Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: Los Angeles chewed me up and spit me out. Did my husband really want us to move there?
In the fall of 2019, my husband sat me down in our Hudson Valley kitchen, which overlooked our old birch. “I think I need to move back to Los Angeles,” he said.
I had just turned 50, and we’d been married for one year. I looked at him as if he’d suggested Mars.
“I know,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s enough work here.”
He had just finished directing a documentary. He wanted to return to the city where he had lived and worked in the industry for 17 years to see if he could drum up old connections for new work.
Was this a test? I remained silent while my mind reeled.
L.A. was never a place in which I imagined myself thriving. I first moved there after college to pursue acting and live with my mogul-wannabe boyfriend. We broke up within a month, and my life became a California cliche: I joined a cult-like spiritual practice with a glamorous Indian guru.
Although I found chanting and meditation to be very healing, after a year the relentless sunshine grated on my depressive nature and I moved back to my hometown of New York City, where I tried to hide my California woo-woo beneath a wardrobe of black.
When I’d return to L.A. to visit, my insecurities lined up like the palm trees on Hollywood Boulevard. After two days, I’d start eyeing my mushy backside with disdain in restaurant windows. My thick, curly hair made me temperature hot, while everyone around me was slim, tanned and sexy hot. I’d replay the time an agent told me to come back after I’d lost 15 pounds and how my troupe of college friends all got industry jobs and appeared to be thriving in the Hollywood ethos that felt so empty to me.
Moving back to L.A. as a middle-aged married woman felt like reconnecting with an ex with whom things ended badly. Had enough time passed that it could work? Or would all of our “issues” with each other return?
Back in my kitchen, my eyes fixated on the birch, its yellow-brown leaves clinging to its large, twisted frame. Its unique beauty drew me to the house that I’d bought years before my husband and I met. The pros and cons of life in our rural town flashed before me: my hard-won friends, the long, frigid winters, the affordability and the reliable rhythms of a seasonal life. I had lived most of my time here as a single person. Now I was a middle-aged part of a pair. Maybe it was time to compromise.
“OK,” I said, surprising myself. “It will be our adventure.”
We decided to give it six months. My writing and consulting work was portable, and there was something right about the idea of my husband and me creating a new life together. Although he is nine years my elder, his infectious, childlike enthusiasm about making dreams come true was rubbing off on me. We just didn’t count on the world shutting down a month after we moved in the winter of 2020.
At first, L.A. was a terrific place for the shutdown, because we could walk each day in the beautiful sunshine, which I no longer minded one bit, to a stunning view of the coast. Our weekly trips to the grocery store included a traffic-free drive up PCH to a less-crowded supermarket, the ocean sparkling on our left. As my East Coast friends complained in Zoom squares about the cold, we got to hike and take lunch breaks on the Malibu cliffs. Soon we noticed Angelenos gathering with their friends in their backyards for cookouts.
Still, it was a pandemic. Even with the daily walks, my body rebelled from so much sitting. My hips froze, and I limped around our small apartment like Al Pacino playing Richard the III. Our dog, raised in a country house, barked like a banshee at every door closing in the apartment complex, driving us and our neighbors insane. Then, my husband’s mother died alone in a nursing home on the other side of the country. Grief hung over our lives like a marine layer obscuring the view of Catalina. I entered menopause, and my new brain fog only added to the haze. Some adventure.
We found new ways to cope. We bought used bikes on Facebook Marketplace and started biking everywhere. One day, as I arrived breathless at the top of a Mar Vista crest, I saw the ocean behind me and the snow-capped mountains in the distance. The view managed to take whatever breath I had left away. Despite the doom, I felt elated.
In late summer, we drove back east to check on our family and house, which had been rented by some city folk. But we no longer fit. The Hudson Valley charm was dampened by the sensation of wading through 95-degree humid soup. The clothes and books in our old garage didn’t feel like ours anymore, and I felt a strange desire to just give them away. The light and rhythms of L.A. had seduced me.
When we returned, things started to fall into place. We got vaccines. We met in the courtyard with neighbors — the ones who didn’t hate our dog. We figured out how to sell our property back east and finance one in L.A. (for our dog). We made great friends with our new neighbors, one of whom is an actor and not in the least bit flaky. And then, at the farmers market, a friendly vendor was talking to another regular about their aches and pains.
“She’s too young to understand,” he interrupted himself to nod at me. “You’ve got years to go before you reach this point.”
I was 54. It appeared the “coastal ex” and I were indeed having a rapprochement.
These days, I notice fuchsia bursts of bougainvillea instead of my mushy backside. But L.A. has also brought disappointment, financial hardship and the necessity to face hard truths. DOGE (or the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency) slashed the budgets of organizations I work with in my consulting business. And because of COVID-19 and changes in the industry, my husband, the one gung ho about moving back, ended up being the one to struggle. He is in the midst of a brave and grueling career pivot.
It is still our adventure. In midlife, with the right partner and the self-acceptance that getting older brings, I no longer feel the city is stacked against me. We hold on to each other in this complex phase of life and in this vibrant, complex town. And when things feel hopeless, we step outside our door and watch the golden light stream through our old California elm.
The author is a writer and leadership consultant with bylines in HuffPost, Oldster, Longreads, Brevity and more. Her debut memoir, “This Incredible Longing: Finding My Self in a Near-Cult Experience,” will be published by Heliotrope Books in February.
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.
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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