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L.A. Affairs: I froze my eggs, and he got a vasectomy. Could we still have a love story?

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L.A. Affairs: I froze my eggs, and he got a vasectomy. Could we still have a love story?

Freezing your eggs isn’t sexy. Neither the existential questions it forces nor the toll it takes on your body are conducive to dating.

Yet when I matched with Graham on an app last February, the transparency was refreshing. He explained he was newly divorced and co-parenting his two children back home in London. He would be in Los Angeles for a few intervals throughout the year, working as an orchestrator on a blockbuster franchise film.

I was equally forthright about starting my first egg-freezing cycle, unsure how I’d respond to all the hormones I was set to inject. He was very considerate and curious; the conversation flowed. I wanted to grab drinks with him before he left town until summer, even if I could not drink. Bloated and fatigued, I met him on a Saturday at a brewery equidistant from my apartment in Palms and his hotel in Century City.

Although I thought he was a great guy, I was in no emotional state to gauge romantic chemistry. The mandatory celibacy aside, preserving my fertility at 35 and pondering what it meant for perspective partners had clouded my usual fervor. I believe he kissed me after walking me to my car, saying he’d love to see me again when he came back, but most of the date went forgotten in the following months.

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He returned and reached out in August, where he again found me in quite a funk. I told him I wasn’t sure where I stood with casual dating, but he still insisted on taking me to dinner, no strings attached. I think I surprised us both by wanting to take our encounter further that night.

When I brought up contraception, he revealed he’d had a vasectomy. I can’t recall if he’d previously mentioned not wanting more kids, but either way, I thought nothing of it where I was concerned. I only found it incredibly presumptuous for him to believe he’d never again change a diaper.

We saw each other once or twice a week for the remainder of the month, mostly grabbing dinner or breakfast at the Westfield mall, where it was cheaper to park than to valet at his hotel around the corner, despite all the time inevitably spent searching for my car.

When he moved to a boutique hotel in Burbank, we ate our way down the row of restaurants on that stretch of Riverside Drive. One night over Japanese barbecue, where he neglected to tell me Brendan Fraser was seated opposite us the entire time, we discussed what we were looking for long-term. I noted our arrangement might be working so well because we knew it was temporary. Since we lived in different cities and were in different chapters of our lives, we could just enjoy the time we were allotted, without reconciling opposing ambitions.

He returned to London for a few weeks but was soon back in Los Angeles for a longer stretch. We celebrated his 40th birthday with his work friends at a bar in Venice. He took me to see Dudamel conduct Mahler’s Second Symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall. We had tea at the Huntington before wandering through its gardens and buying each other kitschy socks at the gift shop. Although there were still boundaries I maintained given the circumstances, our connection felt unexpectedly effortless.

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In October, I spoke with my clinic about doing another round of egg-freezing. I was prescribed birth control pills to delay the start while I traveled for some weddings in my homeland, the East Coast. I was glad a second cycle wouldn’t prohibit me from enjoying my last days with Graham, whom I already missed.

But he was working New Zealand hours now as the crew finalized the film. Finishing its soundtrack simultaneously was far more grueling than he anticipated. Never did I imagine one of the world’s most prolific directors would single-handedly be stopping me from getting laid. I managed to steal Graham away for a few hours of Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, but that was neither the time nor the place to reflect on our feelings.

He invited me to an industry concert on his last night in town, where I saw him in his element, conducting the score he’d orchestrated, wearing the socks I’d bought him. The woman seated next to me remarked what a great conductor he was and asked his name. I gave it to her and identified him as my friend, despite how amusing I imagined it would be to say I was sleeping with him.

He’d developed a fondness for L.A.’s many doughnut shops, so I brought a box from Sidecar back to his hotel. As he packed, we casually threw out possible avenues for us to reunite. Maybe at an upcoming gig he had in Miami, or meeting halfway the next time I was in New York? Fate simply did not allow us the time or the energy to tie things up neatly. He returned to his home and his children the next day, and I to a new series of hormone injections.

Despite the ocean and continent that now separated us, it seemed I was losing Graham more to bad timing than to time zones. It’s hard to imagine two people farther apart than one who has surgically altered their body to no longer procreate and the other who was medically pushing their body to new limits for the opportunity to do so.

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Once I’d healed from my retrieval, I asked Graham for a call to properly process our time together. A month after we said goodbye at his hotel in Burbank, he spoke to me from his hotel in Paris before the film’s European premiere. Although we couldn’t definitively say when our dynamic shifted into something deeper, we agreed it had. We felt better confirming these feelings were mutual, but we remained at the same impasse that had been there from the start.

I let myself be more vulnerable with him than ever before and shared how important having children was to me and what a source of angst it had been that I still hadn’t. Although he loved his children, whose faces and personalities I’d come to know through his many photos and anecdotes, he’d decided long ago he was done.

Still, he reiterated how grateful he was to have met me and how much I’d enriched his time in L.A. beyond his many hours in the studio. He’s almost certain he’ll be back for work at some point, though he doesn’t know when, much less where either of us will be in our dating lives.

But whenever that moment arrives, if neither of us is lucky to have found someone whose goals better align, with whom things feel just as effortless, he is welcome to share his time in Los Angeles with me.

The author is a writer and producer from New York, living in Los Angeles at the intersection of Palms, Culver City and Cheviot Hills. Find her there or at jamiedeline.com and on Instagram @jamiedeline.

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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.

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

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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.”

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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.

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“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.

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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.”

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Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden

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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.

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“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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