Lifestyle
She Tuned Into His ‘Commanding’ Voice at Columbia
Chambers Boyd Moore instantly recognized Thomas Philip Moore’s distinctive voice as it rose up from a group standing behind her at a cocktail party kicking off their 30th Columbia Journalism School reunion weekend in April 2022.
“His voice is commanding,” said Ms. Moore, 60, first impressed by that command in a radio class in 1992. “He was a natural. ”
They got to know each other there as they prepared predigital audio “reel to reel” newscasts, which included ripping newswires from The Associated Press off a matrix printer.
“We cut each sound bite with razor blades and pieced them together with tiny bits of adhesive tape,” said Mr. Moore, 61, who goes by Tom, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology from Fairfield University.
In March 1992, after each handed in a master’s thesis, they had more free time, and explored the city together a few days every week. In May, both received master’s degrees in journalism.
“We partied, drank, danced and had dinners,” and basically dated from March to May, with the end in sight, said Mr. Moore, who grew up in Baltimore. Ms. Moore grew up in Louisville, Ky.
Their escapades included the Cloisters and Jones Beach by day and clubs like the Limelight, the Palladium and Save the Robots, sometimes until sunup.
“After graduation,” he said, “it was adios.”
She already had a job lined up at the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper in Manchester, N.H., and was upfront from the start about getting back with her boyfriend after graduation.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
“We were caught up in the fun, in the merrymaking,” said Ms. Moore, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in legal studies from Simmons College, now Simmons University. The Moore surname is from a previous marriage, which ended in divorce, as did the groom’s.
Mr. Moore, who has three daughters in their 20s, is now an associate professor at the City University in New York — York College in Jamaica, Queens. Until 2023, he worked as a writer at CBS News Radio’s national network in Manhattan.
“I remember going to New Hampshire, leaving it all behind,” said Ms. Moore. “No formal parting.”
Ms. Moore has two sons, one in his 20s and the other a teenager. In 2005, she moved back to Louisville to work in corporate communications, and over the years she lived in Londonderry and West Lebanon, N.H.; Bryn Mawr, Pa.; and Wellesley, Mass. She now works remotely as a vice president and financial adviser for Baird, a financial services firm, based in its Louisville office.
After graduation, Mr. Moore couch-surfed and was a stringer for The New York Times, where Ms. Moore had been a stringer during graduate school. He then lived mainly in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where the couple now lives.
At their reunion, they eventually greeted each other, then caught up over dinner with two other classmates at Le Monde, a brasserie near Columbia.
That evening he mentioned that he was going through a divorce, and after the reunion she soon realized her marriage was ending, too.
After Ms. Moore reached out to him a few months later, they began texting. In July, when she visited New York, where she rented a loft for the weekend in Red Hook, Brooklyn, they reunited for dinner at Fort Defiance restaurant nearby.
“It was very loud, but kind of cozy and romantic,” said Mr. Moore, thanks to sitting on the same side of the table so they could hear each other.
“He seemed like the same fun-loving person,” she said. He was “into journalism, and into his family as much as I was.”
They kissed good night after he walked her home, and the next evening they had drinks at Sunny’s Bar, also in the area.
“I had the glorious memory of all the fun things we did,” he said. “I wanted to reignite it.”
That August, when she had a business trip to Lake Tahoe near Truckee, Calif., he joined her, and he visited her in Louisville over Christmas, and the next time he was there in May 2023 they went to the Kentucky Derby.
Since her job was more flexible, and he taught a full load of courses, and worked at CBS at the time, she usually visited New York each month for a week or two.
“I remember liking him in the ’90s,” she said. “I’m happy I liked the person in 2022.”
They still both like going out, but in a toned down way.
“Tom doesn’t like to have the same day twice,” she said. “My kids’ nickname for me is ‘activity lady.’”
In February, he proposed at his apartment in Park Slope, over a candlelit dinner, with flowers, for which he had made what he called “a rather humble chicken.” They then toasted with Champagne.
On March 22, Jenn Zappola, who is ordained through American Marriage Ministries, officiated before his three daughters and her two sons, as well as a photographer, on the deck of a beach house the couple rented for the weekend in Huntington, N.Y., overlooking the Long Island Sound.
“It was important to let the kids know how important they are to us,” she said.
Their children also showed how much they cared — they pitched in with a charcuterie board, blasted soap bubbles at them after the ceremony and performed the Cupid Shuffle dance.
The couple are still hooked on journalism.
“We consume a lot of news together,” she said.
The Beginning
Kilian Jornet was drenched and tired.
Mr. Jornet, 37, was just a few days into an ambitious odyssey, a self-designed project he had named “States of Elevation.” His goal was to link, by foot and by bike, the tallest peaks in the contiguous United States — a series of 70-plus publicly accessible mountains in Colorado, California and Washington known as the “14ers” because they are all 14,000 feet or higher (symbolized on the map as ). He estimated it would take him around a month.
But now, in early September, Mr. Jornet wondered whether he could continue.
It is not often that Mr. Jornet, one of the most accomplished endurance athletes on the planet, seems susceptible to human frailties. In 2017, he reached the summit of Mount Everest twice in one week, without support or supplemental oxygen. In 2023, he climbed the 177 tallest peaks in the Pyrenees in eight days. Last year, he needed just 19 days to tackle the 82 tallest peaks in the Alps.
But now, after a long flight from Norway, where he lives with his wife, Emelie Forsberg, a former skyrunning world champion, and their three young daughters, Mr. Jornet was jet-lagged and struggling to acclimate to the high altitude of the LA Freeway in Colorado, a mountainous traverse along the Continental Divide.
Making matters worse, a steady rain left him feeling as if he were soaked through to his core.
“I just felt exhausted,” Mr. Jornet recalled in a recent interview. “It felt impossible to do one more week, let alone another month. But then the body switched, and I went from fighting to adapting.”
Climbing peak after peak in Colorado, he seemed to grow stronger as he moved west, through the Mojave Desert and into the Sierra Nevada, across Northern California and finally into the Cascades.
A small support crew in a recreational vehicle met up with Mr. Jornet periodically while he was hiking, and followed more closely during his long bike rides. He also had a rotating cast of friends and fellow athletes who joined him for parts of the project.
And, over the course of 31 days and 3,197 miles, he conquered a challenge in which, on any given day, he was completing a feat — or, in some cases, feats — that many climbers would consider a lifetime achievement in and of itself.
Colorado
16 days | 1,207 miles | 56 peaks
A couple of days before Ryan Hall, the retired Olympic marathoner, was set to meet Mr. Jornet near Crested Butte, Colo., he checked the forecast. An avid climber, Mr. Hall was alarmed enough to send Mr. Jornet a text message asking if they really wanted to tackle the Elks Traverse in a snowstorm. Mr. Jornet was not concerned.
“Yeah,” he replied via text, “we might get a little wet out there.”
The weather, though, turned out to be pleasant, and Mr. Jornet and Mr. Hall chatted throughout their 12 hours together — about their families, about training and nutrition, and even about “different levels of consciousness,” Mr. Hall said. At one point, Mr. Jornet, who is from Spain, described climbing as an out-of-body experience.
Mr. Hall was surprised to learn that Mr. Jornet did not drink coffee. His explanation? He worries caffeine will make him push too hard and hinder his ability to recover. Mr. Hall said Mr. Jornet made no mention of feeling tired or hungry during their time together.
“It was interesting to see how he managed his body and what he was putting it through,” Mr. Hall said, “and how, mentally, it wasn’t taking up any space.”
Mr. Hall also noticed that Mr. Jornet refrained from talking about the project. Instead, he seemed present. The only mountain that mattered was the mountain he was on. Mr. Jornet, Mr. Hall said, was “full of peace” — an impression that was reinforced when they reached Castle Peak, their fifth and final summit together. Not that Mr. Jornet was keeping track.
“The peaks don’t really mean anything to me,” he told Mr. Hall. “The peaks are just an excuse to be out here.”
Dakota Jones, an elite trail and mountain runner, joined Mr. Jornet for his final two days of climbing in Colorado, which started with an ascent of Mount Sneffels and a 25-mile traverse through the early hours of the night.
When Mr. Jornet awoke the next morning, he rode his bicycle several hours to the next trailhead. Mr. Jones followed Mr. Jornet’s crew in his Toyota Tacoma and prepared for the day by consuming a burrito, several doughnuts and lots of coffee.
“He’s so far beyond what the rest of us can do,” Mr. Jones said of Mr. Jornet.
At around noon, they embarked on a nearly 14-hour run through the Weminuche Wilderness, a remote area of the San Juan National Forest. By the time they reached their final peak of the day, Mr. Jornet had run out of food.
“He never said a word,” Mr. Jones said. “He just kept going. That’s Kilian.”
Mr. Jornet spent a total of 16 days in Colorado, where he made 56 summits while covering more than 1,200 miles.
Desert Ride
5 days | 877 miles
Up close, there was nothing inherently sexy about Mr. Jornet’s quest. Day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, he was simply putting one foot in front of the other, or pedaling one stroke at a time. Mr. Hall likened him to a “metronome,” his rhythmic movements never hurried or rushed.
Mr. Jones approached Mr. Jornet as if he were part of an anthropological study: What was he capable of doing next?
“He has both the physiology to be great and the infinite discipline and focus to make the most of what he has,” Mr. Jones said. “And that’s a really rare combination.”
Mr. Jornet’s discipline was clear when, after conquering Colorado, he spent five days biking nearly 900 miles across vast expanses of the Mojave Desert. He averaged about 14 hours a day in the saddle.
He was accompanied for portions of the trip by athletes like Chris Myers, a trail runner, and Gemma Arró Ribot, a former teammate on the Spanish ski mountaineer team. But Mr. Jornet also spent a great deal of time alone, and he battled boredom, fatigue and the heat by listening to music and audiobooks.
Mostly, though, he biked as a mode of transport, as a means to an end.
California
7 days | 593 miles | 15 peaks
One of Mr. Jornet’s early challenges in California was Norman’s 13, a winding, 100-mile route that links all 13 of the 14,000-foot peaks in the Sierra Nevada. In search of some expertise, Mr. Jornet recruited Olivia Amber, a world-class trail runner who, about two weeks earlier, had done the route on her own.
Some context: Ms. Amber, 30, described Norman’s 13 as a “dream project” that she had pieced together over several years. For even the most accomplished adventurers, the route is serious business. And when Ms. Amber completed it in 89 hours (which included four hours of sleep), she became the fourth person to ever do so — and the first woman.
And then there was Mr. Jornet, fresh off hundreds of miles of bicycling through the desert, who intended to move through Norman’s 13 as just one part of a much larger project. It was difficult for Ms. Amber to comprehend.
“He’s rewriting what’s possible in the mountains,” she said, “especially with endurance feats.”
On Sept. 25, Ms. Amber was set to meet Mr. Jornet at the junction of the Taboose Pass Trail and the John Muir Trail, before their shared trek up Split Mountain. To reach him, she had to jog 12 miles while ascending 6,000 feet — and she had to do it in a hurry after receiving word that he was moving quickly.
“I honestly thought he was going to beat me there,” she said. “It was crazy.”
From the start, Ms. Amber could sense Mr. Jornet was egoless. He seemed genuinely grateful for her help. With rough weather approaching, he agreed when she suggested that he take a quick nap before leaving camp.
“I wasn’t totally sure if he was committed to sleeping,” Ms. Amber recalled.
They set out before dusk, and as they began to move through the night, heavy snow blanketed them. It was Ms. Amber’s sixth time up Split Mountain, and Mr. Jornet’s first. It hardly mattered.
“He had this feel for where we were and for the terrain even though he had never been there before,” said Ms. Amber, who accompanied Mr. Jornet for 25 snow-filled miles. “I could just feel that energy from him — a confidence that came from a place of deep understanding of how to move in that kind of environment and in those conditions.”
Of course, Mr. Jornet made it look easy, even when it was not. Later, after biking another 390 miles over two days into the Cascades of Northern California, he reached Mount Shasta — the 71st and penultimate peak of his project — where he was buffeted by an Arctic wind. He had to crawl the final 1,000 feet to the summit.
“You need to laugh in those situations and find the way to pass through,” Mr. Jornet said.
Oregon Ride
3 days | 489 miles
A few hours after summiting Mount Shasta, Mr. Jornet was on two wheels once again. He was joined by the triathlete Ian Murray for a 60-mile ride on crushed volcanic gravel before they slept just south of the Oregon border.
Mr. Jornet was by himself for the next two days as he rode 430 miles to the foot of Mount Rainier in Washington. The end was near.
When he was planning the project, Mr. Jornet worried about being hit by a car or a truck while biking. “A lot of people were telling me it would be very dangerous,” he recalled.
He and his team worked hard to locate the safest roads with the widest shoulders, and he found, to his surprise, that most drivers gave him ample space. He also was grateful for the company of his friends, new and old.
“He clearly could have done every inch of this on his own and he would have been totally fine and totally happy,” Ms. Amber said. “But he had this deeper appreciation that people showed up for him and were willing to help him.”
Mr. Jornet wanted to share the experience with those who joined him for portions of it — and with the wider world. Mr. Hall, for example, laughed whenever Mr. Jornet broke out his selfie stick. It was important to Mr. Jornet that he and his team use social media — Mr. Jornet has nearly two million followers on Instagram — to convey the beauty of the natural world and the importance of protecting it.
During his travels, Mr. Jornet saw moose, coyotes, goats, eagles, snakes and even a couple of bears from a distance. None bothered him, he said.
“We would look at each other,” Mr. Jornet said, “and say: ‘Hey, guys! How are you doing?’ And just continue.”
Mount Rainier Finale
Mr. Jornet started up Mount Rainier at dawn on Oct. 3, and it was a final test worthy of the project — a 29-mile haul up 14,320 vertical feet before he reached the summit. About 17 hours after he had set out that morning, he returned to the trailhead where his support team was waiting with celebratory slices of pizza and pickle juice shots.
After 31 days and 72 summits, Mr. Jornet’s objectively absurd project was complete. He covered 629 miles on foot and biked an additional 2,568 miles, which outdistanced this year’s Tour de France by more than 400 miles. And he did all that while amassing 403,691 feet of elevation gain.
Throughout the project, Mr. Jornet wore a smartwatch that tracked his heart rate, his mileage, his sleep totals (he averaged about six hours a night) and even something called his “recovery score,” which registered zero — yes, zero — for 17 consecutive days. (At one point, he broke his cellphone, and members of his team questioned whether he had done it on purpose.)
Mr. Jornet estimated that he had burned about 9,000 calories a day, but he managed not to lose any weight. One of his secret weapons: flasks of olive oil that he guzzled raw. By the end of his journey, he was looking forward to homegrown produce from his garden and thick slices of his wife’s sourdough bread.
The day after summiting Mount Rainier, Mr. Jornet awoke feeling disoriented. His first instinct, he said, was to reach for his bike: Didn’t he have more miles ahead of him? No, he realized, it was over. He slept more peacefully the next night.
His trek through the Alps last summer, while less physically demanding, had left him mentally drained because so many of the climbs were so challenging. His jaunt through the American West was a comparative breeze.
“It was just fun,” he said. “It was nice to ride and to run and to see the things and just to enjoy those places. And I could have gone on. I was happy to finish and go home, but physically it felt like my body was ready to continue.”
For now, Mr. Jornet plans to take a break and spend time with his family.
“But I know myself,” he said, “and I know in a couple of months that I will start to think of something else.”
Lifestyle
Want the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of holiday decorations? Call this L.A. team — and pay up to $50,000
It’s Monday afternoon in Madison Heights, a stately Pasadena neighborhood where the seasonal decor is as tasteful and predictable as a Hallmark movie.
Suddenly, like a strange wind, a U-Haul truck quietly pulls in front of an elegant home. Within minutes, a crew of black-clad workers begin emptying the truck’s contents, briskly lining the sidewalk with piles of leering jack-o-lanterns, disassembled gargoyles, bags of shredded rags and a line of gaping brown “skellys” in floozy gowns.
Dr. Halloween has arrived.
Chris Bryant and his wife, Jasmine, are big fans of Halloween and have hired the Dr. Halloween crew to give their yard a spooky makeover. Here’s a before photo of their Pasadena home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Skeleton figures are laid out in the front yard of the Bryants’ front lawn.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
In less than three hours, Dr. Halloween and his crew of eight will transform the broad front yard of this Fillmore Street home into a riotous Halloween fun house. It’s an annual tradition that Chris and Jasmine Bryant inherited when they bought their spacious home in 2018, and they were happy to continue after they moved in, with the help of the crew who creates a different spooky scene every year.
The job sounds fun, but this crew is all business, cranking giant bony fingers into the ground, styling the wayward hair of ghoulish girls, impaling skeletons — “skellys” — on tall garden rebar so they can be posed and wrestling with the assembly of a towering mummy, gruesome green witch and headless horseman on a rearing stead.
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They rarely talk and never stop moving, and amid them all is Dr. Halloween himself — Bob Pranga (a.k.a. Dr. Christmas after Oct. 31) — directing what goes where. Pranga, 63, claims he’s mostly a watcher these days, because he’s been decorating ritzy homes for the holidays since 1989. Also, his crew members are all pros, but really, he’s just as busy as the others, unconsciously pushing back the bangs of his blond, boy-band hair every few minutes as he rushes from the street to the yard, scrutinizing the effects, deciding the best orientation for the creatures, and sending crew members scurrying to assist another in need.
His longtime friend and business partner, Debi Staron, 67, quietly bustles around in a button-front Santa shirt (“We do Christmas too, so why not?”), pulling spooky accessories and body parts out of boxes so they can be assembled and placed. Her well-worn cycling gloves allow a peek at her perfect dripping-blood manicure, and a bulky knee pad helps steady a problem leg because she’s up and down so often.
Israel Cruz completes a stack of jack-o-lanterns while decorating Chris and Jasmine Bryant’s home in Pasadena.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Cruz also assembles a giant warty-faced witch that looms nearly 12 feet tall.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“I’m basically the nuts-and-bolts partner, especially when we do Christmas,” she says. “When we started, Bob was the one decorating inside the lovely house, and I’d be outside on a ladder in the driving rain, trying to hang lights in the bougainvillea. I also know how to fluff a tree properly after it comes out of a box. Most people just put up their artificial tree and wonder why it doesn’t look as good as it did at the store. They don’t realize you have to fluff out the branches — it usually takes at least an hour.”
Staron doesn’t linger long to talk. She makes sure all the crew keep hydrated, and then she’s back trying to install a brighter light in a giant plastic cauldron. Meanwhile, Pranga is all nervous energy.
A headless horseman looms above headstones and mouthy skeletons, big and small.
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
“I’ve been doing this home so long, maybe I’m losing track,” he says, casting a critical eye at the headless horseman rearing above him. “I think it’s different this year? Did we have him before?”
“No, no,” his client Jasmine Bryant reassures him, pulling out her phone to show photos of last year’s underwater-themed display of ghostly divers, flirty mermaid skeletons and adorable baby shark “skellys.” “And before that, “ she says enthusiastically, “we had the creepy babies …”
“Oh yeah,” Pranga says, brightening. “We had a baby riding a giant spider! That was great.”
The Bryants aren’t the only ones smiling by the time the last strips of white and purple tulle are wrapped around the mummy and the giant warty witch is securely tied against a tree. Shortly after the work begins, pedestrians stop to admire and passing cars slow to a crawl, with cellphones poking out the windows for photos.
“And so it starts,” Pranga says, rolling his eyes, but clearly, this is attention he enjoys.
Bob Pranga stands near the outdoor Halloween display at the home of Chris and Jasmine Bryant in Pasadena, which Pranga, business partner Debi Staron and their crew of seven transformed into delightfully spooky Halloween decor.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
It may not be the audience he expected when he moved to New York City to become an actor in 1984, but he and Staron’s work creating holiday fantasies for well-heeled clients has nonetheless resulted in tons of applause as the “Tree Stylists to the Stars,” from regular appearances on local TV shows, decorating homes, hotels and TV/movie sets for everything, from “Elf” to “The Brady Bunch”; creating their own book, “Christmas Style,” in 2004; and 10 years later, their own TLC Christmas special, “Deck the Halls with Dr. Christmas.”
It’s not like any of this was planned, Pranga says. He was just a Midwestern boy from Sturgis, Mich., (“Not the famous one with the motorcycles — we’re the other one”) who fell in love with the idea of Hollywood and all its celebrities by watching TV shows as a child in the 1960s and 1970s.
“We were basically middle class so there weren’t a lot of big to-dos throughout the year, but Christmas was always a big deal,” he says, “Christmas by the pound. My grandparents always had a big Christmas Eve party and the weekend before there was always the American Legion Christmas party. We always had a giant blue spruce in the living room that my sister and I got to decorate. And on Christmas morning, we took forever to open presents because we didn’t want Christmas to be over. “
At Hope College in Holland, Mich., he studied theater and got an internship in New York City the summer before his senior year. Typically, theater interns swept stages, he says, “but I told them I wanted to work with a network, so I was assigned to work with Lorne Michaels on ‘Saturday Night Live.’”
Bob Pranga sneaks up behind crew member Susan Bratton while she dresses a line of gaping “skellys” in witch hats and satin floozy gowns. “I call them my party girls,” Pranga says, while in the background another crew member, Vicki Dimitri, arranges a tombstone in the display.
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
Susan Bratton arranges a lacy shawl on a friendly “skelly” — Dr. Halloween’s shorthand for skeleton.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
His job mostly involved getting coffee and running errands, but the experience was everything a celebrity seeker could ask for, he says. Many years later, he actually decorated the homes of some of the celebs he met on “SNL,” such as Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds. His most memorable moment though, he says, was accidentally walking into the dressing room of “SNL” cast member Gilda Radner while she was sitting inside.
“The rules were, if the celebrities were in the room, you couldn’t go in, and I was terrified,” he says, “but she said, ‘Honey, sit down and have some fruit. I have this big fruit basket and I can’t eat it all myself. You look tired, and you’ve got to take care of yourself in this business because otherwise, it will kill you.’”
He says he hesitated, worried about breaking the rule, but Radner insisted. “She said, ‘If you have any problems with them, tell them I asked you to help me, because after all, honey, I’m the star,’” Pranga says. “She wasn’t being egotistical. It was very businesslike, a moment of power, and I was like, ‘I want to have that power.’”
The following year, after he finished his degree, Pranga moved to New York with $100 in his pocket. One of his friends found an apartment “in a crack-whore neighborhood called Red Hook in Brooklyn. It’s gentrified now, but then, you walked over junkies in the morning to get to the bus,” he says. “People always ask me, ‘Weren’t you scared?’ and the answer is: ‘No, because I was in New York and I was starting this great adventure’ — I was trying to figure out how to be an actor.”
Vicky Dimitri fixes a black veil on one of the yard’s ghostly apparitions after creating hairdos for the other ghosts’ matted locks.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
As it turned out, the acting gigs were rare, but at least it’s how he met Staron, another aspiring actor who, like him, was attending Bob Collier’s Commercial Acting School. To pay the rent, he found work at Macy’s famous flagship department store working in various departments until he finally landed on the Christmas floor, finishing trees.
In the 1980 and ’90s, Macy’s was so prestigious “when I’d go home for Christmas, all people wanted was a Macy’s shopping bag,” he says. During his five years in New York, he worked other jobs too: window dressing at Bergdorf Goodman and leading tours around the city.
“It was all survival work, but being a city tour guide also taught me to hustle,” he says. “Hustle has a negative connotation, but it helped me figure things out. My foundation came from the Midwest, where you work hard, learn how to be nice to people and be happy with what you get. Being a New York City tour guide taught me how to survive.”
Debi Staron calls herself the “nuts-and-bolts” partner of Dr. Halloween and Dr. Christmas, usually wearing fingerless gloves and a bulky knee pad to make it easier when she’s assembling gear or “crawling around under Christmas trees,” but she still takes time for snazzy seasonal manicures from Paris Nails near her home in Chatsworth.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
By the end of 1988, Pranga and Staron were ready for a change. As he recalls, “She came to my Christmas party and said, ‘I’m thinking of moving to California in April,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I’ll go with you.’ And that’s pretty much how my life has been, all just happenstance. Nothing was planned.”
They found a small apartment in West Hollywood in the spring of 1989, which they shared with another friend to keep their costs low. “I came to L.A. with $300, so I felt like I was making progress,” Pranga says jokingly. Within weeks, he was working again as a tour guide, this time on tour buses in Hollywood. “I was literally making everything up,” and it became another kind of survival job, he says, since he had to keep changing tour companies until he found one whose paychecks would reliably clear.
Then in the fall of 1991, Pranga spotted a want ad for a Christmas shop manager at the Glendale Galleria.
“I called and said, ‘I have experience at Macy’s doing Christmas,’ and they literally gave me the job sight unseen over the phone because experience at Macy’s had so much clout,” he says. “Then I told them I had an assistant I worked with, and they hired us both over the phone. So I went home that night and told Debi, ‘I got this job over the phone to run a Christmas store, and you’re my assistant. Do you wanna?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I’ll help you,’ and that’s how it started.”
Mark Ilvedson, on the ladder, wraps raggedly strips of purple fabric and white tulle on a 12-foot-tall mummy, while Charly Sam, below hands him fabric and keeps his ladder secure. Debi Staron recommends adding shredded bits of cheesecloth, tulle or other lightweight fabrics to all Halloween displays because the movement gives the decor a spookier vibe.
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
Things really started humming when businesswoman Bette L. Smith, then-owner of Completion Bond Co., walked into the store. “She said, ‘I love that Christmas tree’ and asked me if I knew anybody who decorates. ‘I do,’ I said, and that was my first job,” Pranga says. “I had no clue what that meant other than bringing a Christmas tree to put up for her. There were no guidelines to being a Christmas decorator in Los Angeles. I had to make everything up.”
Later, Pranga and Staron worked for a Christmas store that was bought by Paris Hilton’s mother, Kathy Hilton, who opened the door to many other celebrity introductions. “I remember Kathy pulling me aside the very first year and saying, ‘Honey, if you want to make it in this town, you watch me,’” he says. “I will always be grateful because I learned so much working for her.”
By then, Pranga was calling himself “the Christmas Guy.” That changed after he told someone he worked 24/7 during the holidays, “and they said, ‘Oh, like a doctor? You’re like a doctor of Christmas!’ So then I started calling myself Dr. Christmas,” he says.
Jasmine and Chris Bryant have been hiring Dr. Halloween to create spooky scenes in their Pasadena front yard since the bought their home in 2018. The displays are pricey, and attract hundreds of trick-or-treaters, but they keep doing the decor, Bryant said, “because it’s so much fun.”
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
As his clientele grew, Pranga says he knew “if you want to make any money in California, you have to have a little bit of fandom, which meant getting on television, so I just started calling around. Nobody told me I needed an agent.”
It was part luck and part chutzpah that landed him a spot on the “Leeza” syndicated talk show. “I just called and said, “This is Dr. Christmas and I’d like to speak to Leeza Gibbons,‘” he says. “The receptionist thought I was her real doctor and put me right through. Leeza said, ‘Who is this?’ and I said, ‘I’m Dr. Christmas and I think it would be fun to be on your show,’ and she went, ‘… OK,’ and that developed into a lasting friendship. She always called me when she needed a holiday fluff piece.”
Ultimately, he and Staron collected so much holiday decor, they opened a prop rental business called Dr. Christmas Rents in Burbank and began decorating sets for movies, TV and commercials. Around 2015, they noticed all the interest in Halloween and branched into spooky decor as well.
Now their season runs from mid-September to mid-January. For some clients, that means taking down their Halloween gear and putting up Christmas the same week.
His fees vary from $5,000 to $50,000, depending on the location and amount of decor. “Some people even do their bathrooms — I had one house where we put a lit Christmas tree in a beautiful glass shower stall. I’m more than happy to decorate whatever room they want to do,” he says.
He never quotes prices over the phone. “I meet with people and ask what kind of experience do they want — a Honda, a Lexus or a Rolls-Royce? “ he says. “They never choose the Honda experience. The majority of the folks choose the Lexus, and a lot choose the Rolls-Royce, but each client is different. We have a lot of corporate clients, but we also have people who want to have their home done while they go shopping. And what really sells it is, once we give them the movie-set experience, we come back and take it all down. And if it needs any maintenance, we come back and make it right. It’s all part of my Midwestern ideals.”
A cyclist ogles the Bryant’s fully Halloween decorated home, just a couple hours after Dr. Halloween’s crew began. Here’s the finished look of the Pasadena home.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Chris and Jasmine Bryant — he a software engineer, she the director of Caltech’s Center for Teaching, Learning, & Outreach — were cheerfully mum about what their Halloween extravaganza cost. “A decent amount,” Chris Bryant says, smiling.
They keep things simple for Christmas — just a string of lights around the outside of the house, but their Halloween decor “goes into our annual budget because it’s so much fun,” Chris Bryant says. “We probably got 2,000 trick-or-treaters last year, an endless stream. It seems to make people very happy, and that’s something we enjoy. It’s a big part of why we do this.”
Those kind of comments are music to Pranga’s ears, a win-win for his business and his Midwestern “be nice to folks” ideals. His goal is always to make people happy, he says, even with a client load that, after Halloween, will likely have he and his team decorating at least one house or business every day until Dec. 25. But don’t let that stop you from calling, he says, laughing. He’s the doctor, after all, a master at making things work, “and I’ll keep taking money until I fall down.”
Figures from the entertainment industry — including the late Fred Rogers, Tupac Shakur, and Robin Williams — have been digitally recreated using OpenAI’s Sora technology. The app’s ability to do so with ease left many in the industry deeply concerned.
Sora/Open AI/Annotation by NPR
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Sora/Open AI/Annotation by NPR
OpenAI says it has released new policies for an artificial intelligence tool called Sora 2, in response to concerns from Hollywood studios, unions and talent agencies.
The tool allows users to create realistic, high-quality audio and video, using text prompts and images.
“It’s about creating new possibilities,” OpenAI promised in a promotional video for Sora 2. “You can view the power to step into any world or scene, and letting your friends cast you in theirs.”
But with Sora 2, some creators have also made fake AI-generated videos of historical figures doing things they never did. For example, Martin Luther King, Jr. changing his “I Have a Dream” speech, Michael Jackson, rapping and stealing someone’s chicken nuggets, or Mr. Rogers greeting rapper Tupac Shakur to his neighborhood.
Some videos reimagined the late Robin Williams talking on a park bench and in other locations. His daughter Zelda begged fans to stop sending her such AI-generated content, calling it “horrible slop.”
“You’re not making art,” she wrote on Instagram, “You’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings.”
Actress Chaley Rose is one of many in the entertainment industry worried about OpenAI’s video-generating technology.
Karolina Turek/Chaley Rose
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Karolina Turek/Chaley Rose
“It’s kind of cool, it’s kind of scary,” says actress Chaley Rose, who’s best known for her role in the TV series Nashville. “People can borrow from actors, our vulnerability and our art to teach the characters they create how to do what we do. I would hate to have my image out there and not have given permission or to actually be the one doing the acting and having control over the performance.”
Hollywood’s top talent agencies first sounded the alarm.
“There is no substitute for human talent in our business, and we will continue to fight tirelessly for our clients to ensure that they are protected,” United Talent Agency wrote in a statement last week. “When it comes to OpenAI’s Sora or any other platform that seeks to profit from our clients’ intellectual property and likeness, we stand with artists. The future of industries based on creative expression and artistry relies on controls, protections, and rightful compensation. The use of such property without consent, credit or compensation is exploitation, not innovation.”
Creative Artists Agency issued a similar warning last week.
Last year, California’s governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill requiring the consent of actors and performers to use their digital replicas.
Now, the talent agencies and SAG-AFTRA (which also represents many NPR employees) announced they and OpenAI are supporting similar federal legislation, called the “NO FAKES” Act.
Until now, some of the videos created using Sora 2 have relied on copyrighted material. For instance, there’s a video that shows the animated character SpongeBob Squarepants cooking up illicit drugs.
An unauthorized AI-generated video depicts SpongeBob SquarePants preparing illicit drugs.
Sora/Open AI/Annotation by NPR
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Sora/Open AI/Annotation by NPR
The Motion Picture Association, which represents major Hollywood studios, said in a statement that since Sora 2’s release, “videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media.”
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of the union SAG-AFTRA told NPR last week that it wasn’t feasible for rightsholders to find every possible use of their material.
“It’s a moment of real concern and danger for everyone in the entertainment industry. And it should be for all Americans, all of us, really,” says Crabtree-Ireland.
SAG-AFTRA says actor Bryan Cranston alerted the union to possible abuses. Now, the union and talent agencies say they’re grateful OpenAI listened to such concerns.
The company has announced an “opt-in” policy allowing all artists, performers, and individuals the right to determine how and whether they can be simulated. OpenAI says it will block the generation of well-known characters on its public feed and will take down any existing material not in compliance.
Last week, OpenAI agreed to take down phony videos of Martin Luther King, Jr., after his estate complained about the “disrespectful depictions” of the late civil rights leader.
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