Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: She made a pact to jump-start romance by dating in a pandemic
My pal and I sat at a comfortable restaurant in Pasadena and toasted our success: Not solely have been we lastly consuming at a restaurant (on the patio, in fact), however we had each landed new jobs. A number of months earlier, we’d made a pact to start out new profession adventures in 2020. Whereas COVID-19 had put a damper on our searches that 12 months, we had carried out it.
Driving the identical excessive, I requested her, “Properly, what ought to our subsequent purpose be?”
We tossed round a number of concepts earlier than I stated, “I feel 2021 needs to be the 12 months that we date.”
We have been each in our late 20s, and neither of us had been courting a lot. (Thanks, pandemic.) I had been in grad college and held down a job on the weekends, and she or he was a nurse, which didn’t go away a lot time for a typical courting schedule.
Up to now, she’d snicker me off once I introduced up courting, however this time she stated, “Positive, why not?” I feel the pandemic has made all of us understand that life is brief. I took it a step additional and arrange a measurable purpose: “OK, 10 dates.” To our pandemic ears, that gave the impression of loads. And there have been nonetheless particulars to be sorted out. The place would we even meet males? What courting apps? And will we meet them in particular person? Nonetheless, we made our pact and figured we might see how issues unfolded within the new 12 months. My bestie and I obtained along with two different single girlfriends and persuaded them to hitch within the problem.
It wasn’t lengthy earlier than I obtained a textual content from my finest pal, “A man at work requested me out.” Quickly, she was happening one date after one other with this new man. I used to be glad for her, however I used to be secretly fearful too: Was I going to get left within the mud earlier than our 2021 had even begun?
If I’m being sincere, I tended to be drawn to guys with a pure expiration date. My first boyfriend I met throughout a summer season internship, and I didn’t even inform him I favored him till we have been each again in our respective states. We tried long-distance courting, nevertheless it shortly fizzled out. And there was the man I met whereas on a two-week trip. Positive, it was enjoyable to flirt. However as soon as he began saying he was going to maneuver again to the U.S. with me, I freaked out. Someway I felt freer to be myself once I knew it will finally finish.
I used to be decided to alter that sample.
At the start of the brand new 12 months, I kicked issues off by downloading Hinge. I began many chats, however few of them went previous the app.
Then I landed my first date, and on an uncharacteristically heat January day we ate ice cream. It went properly, and I used to be smitten. Then he ghosted me. Pondering again, it was in all probability all a dopamine rush from an extended, lonely 2020.
The following man checked off all of the bins on paper, however he left me feeling exhausted.
On one other date, a drummer determined to point out me his prolonged drumming efficiency on YouTube. Whereas we have been FaceTiming, I discovered myself bored.
Was this what the remainder of the 12 months can be like?
A couple of extra weeks glided by, and I used to be nearly midway by means of my problem. It was mid-February. I started to marvel what number of instances I might reply to “What are your quarantine hobbies?”
My brother-in-law suggested me, “Simply get off the app. Exit with the man that asks you out immediately.” What did he know? He and my sister have been courting earlier than smartphones have been a factor. I used to be feeling fatigued.
It was round that point that I obtained a message from a brand new man, Moshe. His profile didn’t stand out at first look, however I used to be intrigued by the best way he answered his prompts and that he had learn mine.
However did I need to begin one other pen pal session?
One thing about his broad smile and sort eyes made me take a second look. I answered with my try at a witty response and was stunned when he shortly responded after which requested me out for espresso. I attempted to maintain it informal, “Yeah, certain, I like espresso.” I advised him I lived in Pasadena. “I dwell within the South Bay,” he replied. He may as properly have stated he lived overseas. However I used to be staying open-minded. We agreed to fulfill midway.
“If this date is a flop,” I advised my bestie the day of our date, “I’m gonna take a break.”
Our date was at Chimney Espresso home in Chinatown. Moshe was taller than I anticipated, well-dressed — oh, and did I point out, very good-looking.
His quiet presence each unnerved me and made me really feel calm on the similar time. I discovered myself overcompensating by being super-chatty. When he went to seize our espresso order, I mentally advised myself to relax. He got here again and I admitted, “I’m nervous.” He provided that broad smile and stated, “Me too.”
The remainder of the date we talked concerning the standard stuff and bonded over rising up in spiritual Latino properties and our favourite comedy TV reveals. I bear in mind considering how acquainted he felt, like I had identified him for a very long time and we have been reconnecting after time aside. I noticed I didn’t need it to be over. However after simply an hour he stated, “Properly, I don’t need you to get an excessive amount of solar, so ought to we go?” I used to be disillusioned. “I don’t know if he likes me or not” I later advised my pal. However the subsequent day he texted to inform me he’d gone to the library to take a look at the e book that I’d simply completed.
Our second date we met on the Strand in Redondo Seaside. After poke bowls for lunch, we walked alongside the sand, speaking for hours. I didn’t need this date to finish. Finally he stated, “Properly, I don’t need you to get chilly, so ought to we go?” Was he being thoughtful? Or was he making an attempt to do away with me?
On our third date, he met me for dinner in Pasadena. I confessed all concerning the pact. “Wow, no stress,” he joked.
We’re nonetheless courting, and I’ve misplaced observe of the numbers.
In a number of methods, we’re each outdated souls. We like listening to jazz and we ship one another Spotify “combine tapes.” We take turns writing letters and postcards to one another. We go for lengthy walks when we have to course of issues. When he picked me up from the airport for the primary time, he introduced flowers. When he picked me up the second time, he introduced a watermelon — as a result of it’s my favourite fruit. I took him to his first Dodgers recreation. He taught me the right way to eat crab.
As soon as, I requested Moshe what number of app dates he’d gone on earlier than me. “None,” he replied. “You have been the primary.” Although every of us has spent extra time in visitors than we’d like, we are able to’t think about a greater cause to take action.
Oh, and the girlfriends that I made a pact with final 12 months?
Their new relationships are additionally going robust, and the eight of us lately celebrated the brand new 12 months collectively. The celebration was hosted by my nurse pal and the man who requested her out at work.
The one query now could be, what’s going to our subsequent pact be?
The creator is a program coordinator residing in Pasadena. She is on instagram @nataleemore.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the seek for romantic love in all its wonderful expressions within the L.A. space, and we need to hear your true story. We pay $300 for a printed essay. E mail LAAffairs@latimes.com. You could find submission tips right here. You could find previous columns right here.
Among the losses in the devastating Eaton fire was the Bunny Museum, husband-and-wife Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski’s grand ode to the world’s hoppiest animal, the rabbit. The Altadena museum, located on Lake Avenue, was one of L.A.’s quintessentially quirky institutions, a place that transported guests to a strange and magical world where the bunny permeates all aspects of life.
There were stuffed bunnies (including the first bunny that Lubanski gave to Frazee, the one that he gave to her because they used to call each other “bunny” as an endearment), hundreds of miniature porcelain bunnies, a bunny T-shirt collection, bunny cookie jars, bunny movie posters (including “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “Peter Rabbit”), a bunny song room (Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” for one), bunny costumes, bunny books, bunny items from Rose Parade floats, and on and on.
The couple ended up collecting more than 46,000 bunny objects and memorabilia in all — a certified Guinness World Record for largest bunny collection in the world.
The Bunny Museum, photographed before the fire, had the world’s largest bunny collection.
(Maxwell Williams / Los Angeles Times)
Most of it burned in the fire on Wednesday. “We lost our wedding albums, my wedding dress, and 46,000 bunny objects,” Frazee wrote in an email from a motel, as her phone was also lost in the fire.
It was a life’s work, and Lubanski stood outside the building hosing it down until the building next door caught fire. It was then that the couple grabbed a few select bunny items, their real bunnies Doris and Nicky and their cats, and left.
“We saved the first bunny and the second bunny of the collection,” Frazee said. “Gifts to each other. We saved the antiquity items, three framed Guinness World Record certificates and the Elvis Parsley water pitcher. We lost our wedding albums, my wedding dress and 46,000 bunny objects.”
She added, “It’s not a hoppy day.”
But on Thursday, Frazee vowed to fans on social media that the Bunny Museum will rebuild, hopefully in the same space. She said the museum has yet to set up a GoFundMe, though they plan to, and that any current fundraising efforts floating around are not sanctioned by the Bunny Museum.
The Bunny Museum began as a humble endeavor back in 1998. Frazee and Lubanski had been collecting bunnies since that first one, and they had enough in their arsenal to open the first location, in their Pasadena home, to the public on appointment. It was an oddity back then, but people came. They told their friends about this strange collection of bunny items, and the collection grew, and finally, in 2017, the Bunny Museum expanded to Altadena, to the 7,000-square foot midcentury building that they proceeded to stuff to the brim with bunnies.
As Frazee used to tell nearly everyone that entered, it was the “hoppiest place on Earth.”
One night in December 2019, Emma Louthan realized in a mild panic that she needed a gift for a child’s birthday party the next day. She grabbed acrylic paint and some of her daughter’s old clothes and began creating an aquatic scene: pink koi swimming beneath white and green water lilies.
The birthday boy wasn’t much impressed by the artful present, but it planted a seed in Ms. Louthan’s mind.
A few months later, she tried her hand at a collection of about a dozen hand-painted adult sweatshirts and found a more appreciative audience. It was the beginning of Covid lockdowns, and Ms. Louthan, an artist in Philadelphia who graduated from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, was working as a freelance textile designer while at home with her husband and 1-year-old daughter.
The sweatshirts, which she had painted in the kitchen of her brick duplex in Germantown, sold out online almost immediately.
“I feel like I just kind of accidentally hit it at the right time,” said Ms. Louthan, 35. Though divisive and terrifying, the pandemic also brought out people’s softer sides. Suddenly, comfort was king. Everyone was baking or crafting. Small-batch ceramics and upcycled quilted coats soared in popularity. There was a compulsory return to the home — and a wholehearted embrace of the homemade.
Noticing that people were drawn to “anything that could replicate a tie-dye look,” Ms. Louthan learned different dyeing techniques: botanical, ice, brush-applied. She traded her stiff acrylic paints for fabric versions, which she used to produce more sweatshirts and loungewear under her brand, Swan Gossip Shop.
As life slowed down during the pandemic, many other artists and independent designers also found success in the niche world of clothes with hand-drawn motifs — a trend spurred in part by Emily Adams Bode Aujla, who repopularized the senior cord tradition, which dates back to the 1900s, with her namesake brand.
Located across the country, these makers use a variety of methods, mediums and styles. In Los Angeles, Juliet Johnstone paints oversize, sherbet-colored flowers, butterflies and peace signs onto T-shirts and fitted work pants; in St. Louis, Lauren dela Roche and Curtis Campanelli of 69 Tearz use 19th-century farmer feed sacks as canvases for gothic hand lettering and rubber-hose-style cartoon characters; and in New York, Nick Williams and Phil Ayers of Small Talk Studio juxtapose imagery like American brand logos and botanical drawings on Japanese cotton.
In an era of mass-produced fast-fashion, these designers and others say they have experienced a growing demand for their meticulously rendered, one-of-a-kind garments.
Today, Ms. Louthan has a monthslong wait-list for her custom hand-painted clothes, which range in price from $250 (for T-shirts and sweatshirts) to $800 (for some pants). She’s partnered with local boutiques; the streetwear brand, Teddy Fresh; and national retailers including Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters and Free People on small batches of shirts, socks, bags and dresses.
“People say they can sense a certain energy in the hand-painted stuff,” Ms. Louthan said one afternoon this summer, while carefully adding green to a tendril on a pair of bluejeans.
Although her brand now has national reach, Ms. Louthan still paints her clothing at home, mostly on her kitchen table. Her process usually takes multiple days and consists of three stages: outlining forms, painting them and then heat-setting everything with an iron.
“I feel like with the rise of A.I., people are swinging the other way pretty intensely,” she said. “I think when everything feels so impersonal, people do gravitate toward art.”
Ms. Louthan’s work is fantastical, depicting off-kilter, edenic scenes of cherubs, rabbits, butterflies, devils, swans, moons and streams. She creates storybook worlds, where the sun smiles and jesters run wild.
She draws inspiration from illustrators of vintage children’s books (like Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl); the Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt (known for her reverent paintings of domestic life); and ancient art.
Her daily walks to Awbury Arboretum, half a mile from her house, are also creative fodder. “There’s no roadblock,” she said, between what she sees blooming there and what she paints.
Before she had her first daughter, Rosie, in 2018, Ms. Louthan designed prints for mass market brands. Back then, she also painted by hand, but her designs would later be scanned, photoshopped and printed onto fabrics that would then be sold to companies like Gap, Old Navy and Alfred Dunner.
Ms. Louthan said her work today is “kind of the exact opposite of trying to design for thousands of people who want the same thing.”
Though Ms. Louthan occasionally orders plain white shirts or finds light-colored clothes in thrift stores, customers more frequently provide their own garments for her to paint (they have ranged from $800 Acne jeans to favorite old tees). It’s a way of giving clothes a second life, Ms. Louthan said, and making precious garments even more special.
The popularity of hand-drawn designs like hers can pose challenges. Producing a single garment is time consuming for artists and can also be physically taxing.
Ms. dela Roche of 69 Tearz used to joke that she was a “doodle machine.” But now, because of arthritis and bone spurs in her hand, she said, “I literally can’t hand-draw anything anymore.”
Last year, she and Mr. Campanelli, her business partner, began screen-printing outlines of her designs onto garments. Only about 25 items are screen-printed before Ms. dela Roche, 42, switches up the imagery. Mr. Campanelli, 33, still hand sews each garment and hand-paints certain portions, ensuring that each piece is distinct.
“Even if I try my absolute best, I cannot do the same thing twice,” he said.
In 2023, Mr. Williams and Mr. Ayers, the Small Talk Studio designers, expanded their then-three-year-old business to include seasonal, ready-to-wear collections.
“We had all these ideas we wanted to put into motion and we wanted the operation to support more than just these specific hand-drawn garments,” said Mr. Williams, 33. “The other part of it was also that there’s a ceiling to how much you can charge and how much you can put out if that’s all you’re doing.”
Of the current interest in such pieces, Mr. Ayers, 34, added, “We don’t know whether this is like a trend or not — you know, that people are into hand-drawn clothing.”
Ms. Louthan has had to make some adjustments, too. When she works with brands like Anthropologie and Free People, she is often tasked with fulfilling bulk orders of the same garment — 60 pairs of natural-dyed socks, for example, or 40 T-shirts emblazoned with kittens.
“They know that it won’t be all the same, but it’s as similar as possible,” she said. “I just work in batches, you know, kind of assembly-line style.”
Recently, Ms. Louthan has re-embraced the idea of licensing artwork to be scanned and printed on clothes. “I kind of hope to shift more into that in the future,” she said. “Honestly, just because hand-painting everything is physically — it’s just a lot.”
She’s striving to find a balance.
“There’s always at least one moment of, I would say, growth in every single thing I paint,” she said, pointing to a small area on a T-shirt where the red paint of a tomato bled into the blue paint of a stream. “I always make sure to have a few moments where I tell myself, even if no one else notices or no one else appreciates, I just think it’s really cool.”
Kristin Cavallari is heading for ‘The Hills’ … looking to get out of Nashville ASAP — and, she’s willing to take a whole lot less for her home to do it.
The reality television star’s Tennessee home is now listed for just under $9 million … a $950K cut from the asking price she established in August 2024.
This was already a reduction from her original asking price … ’cause she wanted $11 million when she put the house up in June 2024 — so, clearly she’s trying to get the property off her books.
Even with the reduced price, Kristin’s still likely to make a tidy profit on the house … ’cause she originally bought it for just $3 million back in 2020 after her divorce from Jay Cutler.
It’s a 4-bedroom, 5-bathroom home in Franklin, Tennessee … a suburb just outside the metro Nashville area.
The house boasts 6,799 square feet of living space and 28 acres of total land … more than enough room to comfortably stretch out. The kitchen features state-of-the-art appliances, and the basement is basically a wellness retreat — all thanks to a remodel overseen by Kristin.
Add to that a pool, a greenhouse and beehives — again, all Kristin’s design ideas. It’s unclear if Kristin wants to stay in the area, but one thing is for sure — she wants out of this old place!
Tim Thompson of Tim Thompson Premier Realtors holds the listing.
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