Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: Everything was good. Then came the text I never wanted to get
My father spent the 1970s selling hunger to America: soda, waffles, chips, anything that promised satisfaction in 30 seconds flat. He also weighed 450 pounds and was always on a new diet with me as his little diet coach. All his best material came from our kitchen table: “L’eggo my Eggo,” “Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop,” “Coke Is It” — the lines he’d toss out between bites.
My grandma Beauty did the opposite. She fed me comfort, one recipe at a time, until I believed emotions had a flavor. My dad could sell the American consumer comfort, but he couldn’t quite give that same safety to the girl sitting across from him. Between my dad, who treated cravings like a religion, and my grandmother, who treated food like therapy, I grew up thinking connection was something you could taste before you could name it.
So when I met my Bumble date years later after my divorce, it wasn’t fireworks. It was something quieter. A sense memory. A familiar click in the body before the mind catches up.
The first meal we ever shared was at Dan Tana’s: rare steak and shrimp swimming in oil and garlic. He ordered quickly, confidently, passing plates back and forth like this was something we’d always done. Somewhere in that meal, I felt that oyster-like disbelief when something simple tastes better than expected, and you pretend not to notice because the surprise feels too intimate to say out loud.
After that night, we slipped into a rhythm. We went out to dinner a lot. Before I could even open a menu, he’d tell the waiter, “Sauce on the side, she eats like a celebrity,” making me feel adored, not demanding.
The dishes were always exquisite. Slow-roasted bone marrow, branzino laced with herbs, the kind of flavors that made us lean in and feed each other. He’d study my face and say, “Love it or hate it?,” shooting me a warm smirk.
On quieter dates, we watched movies in bed, talked about our kids, anything except for whatever was forming between us. On the nights I slept over, he’d bring me matcha lattes in the morning casually like it was no big deal, and every single time, I felt like I’d won an Academy Award.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!” I’d exclaim.
And he’d shake his head, amused. “You’re too easy to please.”
But what he didn’t realize was remembering that I liked only a splash of milk and an extra shot of matcha fed a hunger in me I didn’t know I longed for.
Our banter was fun, constant and warm. Everything worked except for when a question leaned into the future. That’s when something tightened, a brief, instinctual clam-closing and then loosening again just as fast. But I kept going because the present was good. Because we laughed a lot. Because the world felt softer when I was with him.
Then one Sunday evening, I asked, “What are you doing for the Jewish holidays?” He gave a quick, unreadable flicker. It was gone before I could interpret it. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t need to. We were both leaving for our own family week. When I returned excited to see him and celebrate a big work milestone I’d helped him prepare for, I got “the text.” Careful. Polite. And at the end, a line that blew a hole through my chest.
“I don’t see a romantic future with you.”
I read it again and again until my body revolted. A wave of heat shot through me. I wanted to scream but I just stood there frozen, unable to breathe, like someone had cracked open my chest and scooped the air out.
Suddenly, I wasn’t a grown-up woman living in Hollywood. I wasn’t a mother, not a nutritionist, not someone who has taken care of people for years.
I was 9. I was in Chicago. It was 1975. I was in my grandma’s kitchen, the place I loved most in the world. The only place I ever remember feeling safe. My fingers were gripping her apron. The smell of dill wafting through the air. Her soup was bubbling. Nourishment, comfort, stability in the form of broth and steady hands. Then my mother’s voice sliced through it: “Dawn, get in the car.”
As I was pushed into the station wagon, there were boxes everywhere. Clio Awards, stacks of Playboy magazines with my dad’s byline, and when my mother slid in after me, she bumped into my dad’s cigarette and the ashes ignited the map — burning a hole straight through the Midwest. My stomach was in knots. I kept reaching my hand toward my grandmother.
“Don’t make me go.”
My mom, irritated, honked the horn, and my dad stepped on the gas.
Standing in my kitchen decades later, looking at the text message, the same feeling of nausea washed over me. The ground shifted. My friends, trying to support me, started texting me. “Don’t you dare text him.”
But I did.
“Hi.”
He responded immediately. We met for Japanese that night, and without trying, we fell right back into our rhythm over Santa Barbara uni and lamb chops cooked exactly the way we like them, crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, the kind of dish that cracks when your knife hits it and then gives way like warm silk. We were not awkward. We were not mad. We were not resolved. We were two people who kept finding each other at a table, even when everything else was uncertain.
Then, somewhere between courses, he looked up and said, “You remind me of my mother.”
The words hit something in me I couldn’t name. Not a wound, an internal flinch. He always told me his mother was unpredictable. Warm one moment, stormy the next. Comforting and chaotic in the same breath. I was none of those things. And I knew instantly that whatever he meant was tangled and that my warmth might feel like comfort to him, but also, unconsciously, like danger. That being cared for and being overwhelmed lived very close together in his body.
I didn’t take it personally. I took it as information. Maybe I felt familiar to him in a way that carried both safety and alarm. A green light and a red light at the same intersection. And the strangest thing was, in that same moment, he reminded me of my father, a man who could charm a room, feed America slogans that defined a generation, win awards and still feel shaky where it mattered most — with me.
Two grown-ups sitting across a table, mirroring childhood patterns that neither of us fully understood.
Later, when he drove me home, he dropped something heavy: his story, not mine to tell. The kind of truth that shifts the room without explaining the entire plot.
Sitting there in his car, I realized it was never just the two of us. We both brought our ghosts, and they probably showed up before we even opened our menus. Maybe that’s the real story. You can share the same cravings and still have to adjust the salt and heat as each new combination of flavors come together and unfold.
The author is a nutritionist who wrote the bestselling book, “My Fat Dad: A Memoir of Food, Love and Family, With Recipes.” Find her on Instagram: @DawnLerman.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Editor’s note: On April 3, L.A. Affairs Live, our new storytelling competition show, will feature real dating stories from people living in the Greater Los Angeles area. Tickets for our first event are on sale now at the Next Fun Thing.
Workers react to the media after updating signage outside the Kennedy Center on Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
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Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio is asking a federal court in Washington, D.C., to force President Trump and the board and staff of the Kennedy Center to revert to calling the arts complex The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The motion, which Beatty filed on Wednesday, asks a federal circuit court judge to reverse the Trump administration and the center’s current board and staff’s decision to call the complex “The Trump-Kennedy Center.”
In the filing, Beatty’s attorneys wrote: “Can the Board of the Kennedy Center — in direct contradiction of the governing statutes — rename this sacred memorial to John F. Kennedy after President Donald J. Trump? The answer is, unequivocally, ‘no.’ By renaming the Center — in violation of the law — Defendants have breached the terms of the trust and their most basic fiduciary obligations as trustees. Shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Congress designated the Kennedy Center as the ‘sole national memorial to the late’ President in the nation’s capital.”
In a statement emailed to NPR Thursday, Roma Daravi, the vice president of public relations for the Kennedy Center, wrote: “We’re confident the court will uphold the board’s decision on the name change and the desperately needed renovations which will continue as scheduled.” NPR also reached out to the White House for comment, but did not receive a reply.
In December, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the complex would heretofore be called “The Trump-Kennedy Center.” Although the new moniker was never approved by Congress, the Center’s website and publicity materials were immediately updated to reflect the administration’s chosen name, and the same day as Leavitt’s announcement, Trump’s name went up on the signage of the complex’s exterior, over that of the slain President Kennedy.
Later that month, Rep. Beatty who serves as an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, sued Trump, members of the Kennedy Center board appointed by Trump, and some ex-officio members, arguing that the complex’s name had been legislated by Congress in 1964. Wednesday’s motion is part of that lawsuit.
In a press release sent to NPR on Wednesday, Rep. Beatty said: “Donald Trump’s attempt to rename the Kennedy Center after himself is not just an act of ego. It is an attempt to subvert our Constitution and the rule of law. Congress established the Kennedy Center by law, and only Congress can change its name.”
For many patrons, artists and benefactors of the Kennedy Center, the name change was the last straw in politicizing the performing arts hub. Following the White House announcement of the new name, many prominent artists withdrew planned performances there, including the composer Philip Glass (a Kennedy Center Honors award recipient, who received his prize during the first Trump administration), the famed Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz and the 18-time Grammy-winning banjo master Béla Fleck.
The Washington National Opera (WNO), which had been in residence at the Kennedy Center since 1971, also severed its ties in January after ticket sales dropped precipitously. Earlier this month, WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello told NPR, “We did try as best as we could to encourage [the patrons] that we are a bipartisan organization, but people really voted with their feet and with their pocketbooks. And so we realized that there was really no choice for us.”
On Monday, a coalition of eight architecture and cultural groups also sued Trump and the Kennedy Center board in federal court over the complex’s scheduled closing in July for unspecified renovations. Their suit seeks to have the White House and board members comply with existing historic preservation laws, and to secure Congressional approval before moving ahead with the renovation plans.
I am blindfolded and seated in a vintage armchair set in the center of a darkened, red-lit room with Gothic accents. An actor is performing nearby. I hear their voice, but cannot, of course, see them. I suddenly spring upward in my seat, alarmed at the touch of some sort of cloth — or perhaps a feather? — across my ankles.
I’ll never be entirely sure. For wearing the small veil across my eyes was a requirement to participate in “Poe: Pulse & Pendulum,” the debut offering from new troupe Theatre Obscura L.A. The company’s initial performance contains two one-act plays, modern interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
While the stories are familiar to many, Theatre Obscura increases the levels of discomfort. In this room, I am at times unsettled, at once tracking the movements of the actors while attempting to remain hyper aware of any sudden touch or scent. “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the first half of the program, translates especially well to this setting, its dark sense of demented confinement keeping my nerves on high alert.
Conjuring such a state of anxiety was the point.
“If you take the visual away, it’s going to make you feel uneasy,” says Paul Millet, who devised the concept.
There are jump scares. Downtown event space the Count’s Den has been outfitted with about 50 speakers for the Obscura shows, which run through April 12. Some are visible before one puts on the blindfold. Many, though, are hidden under seats or couches, as the audio will trail the actors around the room, or perhaps a sudden crash or door opening will have me jolting my attention elsewhere.
“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a story of torture, and as the narrator, here played by Melissa Lugo, desperately speaks of a blade swinging above, actors will fan us, timing their waves with each swoosh of the audio. I was prepared for that one, as a fellow theatergoer nearby let out a soft yelp when the unseen gestures first arrived above their head.
For many, sight is the most coveted sense. “If you take that away, you’re already naturally uncomfortable,” Millet says. “So we lean into that. We know you’re going to be uncomfortable. We know this is not the norm. But get on that ride with us. Be willing to be uncomfortable. Discomfort, I think, helps to heighten the experience, and ideally allow it to trigger the emotional reactions that the story does.”
“Poe: Pulse & Pendulum” is two one-act, audio-focused performances of Edgar Allan Poe stories.
(Joe Camareno / Theatre Obscura)
Still, touch is limited in the show. Occasionally a rattling of a chair, but little more. The fluttering I felt near my ankles was to mimic the sensation of a running critter. The troupe will ask for audience consent, and participants can opt out. While I went in wondering if “Poe: Pulse & Pendulum” would seek to recall more extreme haunt experiences with lengthy waivers, Millet wanted to keep it light — an audio play, primarily, with just a few in-the-flesh signals.
“We want people to feel unease, but I don’t want anyone taken out of the story because a boundary or line was crossed,” Millet says.
Scent, too, is used with restraint. There are moments when guests will get a whiff of a fragrance that pairs with the storyline. Millet considers the first run of Theatre Obscure to be an experiment in how much touch and scent audiences may want to endure. Smell, he says, is tricky, as the aroma may linger and become a distraction.
Millet has been honing the concept since 2023. Previously, he was part of the team behind Wicked Lit, which ended in 2019 after running for a number of years at unique locations such as Altadena’s Mountain View Mausoleum. Those immersive performances would feature casts and guests walking the venue. Theatre Obscura, however, is fully seated.
“Poe: Pulse & Pendulum” focuses on the fear that something may happen to us when stripped of sight.
(Joe Camareno / Theatre Obscura)
And while the stories of Poe lend themselves to the Halloween season, spooky events increasingly occur year round. Long-running production “The Willows” is set to wrap in early April, and “Monster Party,” a period piece that takes guests to a devilishly extravagant cocktail party, is re-launching in mid-April. Millet, a longtime theater producer who has a day job in television editing, is hoping to stand out by avoiding “the glut” of horror events that occur each September and October.
Theatre Obscura may face challenges, namely persuading potential guests that “The Pit and the Pendulum” is more than simply a live reading with audio effects.
“You can feel the movement of the characters around you,” Millet says. “You’re in the environment with the story as it unfolds. You can experience it on a more visceral level.”
Blindfolded, I felt Theatre Obscura was mostly playing off our fears rather than giving in to them, largely keying in on our anticipation that something may happen to us when stripped of sight. Lugo in much of “The Pit and the Pendulum” circles guests, who are seated sporadically around the room, allowing each of us to imagine how close or far we may be from the hole we are told is at its center. Each show deals with claustrophobia in some way, either of a space, or of a mind.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” is louder, more crowded. The sounds of crashing glass and creaky floorboards had my head working overtime to draw a floorplan, only to then have it distorted when actors would unexpectedly whisper in both of my ears to bring forth the protagonist’s nightmares. While I expected Theatre Obscura to be slightly more aggressive in its uses of touch and scent, it’s a show that asks us to live in our heads, and to sit in our own feeling of trepidation.
“I was intrigued,” Millet says, “with really trying to engage the audience’s imagination.”
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