Ken Marino loves living in L.A.

Living here has certainly been good for his acting career. Though he broke into the business as a member of NYC-turned-MTV sketch comedy group the State in 1994, he moved to L.A. in the fall of 1997 when he landed a role in the second season of “Men Behaving Badly,” an NBC sitcom. Marino shot just 13 episodes before the show was canceled. Still, he stayed in L.A., landing roles in much-loved shows like “Veronica Mars,” “Party Down,” “The Residence” and “Running Point.” He’s also co-written a few things, including “Role Models” and “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” out July 10, which was filmed in and around Los Angeles.

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

Advertisement

“Working around L.A. and running around to jobs is how I got to understand L.A.,” Marino says. “It’s just a very comfortable city to live in. I just think it’s fun to be able to bounce around and do anything you feel like doing.”

Here’s how Marino would spend his perfect, carefree Sunday in Los Angeles.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

6 a.m.: Dog walking, coffee and flowers

We have two dogs. They need to go outside in the morning and eat, and they are very vocal about it. For a while, every morning at 5:58 my one dog, Dot, would start whining and moving around until I’d go “yeah, OK, let’s feed you.”

In our family, I’m the one who feeds the dogs and takes them out, because I’m a morning person. I enjoy it when it’s not fully light out, maybe making myself a coffee or taking a walk to this place called Project Bloom Coffee. It’s a little mom and pop kind of place and they have terrific coffee and breakfast sandwiches. They’re also a florist. Sometimes they even use this cool paper holder with a handle where, on one side you put the coffee and then on the other side you put your beautiful flower display. So then you get to walk home with your coffee and your flowers together and it’s something I’ve never seen anywhere else.

7:30 a.m.: Online chess

After I go get my coffee and walk the dogs, I’ll still be the only person up so I’ll get on my computer and get a couple of games of chess in. I play people from around the world online on Chess.com, and I usually either get frustrated or feel like I’m the best chess player in the world. Anyway, I’m getting my rating up on the app and I’m very excited about it. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of chess tutorials on TikTok and YouTube that teach me how to play better.

9 a.m.: More coffee and “911”

If I go to Project Bloom, I’ll bring my wife a coffee and some flowers but if not, we have a little espresso and cappuccino maker so I’ll use that to make her a cappuccino, which I’ll bring to her in bed. She’s always very happy about that and then I’ll go try to wake my [16-year-old] daughter up, which usually takes about two or three tries until I take her phone, set the timer for five minutes, and then put it on the other side of her room so she has to get out of her bed to turn it off when it sounds.

She and I have been religiously watching “911” recently. We started with Season 1 and now we’re about six or seven seasons in so I’ll make her breakfast — maybe a Nutella crepe with some little cherry tomatoes on the side, which is weird but she likes it or maybe some oatmeal — and then we’ll watch “911” and talk about our favorite characters, like Buck, Chimney and Bobby.

Noon: Lunch on the Westside

We have a little apartment in Marina Del Rey that’s right by the beach so sometimes I’ll go out there with the dogs, just to sit for a while and enjoy. I usually walk between the Venice pier and Washington Street, but sometimes I’ll go further north and walk along Venice Beach if I want to hang out with some freaky deakies.

When I’m over on that side of town, there’s a couple of places that I might go for food, like this Italian restaurant called Ospi that’s in Venice. They’re incredible. They make their own homemade pasta and it’s delicious. There’s also this chain called Guisados, and I love their tacos so sometimes I’ll do that too. Venice Ramen is good too, and they do these things called jumbo gyoza that are absolutely delicious. They’re like 2.5 times bigger than a normal gyoza, like palm-sized, and I really like them.

2 p.m.: Play practice and a pint

My daughter is in two plays right now at this place called the Morgan-Wixson Theatre in Santa Monica, so it’s my responsibility to take her over there and drop her off for practice. When I do that, if it’s a Sunday, I might want to grab a Guinness somewhere and watch basketball. There’s a bar called Weary Livers down the street that has a lot of board games and it feels like you’re in somebody’s basement, which is good. It’s also right next to the Brixton, which is another nice bar that I’ll go to from time to time if I’m waiting for my daughter to finish rehearsal because it’s a lot of driving otherwise.

4 p.m.: Garage band practice

Typically on Sunday, we’ll also have a rehearsal for the Middle Aged Dad Jam Band. [Editor’s note: Marino co-founded the group with David Wain, whom he’s known since “The State” and who co-wrote “Wet Hot American Summer.”) We’ll play for a couple of hours in David’s garage, trying out new songs and working out what we’re going to do at our next live show.

6 p.m.: Guerilla promotion

Right now, David [Wain] and I are trying to figure out different promotional things we can do for our movie, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” so maybe we’d do some more of that. It’s a really funny movie and we sold it at Sundance.

Anyway, two Sundays ago we walked around with our friend Frank Barrera, who is also one of the camera operators on “Gail Daughtry.” We went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and we shot promos for the movie where we were talking to different people and pretending that the Gail Daughtry cinematic universe is vast and has been around for decades, like we were asking people what their favorite Gail Daughtry movie is. It confused a lot of them, but every once in a while somebody would say something so we’re using those for promo spots.

I also spent some time just running up and down the street being very overly enthusiastic and screaming “the new Gail Daughtry movie is coming out!” and then we shot people’s reactions, which were typically “confusion” and “not caring.” Like, “Stop yelling at me, weirdo.”

7:30 p.m.: Thai takeout

On weekends, my wife and I like to order from a specific Thai place that’s won many awards. It’s called Luv 2 Eat Thai Bistro and it’s absolutely fantastic. The crab curry is so delicious and they do these street food sausages that we crave. They come with ginger and peanuts and garlic, plus a big slab of raw cabbage and some hot peppers and we’ll eat them like popcorn, just throwing them in our mouths while we catch up on “Survivor.” The flavor is just insane, and we think about how good they are all the time.

9:30 p.m.: Checkmate

After we watch “Survivor,” usually what happens next is that we’ll end up going, “Should we watch a movie?” Then we’ll look around for a movie for a while and then my daughter will be like, “Hey, Mom! Come in here and watch this YouTube show with me” so my wife will get pulled away, and I’ll immediately pick up my computer and start playing chess again. I like to bookend my day with a quiet chess game in the morning and another quiet game at night. It’s a nice way to wind down.

I’ll typically play a minimum of about three games before my eyes start to close because they’re trying to fall asleep. That’s when I’ll quit because I’ll be making stupid moves and it affects my rating, like “Oh, I just lost that game because I fell asleep while my computer was on,” so that’s how I know when I’m done.

A new national poll reveals a striking paradox in public sentiment ahead of America’s 250th anniversary: a disconnect between Americans’ strong patriotic pride and their lack of civic knowledge.

According to a survey from the libertarian Cato Institute think tank of more than 2,000 U.S. adults conducted in late June, 86% of respondents said they are grateful to be American and 70% believe the nation’s founding principles remain relevant.

However, nearly half of Americans (46%) don’t know that America’s 250th anniversary commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

This civic ignorance extends to basic governance: Nearly 60% do not know the main purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to limit government power, and do not know why the colonies declared independence from Great Britain.

Furthermore, the report highlights deep anxieties about the future of American liberty.

The majority of those surveyed believe the country has strayed from its founding principles, and more than half fear the U.S. could cease to be a free country within the next 50 years, citing corruption and the abuse of power as primary threats. The majority of both Republicans and Democrats share these fears.

The concerns are especially pronounced among Gen Z respondents, who exhibited both the lowest levels of civic knowledge and the least favorable views of the nation’s founders. The majority of Gen Z failed to cite the adoption of the Declaration of Independence as the source of the 250th anniversary.

“The lack of civic knowledge is a great disaster,” said Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Stanford University Jack Rakove. “Any democratic system of government to succeed requires having an informed electorate.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning authority on the drafting of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence blamed the problem on the fragmented media landscape and schools prioritizing STEM subjects over civics and history.

Unpacking my third suitcase in our new West Hollywood home, a sharp pain shot through my chest. I felt dizzy and short of breath before sprawling out on our mattress, which was still covered in plastic.

“What’s wrong?” David asked.

An hour later, on a gurney in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, I waited to be admitted overnight. What a great start to our new life — back in L.A. after seven years in New York City — David sleeping alone at our apartment while I was to keep close to the paddles and operating room in case what had just happened was a heart attack.

I was 33, practicing yoga and exercising almost daily. A few months earlier, my New York doctor noticed I had high blood pressure, and I was feeling terrible, so something clearly was going on. Was an artery blocked? Nope, the tests revealed; physically, I was fine. What had happened was a panic attack.

“Your health will be better in L.A.,” David had promised before returning to L.A.

Now I took no pleasure in his being wrong.

After growing up in Temple City (hardly L.A.), I went on a high school trip to the Big Apple and knew it was where I needed to be.

Exactly five years later, the time to escape California arrived after a miserable breakup from a three-year relationship with a guy that I hid entirely from my family. I was desperate and depressed, down 15 pounds from not eating much, my diet consisting largely of cigarettes and red wine. At the Archstone, my Studio City apartment, I did ecstasy alone on a Wednesday. One has to take a good look at himself when he’s in his bedroom, by himself, rolling, and so I decided it was time to start over in New York.

On the other side of the country, I thought it was normal to hook up with a new guy every third night. Which I suppose, for a gay man who’d spent the first 27 years of his life denying his sexuality to a family he feared wouldn’t understand, it was. My self-esteem was in the gutter, though you wouldn’t have known it from the outside.

After a three-digit number of hookups on Grindr, I met David, a guy who lived on the same Manhattan corner as I did. We did what people do on Grindr and hooked up a couple of times.

But one morning, we bumped into each other on 9th Avenue. I left our short chat feeling uplifted by how smiley and polite he was in daylight and while we were sober. That night, we went on our first date, and the rest is history. But I hid what I assumed wouldn’t be well-received.

“Let’s move back to L.A.,” he said after four years of life together in New York.

“I’m really not ready,” I said. I loved living in New York and never, ever expected to leave. He understood, but he wanted to return to “the coast.” I knew that in a healthy relationship, it couldn’t be just what I wanted. So eventually, we packed up and moved to an apartment on North Flores Street in West Hollywood.

And now, I was in the hospital.

After having to cancel the welcome home party our L.A. friends had planned for us, and being released from Cedars, my life fell apart. But being the one who kept everything together, I kept it together better than most would, at least in the presence of others.

I’m fine, I told myself, but I worried my heart was broken, and there was something medically wrong with it. To heal it, I’d need to accept truths that I didn’t want to.

Growing up was devastatingly hard for me. Being gay and misunderstood, with the unacknowledged pain of it kept inside, was quite literally eating me alive. Being back in L.A. meant being near my past. I told my mom I was gay before leaving for New York. She said she still loved and accepted me, but to this day, the struggle has never been discussed or acknowledged. I knew I was a disappointment to my family.

I went to Westwood what felt like 70 times, and after visiting a bunch of UCLA’s specialists, I found myself in the office of a neurosurgeon who took one look at me and said, “You don’t belong here. What you’re suffering from is plain old anxiety, and you’re going to have to work with your therapist on this.”

“I have been,” I said, “and it’s not helping.” But before I finished, he had walked out the door.

Before long, the panic attacks got so bad, I could hardly drive. David chauffeured me, under the palm trees and bright sun, around as much as his schedule allowed, and when he couldn’t, I made the best of it, lugging my laptop with me for the hour-long trek to yoga-teacher training at Equinox in the South Bay, using that extra time in the back of an Uber to write.

For almost my entire adult life, I’d been in therapy, but it was couples therapy with David where I felt supported enough to admit, first to myself, that I’d been terrified of being fully myself. I was afraid he’d leave me if he saw the real me. Secretly I had been keeping a lifetime of pain bottled up inside because of fear — I didn’t want to risk losing him by being too emotional or having too many feelings.

Three months after that therapy session, the pandemic arrived, and being together 100% of the time for the next year, I let him in fully. He didn’t run — instead, he proposed.

It’s been eight years since that neurologist, and six since I’ve been able to fully drive again. And here in L.A., in a city characterized by its distance, I have, with David, built a close chosen family that supports and fully understands me.

Now, I feel “at home” at our Spanish-style Hancock Park house, the one we bought because we wanted to start a family of our own, only after L.A. allowed me to heal and live peacefully, and now, anxiety free.

Had David not dragged me back, I wouldn’t have learned what I did about myself, my story of origin and living a life that’s so beautiful and that’s so true to me.

And certainly, we wouldn’t be bringing our baby daughter, Lucy, named after Lucille Ball (who’s more Hollywood?), home in mid-July by way of surrogacy.

The author is a writer and coach who helps established business owners build lives that feel as good as they look. He lives in Hancock Park. He’s on Instagram: @iammattgerlach.

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.