Between band sets, Brandon Jay, a Backyard Party partner, popped onstage to remind the crowd that the space is a drug-free zone. For those who don’t comply, “You gotta go,” he announced.
And on Kim Theory’s night, the heaviness left behind by the fires stays at the door.
“Music is a very powerful thing,” says Malena Vesbit, 14, who helped run ticket sales for the show. “It moves your emotions. I think it’s really a way to escape it all.”
The band Kim Theory preforms on stage during their EP Release Party at Backyard Party.
Music composes a second life
Backyard Party, run by Jay and partners Sandra Denver and Matt Chait, is inspired by Pasadena lore — the backyard shows that helped launch Van Halen. The next era of Pasadena parties starts in this 1,500-square-foot space.
But it’s become more than just an all-ages venue and event space since hosting its first show in September. If you lost your record collection in the fires, you can pick up free vinyls from their library. If you lost an instrument, free guitars, amps and a piano for the taking fill a room next to the stage.
Jay, and his wife, Gwendolyn Sanford, who work together as a composing team, lost their Altadena home, music studio and over 150 instruments and pieces of recording gear in the Eaton fire.
“Everyone lost special things like that,” says Jay, 53. “It’s so hard to cope”
Backyard Party founder Brandon Jay helps adjust a drum set during the band Kim Theory’s EP Release Party.
After the fire, friends started pressing their musical gear into his hands — small acts of generosity that helped stitch him back together. All over Los Angeles, musical instruments sit untouched in garages and closets. What if Jay could help match these lonely instruments with musicians in need?
Weeks after the fire, Jay founded Altadena Musicians, and the companion Instrumental Giving app followed in April to connect musicians in need with donors. Jay, with his bouffant curly hair and preternatural ability to remember the smallest details, became a de facto musical matchmaker.
For the record:
1:33 p.m. Dec. 1, 2025A previous version of this article stated Altadena Musicians has helped over 850 people. It has helped roughly 1,200 people.
The process often starts with a personal story of a loss and ends with an unexpected human connection made by the need for something small, like a harmonica. Altadena Musicians has helped roughly 1,200 people, says Jay. The circulation of treasured possessions and an extraordinary sense of kindness can change lives.
When the Pacific Palisades fire raged, Michelle Bellamy, 39, reached for her Martin acoustic guitar, affectionately named Gretchyn the Second, before evacuating, but then changed her mind. Something told her she would be back.
But the fire took her home — and the guitar she used to learn to write songs on. Regret replayed in her mind until Jay found a match: Abby Sherr, 80, whose Pacific Palisades home survived. Sherr had been given a Martin acoustic guitar at 16 by her brother. She was never quite able to part with it until she heard about Jay’s effort. Then she knew exactly where it needed to go.
In April, Sherr arrived at the Santa Monica real estate office where Bellamy works to give her the guitar, newly named Gretchyn the Third.
Attendees listen to the band Kim Theory during their EP Release Party.
“This guitar has given me a new lease on my musical life,” says Bellamy. She was inspired to write a song about the Palisades fire on Gretchyn the Third. Of course, she sent Sherr a video of her performance.
“It did bring tears to my eyes hearing her play and sing that song,” says Sherr. “I drive by what used to be her apartment, not infrequently, and I think of her every time.”
Just like normal. Just for one night.
No one at Kim Theory’s show really wanted to talk about fires. Especially the kids, says Jay. They just want to feel normal.
Some teenagers prefer action over words. Ticket sales go toward paying the bands and funding Backyard Party and Altadena Musicians’ venue upkeep and programs.
“Helping out can make everything just feel a little bit better about the state of our world,” says Fraser, 16, Kim Theory’s bassist.
Attendees wear various outfit accessories during the band Kim Theory’s EP Release Party.
Vesbit agrees. She helped establish the Alta Pasa Project, an organization to help teens who were impacted by the fires. She and her family are still displaced from their Altadena home.
During the party, Vesbit took breaks from working the door to watch the show. She danced and joined the mosh pit. She noticed that many teenagers hugged, even though they didn’t know each other, Vesbit says. That was her favorite part.
It was the Morrow Family’s first time attending a Backyard Party event. They came from their long-term temporary place in Highland Park to see Kim Theory perform. Their Altadena home stands, but because of the fire’s lingering smoke and ash they haven’t been able to return.
Max Morrow, 15, is tired of talking about the fire and the house they can’t go back to yet. His younger sister, Stella Morrow, 13, still feels awkward about grieving what is still tangible but out of reach.
“It’s a time capsule,” says their mom, Mel Morrow, 52, about their home.
Friends arrive, and she rushes over to greet them.
“I mean, we’ll show up no matter what,” she says. “Because we didn’t just lose our houses, we lost our community.”
Attendees play in the rain after the band Kim Theory’s EP Release Party.
“Growing Pains,” Kim Theory’s EP closer, is a song about the stage of life when you’re unsure the person you were would be proud of your present self, says Cymone.
“I feel like it’s something that a lot of teenagers can relate to,” she adds.
Tomorrow, there will be more uncertainty, but in the parking lot after the show, the teens start dancing in the rain.
Lifestyle
Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective
Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.
“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”
The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”
L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.
The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.
Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.
“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”
A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.
The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”
Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”
The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”
The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.
All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.
Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.
Lifestyle
Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Lifestyle
Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
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