Brazilian UFC flyweight Allan Nascimento has died after suffering an apparent heart attack in his sleep, the organization announced. He was 34.
Nascimento was found unresponsive Monday morning, according to the UFC, and was pronounced dead at the scene “despite the efforts of the responding medical team.”
He is said to be survived by his wife and two children.
“Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with Allan’s family, friends, teammates, and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time,” UFC wrote on social media.
At 5 foot 9 and 126 pounds, Nascimento built a reputation “as a skilled competitor and consummate professional,” according to a tribute posted on the UFC site, while compiling a 4-2 record in the Octagon and 22-7 overall (16 wins by submission).
Nascimento started training at the famed Chute Boxe Diego Lima academy in his hometown of Sao Paulo, Brazil, at age 15. It was there that he was given his nickname, Puro Osso, which is Portugese slang for “skin and bones.”
“When I joined my academy, I was extremely thin,” Nascimento told the website Sherdog in 2021. “I weighed nothing. As soon as people saw me, they called me ‘Puro Osso.’ The nickname stuck.”
Nascimento’s first MMA fight was in 2011, with his UFC debut coming 10 years later. His final bout was a split decision loss to Mitch Raposo at UFC Fight Night 279 in Las Vegas.
On Monday, former UFC lightweight champion Charles Oliveira posted several tributes to his close friend and Chute Boxe Diego Lima teammate on his Instagram Story.
“Today I lost a brother that fighting gave me,” Oliveira wrote in Portugese. “Thank you for always being there, for sharing the mat and the corner, and for your words. I’m just so grateful for having you by my side, brother, in training, in the corner and when hanging out. I love you, kid.”
Fellow Brazilian UFC fighter Caio Borralho commented on UFC’s Instagram post about Nascimento’s death: “He was one of the most kind fighters that’s I’ve ever met! Polite, good energy and always in good spirits! He will be missed.”
UFC Brazil reporter Evelyn Rodrigues wrote in the comments: “One of the kindest souls I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing through MMA. Rest in peace, Allan.”
It’s a few minutes after 10 a.m. on a recent morning and the thermometer is closing in on 95 degrees, but Marc Papas isn’t fazed. “The heat doesn’t bother me much,” he said, unloading his bicycle — a blue and yellow 1989 Trek 400 — from the trunk of his car on a side street in Reseda. “I just keep going.”
Papas adjusted the heart monitor underneath his T-shirt, checked the bike computer attached to his handlebars, then set off on the day’s ride; he’s taken it upon himself to bike every public street in Los Angeles. The Phoenix native has completed over 78% (about 5,840 miles) after two years. He calls it “The Project,” and says there’s about 7,516.07 miles in total, when you include various enclaves and adjacent cities like Beverly Hills or Burbank. Today he’s headed toward the longest continuous bike lane in Southern California — a stretch of Reseda Boulevard. It’s an unexpected amenity in a part of the city that seems otherwise hostile to pedestrians and cyclists, but one Papas wants incorporated around more of Los Angeles.
“Somebody once asked me on a Reddit Ask Me Anything what is one street you think needs a bike lane,” he said. “I wrote him a whole essay in response, because I can’t just say one street.”
Marc Papas estimates he covers about 75 new, unique miles each week, putting him on track to complete the entire city after nearly three years of riding.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Marc Papas sets his blue and yellow 1989 Trek 400 near a graffiti post along the Los Angeles River.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
After a few blocks on Reseda, Papas turned back into the neighborhood centered around Etiwanda and started tracing loops across the blocks. It’s his standard pattern for covering any area he rides for the Project. “I base my routes on a math theory called the Eulerian Path,” said Papas, a mechanical engineer by training. Each new segment of the city he rides is generally a rectangle bound by major streets. “Then, I start with loops around the edges and work my way in,” he continued. “It’s the most efficient way to cover an area without overlapping.”
Today’s ride would yield eight new miles for Papas. “So, I’ll be about 12 miles away from 80%,” he calculated.
Papas started his biking project almost by accident. He moved to Los Angeles in late 2020 after finishing his PhD at Georgia Tech. He had taken up biking around Atlanta as part of triathlon training and worried he wouldn’t be able to continue once arriving in L.A.
“I remember having a sort of fear around it,” said Papas. “I’d heard it’s just so car-filled and dangerous to be on the roads.” But riding along the beach and around much of the Westside quickly changed his mind. With perfect weather year-round and a mostly flat topography, why wasn’t everyone in L.A. riding bikes?
He was soon cycling to work in Monrovia from his apartment in Pasadena, and biking more than he ever had in his life. “Sometimes friends would be surprised to learn I have a car,” he said. “They thought I bike everywhere because I don’t drive.”
Then, on Dec. 31, 2023, Papas decided to get in one last bike ride for the year. He rode a section of San Marino that he and friends refer to as “The Mitochondria” for the shape the streets make when viewed in the tracking app Strava. After riding the Mitochondria, he decided to keep going — making a path up each street and block — until he was satisfied. It gave him the idea to ride every mile of street in San Marino. “It’s only 60 miles total,” said Papas. “That seemed doable.”
“There are beautiful pieces of art on the walls that you wouldn’t imagine,” says Marc Papas, who has spotted murals throughout the city.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Marc Papas cruises along the Los Angeles River bike path.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Finishing the 60 miles of San Marino led to completing the 400 miles of Pasadena. He next found himself taking detours to cover new streets in Northeast Los Angeles as he’d ride to and from Koreatown Run Club meet-ups at Los Angeles Community College. But it wasn’t clear to himself, or anyone else, what he was doing. “Friends were seeing my Strava activities and texting me like, ‘What the heck are you doing, man?,’” Papas recalled. One friend jokingly asked if he was drawing the Nazca lines across the city, but Papas wrote it off as just trying to clock extra mileage. “There’s a level of self-deception, because riding the whole city of Los Angeles seemed impossible to do,” he said. Still, his treks around Northeast L.A., East Hollywood and Los Feliz were starting to build up mileage — he had completed about 18% of the city.
When Papas drove out to North Hollywood in November 2024 specifically to track new mileage, he realized he had crossed the Rubicon. “At that point, I can’t lie to myself anymore about what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m driving out to these places to get miles more efficiently. When that happened, I was like, all right, I’m in it for the long haul.”
“Biking is like a superpower to gain familiarity with your neighborhood,” says Marc Papas.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
As Papas covered more and more of the city, he began growing an appreciation for various architecturally-significant neighborhoods as well as the many murals across large swaths of South and East L.A. “There are beautiful pieces of art on the walls that you wouldn’t imagine,” he said. “I want to take people to these places and do a mural tour.” He was especially moved when he was riding in Pacoima and saw a Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens mural that memorializes the tragic plane crash that killed both Holly and Valens. “So many of these murals are commemorating people and events that are culturally important to those specific areas,” he added.
The bike rides were connecting him to his city in ways he never expected. “I’m not necessarily saying that everybody needs to go out and ride their bikes,” said Papas, though he’d certainly love it if more Angelenos did. Instead, he hopes his biking project is showing people what’s possible — in the most extreme way. Yes, you can bike in Los Angeles, as many Angelenos often do out of necessity. It’s even enjoyable. And yes, you can do it across every single mile of the city, even if the cycling infrastructure isn’t perfect yet. “I think to me, success would be if people just go out and explore their own neighborhood,” he said. He views cycling as a form of civic engagement and a way to see things otherwise invisible when speeding by in a car. For beginners, Papas recommends sticking to bike paths and joining cycling groups. More experienced riders should venture out into new areas, said Papas. “Biking is like a superpower to gain familiarity with your neighborhood, but it just needs to be unleashed.”
“At this point, I can’t lie to myself anymore … I’m in it for the long haul,” says Marc Papas. He’s already clocked thousands of miles on his mission to cover every street in L.A.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Last September, Papas passed the 50% mark of his project and estimates he’s been covering an additional 1% (or about 75 new, unique miles) every week since. That puts him on pace to finish sometime around mid-December — should everything go smoothly — nearly three years after he first began. Does he know what his final mile will be? “Eldred Street in Mount Washington,” he said. He notes it’s one of the steepest streets in the entire country.
“It’’s a fitting end, like a final boss [in a video game], just one last all-out hard effort to completely finish things off,” Papas said. “It gives me goosebumps to think that would be the time and place that this years-long project would be done.” Of course, there’s always the rest of Los Angeles County to conquer.
POP superstar George Michael’s estate is suing his former best pal over footage from the recording of a lost album.
Andros Georgiou, 63, faces court for charging fans to watch scenes which he recorded of the ex-Wham! star.
Secret footage of ex-Wham! star George Michael in the studio for an unreleased albumCredit: UnknownAndros Georgiou is being taken to court by the Wham! star’s lawyers, after he released almost 90 minutes of unseen footage shot in 1992 and 1993Credit: Kevin Dunnett – The Sun
George’s former best friend said he would be “turning in his grave” after the pop singer’s estate sued him over video footage of a secret unreleased album.
The Wham! star’s lawyers are taking Andros to court after he released almost 90 minutes of unseen footage shot in 1992 and 1993.
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Andros launched a website last month charging fans to watch the film Trojan Souls — The Greatest Album That Was Never Made.
But the legal team from George’s estate has now lodged a case against him at London’s Intellectual Property and Enterprise Court, claiming its rights have been breached.
Furious Andros, 63, said the legal claim was “a case of sheer greed”.
On George, he said: “Yes, we fell out, but we loved and cared for each other deeply, and I find the baseless claims and the constant attempts to erase me from history both disrespectful and, frankly, a bit desperate.
“The film belongs to me.
“Trojan Souls belongs to me.
“They’ve opened Pandora’s Box.
“They won’t want me on the stand.
“I know way too much.
“Bring it on.”
Andros’s film shows the making of tracks for Trojan Souls: The Voice of Reason, a collaboration album with global superstars.
Pop fans are being asked to pay £4.99 for 48 hours of access to the 90-minute video online.
Tribe Media is also selling £19.99 VIP tiers, promising access to never-before-heard recordings of George’s unreleased songs from the record.
Andros shot the video using a camcorder given to him by Sony while they were in Japan on George’s Faith tour.
Andros said: “First and foremost — my brother in arms, my best friend, George Michael to you, Yog to me — would turn in his grave knowing what Russells (the estate’s lawyers) are attempting — and spending his money to do it.”
Andros and George were estranged before the star’s death on Christmas Day, 2016, but had been planning to reconcileThe pair had a close friendship for decades after their fathers moved to the UK from Cyprus together in 1953Credit: Getty
He went on: “It is well known Yog and I were working on Trojan Souls through my record label, Hardback Records.
“The film I have released was shot by me, with Yog’s full approval.
“This was a home video leaked over 30 years ago.
“It kept resurfacing on YouTube.
“So I decided, if you can’t beat them, put the film out myself, since others were already profiting from my home video.”
The legal case lists Andros and Tribe Media, the production house distributing the film.
The claimants are Robobuild Limited and Big Geoff Overseas Limited, the holding companies George used to manage royalties and world tours.
Andros and George were estranged before the star’s death on Christmas Day, 2016, but had been planning to reconcile.
But Andros had spoken to his pal on the phone in the final weeks of his life.
The pair had a close friendship for decades after their fathers moved to the UK from Cyprus together in 1953.
Most of the one-hour 24-minute film shows George playing the piano, performing vocals with backing singers, grabbing a bass and talking to producers about his track list in an LA studio.
George lost interest in the album when his then-partner Anselmo Feleppa’s health declined.
Anselmo, who suffered from Aids, died in March 1993.
George never completed the album.
It can take up to two years for a case at the court to reach trial.
After spending decades collecting clean-lined Midcentury Modern furniture and accessories, stylist Wendi Weger felt it was time to give her Silver Lake apartment a playful update.
“Everything was brown,” Weger says as she sits on a plush sofa covered in pink and chartreuse striped Christian Lacroix fabric. “It looked like a UPS truck in here. I mean, look at me,” she adds, fluffing the ruffles of her Accidente Con Flores dress, her intricately manicured fingers decorated with colorful Zuni Toons rings. “That is not me.”
In this series, we spotlight L.A. rentals with style. From perfect gallery walls to temporary decor hacks, these renters get creative, even in small spaces. And Angelenos need the inspiration: Most are renters.
Indeed.
Weger, who grew up in Madison, Wis., studied cinema during graduate school at NYU and later moved to Los Angeles to work in Hollywood as a producer and stylist, is no minimalist. Always expressive, she describes her style as more akin to a “Victorian parlor meets hunting lodge.”
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So it’s no surprise that her one-bedroom apartment, in a Storybook-style fourplex built in 1922, is just as dramatic as she is.
Wendi Weger views her Silver Lake apartment as her creative studio. “I don’t mind a lot of frenetic activity,” she says.
A wall covered in hollyhock wallpaper from House of Hackney stands out in Weger’s bedroom, along with a handmade quilt signed by Grace Verburg that includes crochet, beadwork and hundreds of ribbon rosettes.
Weger thrives on “kinetic energy,” be it color, texture or a pair of bedazzled Italian loafers. In her bedroom, she mixes floral textiles and modern art with a quirky stepstool shaped like an ear of corn. In the dining room, vintage Doyle Lane ceramic beads dangle from a Mission-style wooden clock while designer handbags are draped over chairs and hat racks.
On her fireplace, an ornate gilded mirror from the 1940s she found at Sunbeam Vintage is flanked by porcelain figurines. A porcelain Capodimonte lamp nestled under vintage Japanese prints is described as “Rococo on acid.” Nearby, a handmade chandelier by artist Helen Stickler, decorated with vintage Swarovski crystals and beads, adds to what Weger describes as her “Candyland vibe.”
Weger twirls in a pink taffeta Batsheva dress. “My apartment is basically how I dress — like an Edwardian ghost in a prairie dress who wandered into a circus and decided to keep everything,” she says.
“That’s where I am right now,” she says about the apartment she has called home for 17 years. “I feel like I can finally play. I’m trying to bring in a candy theme without making it too grandma. At this point in my life, I don’t care what anyone thinks about me.”
Her friend, creative director Dana Sidell, says self-expression is central to how Weger lives her life. “Wendi has the unique ability to bring nostalgia, whimsy and individuality all together into maximalist style,” she says in an email.
In 2020, as the film industry slowed down because of COVID-19, Weger took a chance and opened the Curatorial Dept., a vintage and designer resale shop in Atwater Village. Popular with celebrities including Lake Bell, Nick Thune and politicians Nithya Raman and Laura Friedman, the store is known for Weger’s signature “clothing sculptures,” where she layers mannequins with dozens of pieces of clothing and accessories.
“Styling is my art,” she says. “To me, clothing is sculpture.”
A silk Gucci skirt hangs alongside artworks in Weger’s bedroom. “Whether it’s producing a film, building a boutique, styling a room or a mannequin, it’s about assemblage and synergy,” she says.
To demonstrate, Weger starts layering a mannequin in her bedroom, picking from racks of clothes, handbags, color-coordinated shoes and jewelry nearby. She layers an “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt over a dress shirt and Yohji Yamamoto linen pants, then keeps adding more. “It needs a ruffle,” she says, caught up in the process, before adding a frilly collar and glittering vintage brooch.
A bright blue first-place ribbon materializes and becomes the perfect accessory. “It’s not maximalist enough,” she says with a sigh.
Weger says her apartment reflects the way she dresses, with layers of art, vintage clothes and accessories, each with its own story. She jokes that it looks like one of her clothing sculptures has “exploded across a room.”
When asked if there’s such a thing as too much, she shakes her head with conviction.
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1.Weger holds a pair of sparkling JVB X Nomasei ‘Nono’ loafers. 2.The hollyhock pattern from House of Hackney appears throughout Weger’s apartment, even on this fabric lampshade.
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1.A Gucci cashmere bunny cape hangs like an artwork in the bedroom. 2.Doyle Lane ceramic beads hang on a wooden clock above a collection of $2 bills.
“I’ll wear a baby cup as jewelry,” she says, picking up a small silver cup from a cabinet to show her point. What’s one more charm on one of several necklaces already heavy with lockets and hearts?
Weger’s home decor follows the same idea. Some pieces, like a pink silk pleated Gucci skirt by Alessandro Michele, hang on her bedroom wall next to vintage artworks, including a framed cross stitch by a friend that reads “Live. Laugh. Toaster Bath.” Others are neatly arranged in her butler’s pantry. Clothing racks fill the hallway, living room and even her bedroom. “Clothing and handbags are art to me,” she says.
Then there’s the cashmere embroidered rabbit cape by Gucci, which she purchased secondhand.
“People chase me down on the street whenever I wear it and ask me where I got it,” she says. “To me, it’s art.”
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
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(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Humor is important to her too. In the living room, a blue resin coffee table shaped like a candy wrapper adds to the playful feel, along with vintage candy dishes.
“There’s a lot of absurdity and comedy here,” she says, pointing out the Spanish angels with guns, a series of artworks from the 1600s.
“There’s something about these Spanish archangels with weapons,” she says. “They look tough and unisex to me, with mild expressions, beautiful clothes, tights, ruffles and sleeves, plus a firearm. It’s a great symbol for being a warrior, especially as a small business owner.”
Nearly everything in her apartment is secondhand, from the vintage Audubon prints arranged salon-style in the living room to the Navajo rugs and David Shrigley print she found at a garage sale. Mixing old and new is important, she says, referring to the House of Hackney hollyhock pattern she recently added to the walls of the living room and bedrooms, as well as the dining room lampshade.
Handbags are draped over dining chairs.
Her place settings are also layered, including Weger’s grandmother’s Wedgwood china.
Her apartment is essentially her atelier, or as she calls it, “the creative engine behind” the Curatorial Dept. She often does intake for her store at her kitchen table, surrounded by needlepoint pillows made by her Great-Uncle Elliott, who was also an entrepreneur. “This is not cluttered to me,” she says. “This is just where everything gets sorted.”
“Wendi’s style has a touch of the harlequin to it — playful, theatrical and always ready for an occasion,” writer and former NYU classmate Josh Rothenberger says in an email. “Her world is a warm pastiche of vintage and bespoke, histories inherited and histories invented on the fly. Her furniture invites the kind of existential frolic that pairs best with Cuvée — only to remind us, hours later, that true beauty should never be too precious to dance on.”
Although Weger says she isn’t a “woo-woo person,” she believes her apartment and store came from asking the universe for what she wanted. “Tell people what you want,” she says. “Especially in L.A. People support you and help you reach your dreams. I said I wanted this apartment, and because of that, my friend thought of me when she was moving. The same thing happened with my shop. I was in a different industry when I told a shop owner friend I’d always wanted a shop, that I intended to have a shop, and she thought of me when hers became available.”
She’s already thinking about what she wants next: “I’ll be sure to tell everyone I know.”
Mary Steenburgen moved to California to work with Jack Nicholson.
It was 1977, and Steenburgen — an Arkansas native — had been waiting tables in New York at night while studying acting with Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse during the day. She’d been pounding the pavement for about seven years, she says, when her “overnight moment came” and she was called in to read for a film Nicholson was both directing and starring in called “Goin’ South.”
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.
Getting the role, Steenburgen says, changed her life in every way. “I flew out [to film] and had an amazing introduction to the town,” she explains. “I lived at the Chateau Marmont and went to Paramount Studios every day, where [Nicholson] would screen movies for me and then come in at the end to give me a little film-slash-acting lecture about each one. It really helped me get ready to dive into the big leagues.”
Though she spent some years in an old Ojai farmhouse in the 1980s raising her kids with former husband Malcolm McDowell, she’s always had a base of operations here in L.A. She shares her L.A. abode now with husband Ted Danson, whom she married in 1995 and with whom she’s starred in numerous projects, including the Netflix series “A Man on the Inside.” L.A. is also where she filmed her latest movie, “The Dink,” an Apple TV comedy centered on one of her favorite pastimes: pickleball.
Here’s how Steenburgen would spend her perfect, pickleball-filled Sunday in Los Angeles.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
5:30 a.m.: Early morning meditation and mental exercise
We always wake up early. After so many years of going to work at 5 in the morning, we always wake up between 5 and 6 now.
We’re morning meditators, or we try to be since our dog [Blue] just sits on our laps and stares at us until he’s been fed. Then we have to do all the New York Times games, and then I’ll try and find a pickleball game. We love Spelling Bee. We have to get to Genius, at least. Occasionally we’ll get to Queen Bee, but if we don’t get to at least Genius, then my day is ruined.
If my husband and I are working that week, whoever’s not working will have to run lines with the one who is. So we’ll generally spend a few hours doing that in the morning, too.
8:30 a.m.: Light gardening
I love my garden. A lot of it was hand-planted by me. Not the big trees — someone else planted those — but everything else, like the ground cover and smaller plants, I did. So I’ll spend a little time out there, too.
I like to go to Armstrong Garden Centers. They hire very knowledgeable people there. When I first started planting my garden — I live on a hill and it was all dirt back there and not everything grows well that way so I was looking for ground cover that would grow quickly but also didn’t mind a hillside. The people at Armstrong knew the answer, and they were great.
10 a.m.: Pickleball-palooza
I try to play pickleball for at least two hours a day, if I can. I try to find a game with friends, or I’ll go and play in different parks.
This morning, I played at a friend’s house. She has a beautiful tennis court and they put tape down on it so we can use it for pickleball, too. I played with her daughter and her friend.
I also have a pickleball coach and sometimes we’ll go play at this place called Pickle Pop that’s on the Third Street Promenade. Other times, I’ll play at the Santa Monica Pickleball Center.
My son just brought eight members over from [one of] London’s biggest pickleball club[s], Lemon Pickleball, and they all stayed with me. We played all over the place and we had so much fun. They loved Southern California, and seeing it through their eyes made me love it even more.
On their last night here, I called a wonderful family I know that cooks fantastic Mexican food, because I knew [the Brits] hadn’t ever really experienced great Mexican food. I met them because they’re set up every weekend in the parking lot at Rustic Coffee [in Santa Monica]. They’re lovely folks. So they came over and cooked, and we had a wonderful night for the Brits, putting up all kinds of lights and decorations too.
12:30 p.m.: Magical brunch with the grandkids
We go to Kreation a lot for lunch, just because it’s nice and it’s very healthy. I was just there yesterday with my granddaughters, after we all played Pickleball.
Actually, this weekend we all went to the Magic Castle together, too. I hadn’t been for decades and two of my five grandkids were here, and they’d never been either. Mostly it’s no kids at the Magic Castle but on weekends they do a brunch where kids can come so we went to that. The last magician in the show even called my granddaughter up on stage to be a sort of assistant, and it was very cute.
3 p.m.: Hiking with the dog
Because we work a lot and our days often belong to someone else from early in the morning until pretty late at night, weekends are more laid back.
We like to go on hikes and walks around Santa Monica. We have this big Australian Shepherd and we take him for long, slow walks. They’re slow because he has to say hello to every dog and person along the way — especially babies, who are his absolute favorite.
There’s something magical about my dog, I think. People will say, “Oh, my dog hates all dogs” and then my dog pulls me over and the dog that hates all dogs just melts. It’s like he calms other dogs. He even calms people that think they don’t like dogs. I know I’m very prejudiced, but I’m also very proud.
6 p.m.: Breakfast (or Goop) for dinner
We’re big on breakfast for dinner, so maybe we’d have some poached eggs on toast or poached eggs on creamed spinach.
If we order in, we might get food from Goop Kitchen. They have so many healthy, fantastic choices. Even their pizzas are pretty healthy.
8:30 p.m.: TV in bed
Sometimes I read a book at night, but we also have a show we absolutely love to go to sleep to, even if you’re not supposed to do that. It’s this British game show called “Would I Lie to You?” and unfailingly it makes me laugh. I’ve seen every single episode — some of them twice — and I like to go to sleep laughing.
I also just said to Ted that I think we’re going to have to start “Cheers” again soon. We just lost our friend Jimmy Burrows, who was a magnificent human and so important to Ted’s whole career, and one of the great things about watching “Cheers” is, if you know Jimmy’s laugh, you can actually pick it out multiple times during each episode.
It’s been a long time since we’ve watched “Cheers,” and it honestly never gets old. I first watched it in Ojai when I was married and had young children. We would watch it with our best friends on Thursday nights, like everybody would go down to their house in their pajamas and we’d watch “Cheers” and then I’d come home to put the kids to bed. Then, when I was going through my divorce I would watch it at 10 o’clock at night because I was very lonely and it was the thing that cheered me up at the end of the day during a hard time in my life. Little did I know that one day I’d be sleeping with Sam Malone.
Jennifer Finch, the bassist for veteran LA rock act L7, has brain cancer and will not perform with the band on its farewell tour this year.
“Our beloved bandmate, sister and friend Jennifer Finch has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer,” the band wrote in a statement on its Instagram on Monday. “Following multiple surgeries and serious complications, Jennifer now requires extensive medical care, rehabilitation and professional in-home support.”
The group said that its final tour, scheduled for fall, “was planned along with Jennifer when all four of us were in good health and spirits.” Finch asked the band to continue with these performances, according to the statement.
“We will honor her request while making her care and well-being our immediate priority,” the band wrote. “We love her, and we want her to feel the full strength of the community that has loved and supported her for so many years.”
L7, a hugely influential act in the alt-rock wave of the ‘90s, was formed in 1985 by guitarists and singers Suzi Gardner and Donita Sparks, drummer Dee Plakas and Finch. Its firey singles “Pretend We’re Dead” and “Wargasm” helped kick off the riot grrl movement of the era, until they went on hiatus in 2001. The band reunited in 2014, and will begin The Last Hurrah tour in San Diego on Oct. 6.
The band also posted a GoFundMe for donations to help with her medical care . “The level of care Jennifer needs has gone beyond what friends and family can safely provide around the clock,” the band wrote. “As we face the difficult reality that Jennifer may have more good days behind her than ahead, we are asking for help to make the time she has with her friends, family, and fans as comfortable, meaningful, and full of love as possible.”
Chunky platform sandals, fitted baby tees, butterfly clips on perfectly crimped hair, brightly patterned skirts and tons of sparkles. Pure Y2K-fueled nostalgia filled the Kia Forum on Wednesday night in celebration of all things Hilary Duff.
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Duff graced the stage at the Inglewood venue as part of her Lucky Me tour, her first global headlining tour in nearly two decades. And her fans couldn’t have been more thrilled. The pop singer and actor, who released her sixth studio album “Luck… or Something” in February, performed two back-to-back sold-out shows.
Before the final L.A. show, we caught up with fans to talk about their outfits (many of which were inspired by Duff’s most famous roles such as Sam in “A Cinderella Story” and the title role in “The Lizzie McGuire Movie”), the memories her music brings up for them and why her work still resonates with them. Here’s what they had to say.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Tristan Hallam, 36, of Chicago
Tell us about your outfit.
This is my wedding dress that I had stuffed in a suitcase. She’s been in a suitcase for 10 years, and I still fit into her, which is nice. People ask me why I keep stuff and this is exactly why: You might get divorced and use it as a costume. My outfit is inspired by “A Cinderella Story.” It’s my favorite Hilary Duff movie. She plays diner girl Cinderella. She disguises herself with a mask and a L.A. Dodgers cap. I did have a tiara, but I didn’t bring it because I didn’t want to be too much. So I figured, you know what, why not buy an apron and a little black crop top, and rep L.A.
I have a tattoo of her signature. It’s a little faded because it’s like 10 years old, maybe older than that now. It was at a book signing at Barnes and Noble at like the Grove or something. I asked her if she would initial my wrist, and I got it tattooed the same night. I literally drove to the tattoo shop on Hollywood Boulevard with my arm out the window because I’m so clumsy and I didn’t want to smudge it. Then the next time I saw her, she asked me, what did your parents say? I said, “My mom asked me how long I kept the Sharpie on so long.”
How long have you been a fan?
I think I was like 8 or 9 years old when I saw “Casper Meets Wendy” for the first time. My grandma took me to like a K-Mart or something, and told me that I could get any movie that I wanted. Then I was into “Lizzie McGuire,” but as soon as Hilary started doing all her like movies and independent work, obviously the music is great. I used to live in L.A., so I went to a bunch of her book signings. I’ve done a lot of meet and greets for her concerts, and right now I’m traveling around. I’m going to 18, technically 19 shows now, and I’m gonna see her in New Zealand, Australia and some other places. I’m actually really excited because one of my friends, I met her in a Hilary Duff fan club chat room in 2005 on MSN Messenger, and we are still friends, so we are going to a ton of shows together.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
The fact that we’re around the same age, there’s been a lot of relationship similarities. I don’t have any kids, but the struggles with family, with your dad, with your siblings. She’s got some songs that are more mature and relatable for people our age. People who have gone through ups and downs in relationships, struggles with family and figuring out who your real family is, not just by blood but who your chosen family is. I think that’s really important.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Leilanie Martinez, 30, of South Gate
Tell us about your outfit and the inspiration behind it?
It’s my quinceañera dress. It’s supposedly very traditional to wear a white dress, like young women coming of age. For mine, I wanted to wear something that I didn’t see a lot of people wearing and I was very firm that if I didn’t find the love of my life, I was going to wear a white dress and this was my moment. My quinceañera was such a precious time. It really was a labor of love, and I think it’s one those memories I hold very near and dear. I think it’s an ode to her history, her legacy.
How long have you been a fan?
I remember I was 5 and I was running around in my neighborhood, playing with Barbies and watching “Lizzie McGuire.” I’m here today with my neighborhood and childhood friends. We used to watch it together and now we’re reliving our nostalgia and childhood.
Thinking back on when you first fell in love with her work, why does it still resonate with you today?
There’s a lot of power in her being a woman and she’s going through so many milestones that a lot of people my age are going through like having children and growing her career. Sometimes I think people “wash out” and I think it’s wonderful how she’s combating that narrative in so many ways, and that people are out here supporting her. I think there’s a lot of beauty in being able to be together as young women and relive some of these memories, but also cheer her on as she continues developing further.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Crystal Chesher, 33, of Mar Vista and Isabella Sanchez, 33, of Culver City
Tell us about your outfit.
Sanchez: We’re channeling “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” My actual name is Isabella. She gives more Lizzie vibes and I give more Isabella vibes. It’s funny because I’ve literally saved [looks] of Isabella and Lizzie on my Pinterest board and I’ve always wanted to dress up like this. It’s not 100% of what I wanted, but it’s giving what it’s supposed to.
How long have you been a fan?
Chesher: Since I was little. I remember watching “Lizzie McGuire” since the age of 10 at the very least so I’ve been growing up with her movies and shows. She’s definitely my idol.
Sanchez: Same. Growing up, I was bullied so she was a very big part of me being more positive about myself. I can relate to her and she really helped me. It just feels full circle to be able to see her at 33 when I wanted to see her when I was like 10.
Thinking back on when you first fell in love with her work, why does it still resonate with you today?
Chesher: She has a heavy influence in the LGBT community as well especially with the [anti-gay speech campaign]. I loved that. With her movies and her music, it’s all relatable and it resonates with you, the lyrics, the storyline and even her new album that just came out.
Sanchez: She’s just that girl. I’ve never even met her, but I feel like she’s so genuine and real and she’s always stayed consistent with who she is. She’s not like your typical celebrity. She’s just awesome. I’m literally probably going to tear up seeing her on stage.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Lucca Petrucci, 33, of Santa Monica
Tell us about your outfit.
This is a last-minute choice. It’s very like ’70s or retro. I feel like I’ve seen her wear something like this. I’m wearing wide-legged pants, Doc Martens, platform, new haircut, facial. The inspiration for this fit was elegant pop star like confidence, grounded, a baddie. I’m a baddie who knows my worth and that’s what I wanted to embrace. I feel like she’s like doing that. She has a lyric that’s like ‘I look in the mirror, like I’m a bad b—.”
How long have you been a fan?
Since third grade. I thought she was my crush, but I think I just wanted to be her. So many of my core childhood memories are with her.
Why was tonight a non-negotiable for you?
I wanted to experience with my bestie and her sister. I feel like as a kid I didn’t allow myself to fully embrace it because it would be too girly, too much, too gay. So I feel like as a 33-year-old, I’m reclaiming that experience. I’m so excited just to hear everybody in the Forum sing “So Yesterday” and “Come Clean.” She has always been my number one pop star, to this day, and I’ve never seen her perform.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
I feel like, especially when she was on “Lizzie McGuire,” she was figuring out who she was, but was open to being her authentic self. So I think that just like hit me when I was like in third and fourth grade, like figuring out myself. I felt so seen by her, and her music just brings back like such good feelings. Younger version of me, life wasn’t always great, but, I don’t know, she made things better.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Liv Guardado, 8, Priscilla Cruz, 38, Ava Guardado, 10 and Jezelle Velasco of Costa Mesa
Tell us about your outfit.
Cruz: We went thrifting for the first time for this. I’m plus-size, so thrifting is not easy in my size, so we did what we could. We got some overalls from Goodwill. And then we got some cowboy boots because we just wanted to be comfy.
Velasco: I probably stressed the most. I ordered so many pieces and it just kind of came together. I think the nails took the longest. One of my friends did my nails. It took some time but we got it done.
How long have you been a fan?
Velasco: Probably since I was their age. I never got to go to a concert, so this is my first time seeing her live.
Cruz: I definitely got inspired around middle school. I had a friend who was like Lizzie, and I was the best friend, Miranda. People would always say I was Miranda. I was a little older than [my girls], but I definitely have kept tabs on her life, and we love her.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
Cruz: It definitely feels like memories and home when you think of her music from back then. And now she’s obviously stepped into a different phase of her life, and it matches where we’re at in our phase too so it’s nice.
Velasco: It just brings back the nostalgia from back when we were younger and now being parents, and being able to relate to her and her new music.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Paige Beard, 34, and Tayler Nelson, 27, of Bakersfield
Tell us about your outfits.
Beard: I was supposed to be wearing purple and she was going to wear green, and we were going to do the Isabella and Lizzie look at the end of “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” It turned out more pink, but we ran with it.
Nelson: I was all about that performance, so I was like green. Gotta go green. We’ve been planning for a while, like two months.
How long have you been a fan?
Beard: I’ve been a fan for a long, long time, probably since “Casper Meets Wendy.” I was also a really big “Lizzie McGuire” fan, so I got into her acting as well as her music.
Nelson: Same. I was all about the Cinderella movie though, so it’s probably been 10 years for me.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
Beard: I was telling my sister that I really liked “Lizzie McGuire” because it was one of the first times I saw somebody’s inner dialogue acted out in cartoon form. It showed me that I’m not too much. She’s a little bit older than me and I see her crying on stage and I’m like “OK, it’s OK.”
Nelson: “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” was a big turning point for me. I just loved how she expressed herself with what she wore and how she acted. I feel like I understood her in different ways. I enjoyed the dancing and the singing for sure. She felt free and I’m like, “Dang, I want that.”
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Freddy Lopez, 38, and Raymond Lockwood, 36, of San Bernardino
Tell us about your outfits.
Lopez: Just a ’90s vibe. I guess a little old-school.
Lockwood: The outfits are a little last-minute because we were like we should’ve done diner girl [from “A Cinderella Story”] or one of her other movies, but we chose the little cartoon character from the show.
How long have you been a fan?
Lopez: I’ve been a fan since “Lizzie McGuire” and her movies.
Lockwood: For the past 20 something years. We grew up watching “Lizzie McGuire” and got introduced to Hilary Duff when she started singing.
Why was tonight a non-negotiable for you?
Lopez: We don’t know if she’s going to come back after this, so you’ve gotta take every opportunity. There’s other artists who cannot come back to perform right now. So when she said I’m coming back, we had to.
Lockwood: We’re healing our inner child. As a kid, we didn’t know she was having tours or we couldn’t afford to come out. Now, we’re like we don’t have to ask our mom and dad for anything.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
Lockwood: For me, it’s being a teenager, watching the “Lizzie McGuire” show and watching the movie and then learning her songs. My favorite song is from the movie, “What Dreams Are Made Of.” It’s just us getting to live back in the past and kind of understanding it a little bit more. As a kid, our dreams are not what they realistically are today. I ended up becoming a nurse. As a kid, I didn’t sit on the couch like “Oh, I’m going to be a nurse,” but that’s what my dream ended up being.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Stephanie Rodriguez, 32, High Desert
Tell us about your outfit.
If you ask my fiancé, I was hunting for outfits and last-minute I was like, “I’m just gonna order something on Amazon.” When I saw this, I was like, “That’s it.” Total nostalgia with “13 Going on 30.” We went shoe shopping at the South Coast Plaza over the weekend. The metallic is pulling it all together and the butterfly clips.
How long have you been a fan?
Probably since I was like 8 or younger, pretty much very much obsessed. All of my holiday gifts were Hilary Duff. I had her K-Mart home products. Any magazines she was in, I got. Any outfits that I could try and replicate, I would. My first Hilary show was either Wango Tango or a Jingle Ball with KIIS-FM, so it was just a festival with a bunch of different artists but I went specifically for her.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
I think a lot of us feel like we grew up with Hilary, so all of her music resonated with us then, and now, now that we’re older, through relationships or divorces or motherhood. It’s pretty cool to see just how we’re all kind of growing up together. The first time I think I found out about her was at the Glendale Galleria. I was recently telling my fiancé that my dad had me on his shoulders because she did a meet and greet and the entire mall was packed.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Kelsie Wagner, 35, of Temecula and Tyler Walsh, 35, of Long Beach
Tell us about your outfit.
Wagner: I’m channeling Lizzie McGuire. My favorite part is the butterfly clips.
Walsh: This is from Company D, which is a discount store for Disneyland. I was like let me get the biggest shirt and make it into a dress, but I’m wearing shorts — it’s still appropriate. I have like six authentic Disney pins here. This is about $200 on my hat. I was like I have to do something that represents. It’s a big hobby, pin trading, that I picked up in 2023. Then I wore my Lisa Franks. I figured I would channel everything from the ’90s and 2000s.
How long have you been a fan?
Wagner: Whenever the “Lizzie McGuire” show came out.
Walsh: I remember going to sleepovers with all of my friends and we would do Lizzie nights. I was on a soccer team and on Saturday nights, we’d go watch the newest episode. It was just so fun because I feel like I had a little clan that loved Lizzie. We went to her concert at the Grove together and it was back when you paid $50 to get in. We were front row and we like smelled her. It was wonderful.
Why does her work still resonate with you today?
Wagner: For me, especially her new album, she talks about marriage, relationships, motherhood, so it’s still relatable in that sense of that stage of life that we’re in.
Walsh: For me, it’s just nostalgia, because I’m not married, I have no kids, like I’m that fun aunt. And I will say, like, because she goes to Disneyland a lot, so I luckily got to meet her too. I asked her for a picture, and she’s like “Yeah, of course, honey.” It’s the most embarrassing photo of me ever though.
Wagner: I told her she should get it printed and wear it to the concert.
Donny Hathaway had already been expounding on the splendors and indignities of American life by the time he got to the Troubadour in West Hollywood in the last week of August 1971.
A classically trained pianist with a declamatory voice shaped by his years in the church, Hathaway closed Side 1 of his 1970 debut with an original called “Tryin’ Times” — “Maybe folks wouldn’t have to suffer,” he sang, “if there was more love for your brother” — and finished the LP with a stately rendition of Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” Months after the album was released, he dropped a joy bomb of a holiday single, “This Christmas,” that unapologetically made space for a Black experience in the yuletide-industrial complex.
Donny Hathaway performs at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago in 1971.
(Val Mazzenga / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Yet Hathaway captured something indelibly American during his week of shows at the Troubadour, which were recorded (along with a later gig at New York’s Bitter End) for the singer’s classic “Live” album that came out in February 1972. On an LP full of spine-tingling performances, the undeniable high point is Hathaway’s take on Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” — a clear-eyed if optimistic portrait of resilience and cultural exchange.
King — who’d made her name in the 1960s as half of a prolific Brill Building songwriting duo with her husband, Gerry Goffin — wrote “You’ve Got a Friend” after leaving Goffin and moving to Los Angeles with her two young daughters. Here she remade herself as a low-key singer-songwriter dispensing wise yet unflashy tunes about love, home and family — part of a gentle resetting of pop’s mood after the turmoil of the previous decade.
Cut like the rest of the album at A&M Studios on La Brea Avenue, “You’ve Got a Friend” helped drive King’s 1971 “Tapestry” LP to sales of more than 10 million copies and to a boatload of trophies (including album, record and song of the year) at the Grammy Awards; the singer’s pal James Taylor, whom she’d performed with for the first time in late 1970 at the Troubadour, topped Billboard’s Hot 100 with his own cover of “Friend” featuring background vocals by Joni Mitchell.
On the advice of Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler, Hathaway also recorded “Friend” as a studio duet with Roberta Flack, a fellow Howard University alum; their take sat in the Top 20 of Billboard’s R&B chart as Hathaway began his run at the Troubadour — popular enough that the audience on “Live” erupts at the sound of Hathaway’s opening organ lick.
Carole King at A&M Studios in Los Angeles in 1970.
(Jim McCrary / Redferns via Getty Images)
Indeed, the crowd is really the thing in this live version of “You’ve Got a Friend.” Hathaway and his band — including guitarist Phil Upchurch, bassist Willie Weeks and 16-year-old Fred White (soon to be of Earth, Wind & Fire) on drums — are cooking, to be clear; the groove is funky and viscous, and Hathaway’s vocal is gorgeous, not least in his nimble ad-libs.
But it’s his interplay with the few hundred folks in the room that elevates the recording to a deeply moving piece of art.
For King (and Taylor), the song’s promise of unflagging support is an intimate one-to-one matter; their renditions use homey acoustic arrangements to create a picture of two people exchanging confidences. In Hathaway’s hands, “Friend” is about community: Before he even asks them to, the audience takes over for him on lead vocals in the song’s chorus, a congregation in all but name.
Given the proximity to the civil rights movement, it’s impossible to hear Hathaway’s “You’ve Got a Friend” as disconnected from the struggles of Black people. At the Troubadour (as in his and Flack’s duet), he nixes the song’s second verse to arrive more quickly at the bridge, in which he describes a cold world filled with those who’d “hurt you and try to desert you” — even “take your soul if you let them.”
As Emily J. Lordi notes in her 2016 book about “Donny Hathaway Live,” the crowd lays back during the bridge before rejoining Hathaway for the song’s second chorus; the decision, somehow spontaneous and collective at once, is an expert bit of record-making on the part of an audience that, according to legend, hadn’t been told the concert was being taped.
“From this perspective,” Lordi writes of Hathaway’s fans — some number of whom had surely availed themselves of the Troubadour’s bar, as she points out — “they are not stealing the show so much as they are holding him up, ensuring he won’t sing the duet alone.” Together, performer and audience are turning back (not that they necessarily had a choice) to the ugly truths that singer-songwriter music sometimes sought to move past.
In this way, Hathaway’s “Friend” becomes a reinvention of a reinvention — an act of moral imagination about as American as it gets.
This wasn’t the only instance of a Black soul singer interpreting a tune King had written as a single mom newly arrived in L.A.: In May 1972, the Isley Brothers released a sultry cover of “It’s Too Late”; a month after that, Aretha Franklin’s live “Amazing Grace” album mashed up “You’ve Got a Friend” with “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” completing the gospel-ification that Hathaway had begun in a bastion of white rock culture temporarily remade as an African American church.
Yet in Hathaway’s “Friend” you can hear the whole story American music tells about identity and belonging (and about commercial ambition).
“This might be a record here,” Hathaway tells the crowd near the end of the song, and so it was — a document of adaptation, a testament to borrowing, a bulwark against pretty fictions.
LeRoy Irvin, a cornerback and special teams player who made two Pro Bowls with the Rams in the 1980s, has died, the team said Thursday. He was 68.
Irvin holds the Rams record for most non-offensive touchdowns (11 — five interception returns, four punt returns, one fumble recovery return and one blocked field goal return). He also is tied with Janoris Jenkins and Ed Meador for most pick-sixes in team history.
“We mourn the loss of Rams Legend LeRoy Irvin,” the team wrote on social media. “We extend our condolences to his family and friends during this difficult time.”
No further details were provided. Freelance sports journalist Eric Geller reported that Irvin died Wednesday after a long battle with throat cancer.
Born Sept. 15, 1957 in Fort Dix, N.J., Irvin played running back at Glenn Hills High School in Augusta, Ga. He told Sports Collectors Daily in 2023 that he patterned his running style after O.J. Simpson’s.
“That parlayed into my pro career,” Irvin said. “When I moved to defensive back in college, I always prided myself on being a great runner, which led to me being a great punt returner.”
As a senior at Kansas in 1979, Irvin led the Big Eight Conference with 27 punt returns for 321 yards and two touchdowns. He also intercepted five passes that season. In four years with the Jayhawks, Irvin had 42 punt returns for 454 yards and two touchdowns to go with 10 interceptions.
Selected by the Rams in the third round of the 1980 draft, Irvin played in L.A. for 10 seasons before spending his final season with the Detroit Lions in 1990.
In an NFL record that still stands, Irvin recorded 207 punt return yards during a 37-35 win over the Atlanta Falcons on Oct. 11, 1981. Two of his six punt returns that day went for touchdowns, of 75 and 84 yards.
Irvin finished his career with 35 interceptions for 676 yards, and 147 punt returns for 1,457 yards. After retirement, he worked as a coach, broadcaster and businessman.
“Devastated to hear about the passing of my brother, teammate, and Rams legend Leroy Irvin,” his former Rams teammate and business partner Eric Dickerson wrote on Instagram.
“Leroy wasn’t just a lockdown corner and a fierce competitor on the field; he was a true friend and a great man who always brought incredible energy. Rest in peace, my brother. Sending my thoughts and prayers to the Irvin family and all of Rams Nation.”
“This past weekend, after undergoing CT and PET scans, I learned that my ovarian cancer has returned,” Evert, 71, wrote. “I have already undergone surgery as the first step in my treatment and recovery, and will begin chemotherapy in the coming weeks.
“Because of this, I will not be attending Wimbledon this year, and I will step back from my professional commitments over the next few months to focus on my health.”
Evert was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer in December 2021. Two years later, she revealed her cancer had returned.
“Ovarian cancer is relentless, but I will stay optimistic and determined in continuing to fight this battle,” Evert wrote. “I am deeply grateful to my medical team, my family, friends and everyone who has reached out with kindness and encouragement. I look forward to seeing everyone again soon.”
Evert was one of the most dominant women’s tennis players of the 1970s and 1980s, winning a record seven French Open titles to go with six at the U.S. Open, three at Wimbledon and two at the Australian Open. She won at least one Grand Slam for 13 consecutive years (1974-1986) and retired in 1989 with a career record of 1,309-146.
Her on-court rivalry with Czech American tennis great Martina Navratilova during that period is legendary, with Navratilova beating Evert in six of their 10 Grand Slam finals against one another and 43 of their 80 overall matches as opponents. They also won the French Open in 1975 and Wimbledon in 1976 as doubles partners.
A new Netflix documentary, “Chris & Martina: The Final Set,” covers their history together, which also includes a decades-long friendship and support for each other through numerous battles with cancer (Navratilova was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in 2010 and stage 1 throat cancer and breast cancer in January 2023; she announced she was cancer-free in June of that year).
Navratilova was one of the first people to comment on Evert’s Instagram post.
“My friend Chrissie is a champion of champions and as such she will slay this monster again,” Navratilova wrote. “We are all pulling for you, and know you will come out on the other side cancer free again- lots of love, m.”
Other former on-court rivals and fellow International Tennis Hall of Fame members also offered their heartfelt support in the comment section of Evert’s post.
“You beat me 18 straight times, therefore you can beat cancer 19 straight if you have to,” wrote Pam Shriver, who lost 19 of her 22 career matches against Evert. “Much love and respect to one of the greatest competitors ever, Pammie”
Billie Jean King, who lost 19 of her 26 matches against Evert, wrote: “You are a champion and a fighter, and you will beat this. Sending love and prayers from both of us for a strong recovery.”
U.S. alpine skiing great Bode Miller is facing two misdemeanor drug charges following his arrest in Idaho earlier this month.
The actual drug involved and who possessed it isn’t clear, with Miller and the arresting officer providing different accounts of those details from the June 6 arrest in Fremont County.
The six-time Olympic medalist has implied he was arrested because, unbeknownst to him, his friend was carrying cannabis and a pipe while riding in a car Miller was driving. While legal in several states for recreation or medical use, cannabis remains illegal in Idaho.
“I was pulled over for accelerating while passing another vehicle on a highway in Idaho,” Miller, 48, said in a statement posted Tuesday on Instagram. “My friend, who was traveling with me, had a small amount of cannabis and a cannabis pipe in his possession which I was unaware of. We fully cooperated with the officer.”
Fremont County Sheriff’s Deputy Jacob Hurt wrote in a probable cause statement that he found Miller with a white dispensary bag containing 4.1 grams of psilocybin mushrooms (a.k.a. magic mushrooms or shrooms).
While illegal under federal law, psilocybin has been decriminalized in Colorado and Oregon for treatments, with some health advocates saying it can help ease anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
On June 12, Miller pleaded not guilty to possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of one year in jail. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for July 29.
“I am hopeful the misdemeanor charges will be dropped once the facts are reviewed,” Miller said in his Instagram statement.
A five-time Olympic participant, Miller has won more medals than any other U.S. skier, including gold in the super combined at the 2010 Vancouver Games. He was the overall World Cup champion in 2005 and 2008 and won six World Cup discipline titles (three in combined, two in super-G, one in giant slalom).
Head coach Brendon McCullum said he remains “good friends” with England captain Ben Stokes and the pair have “no idea” why rumours of a rift have emerged.
The pair reunited on Tuesday for England’s crucial deciding Test against New Zealand after Stokes missed the second following an incident in a London nightclub.
Both McCullum and Stokes had previously denied their relationship was strained during the 4-1 Ashes defeat in Australia, and McCullum has faced questions about their partnership during Stokes’ absence.
At Trent Bridge, two days before the third Test against New Zealand, McCullum revealed the pair spoke face-to-face on Tuesday morning.
“I said: ‘Do you know where this has come from, the conversations around our relationship over the last six months?'” explained McCullum.
“He said: ‘No, I have no idea.’ I said to him: ‘As far I’m concerned, I consider you a good friend.'”
Stokes and pace bowler Gus Atkinson were made unavailable for England’s heavy defeat in the second Test during an investigation into a breach of the team’s midnight curfew following victory in the first Test at Lord’s.
They were present when a member of England security staff was struck by a Saracens rugby player.
Both have been cleared to rejoin the England team for the third Test, with Stokes returning as captain.
After England made five changes to their team for the second Test, Stokes and Atkinson are two of four changes for the third, as the home side move back towards the XI that won the first Test.
Spinner Shoaib Bashir and wicketkeeper Jamie Smith, who has been on paternity leave, also come back in. Ollie Robinson was man of the match at Lord’s but missed The Oval encounter with a knee problem. Robinson is fit, yet misses out as Jofra Archer keeps his place.
James Rew, Jordan Cox, Matthew Fisher and Sonny Baker are the four players omitted.
Two days before the second Test at The Oval, McCullum gave a sombre media conference, when he repeatedly spoke of his “worry” and “concern” for Stokes.
However, Durham’s county head coach Ryan Campbell later said Stokes was in “good spirits” and the county’s chief executive Tim Bostock said he was “bemused” by McCullum’s comments.
England XI for third Test v New Zealand: Ben Duckett, Emilio Gay, Jacob Bethell, Joe Root, Harry Brook, Jamie Smith, Ben Stokes (captain), Gus Atkinson, Jofra Archer, Josh Tongue, Shoaib Bashir.
When the gates opened at St. John’s Episcopal Church in San Bernardino on Good Friday, the music coming from inside wasn’t that of angel-faced choristers or pipe organs; it was the collective scream of electric guitars.
As the sky darkened over the white stucco church framed in palm trees and the dry peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains, fringed teenagers made their way inside, shaking their limbs and chattering in excitement. Fluorescent lights shone overhead in a room that, by day, hosted Bible studies and food pantries — that night, it would be the site of Spinkick Dance Hall, a regular underground music series where noses are bound to bleed and limbs to flail along to ear-splitting riffs.
It’s just one of many shows taking place from Pomona to Palm Desert, heralding a Latino-led youth revival where the freewheeling movement of mosh pits meets the raw power of punk rock: Inland Empire hardcore.
Teenagers congregate in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in San Bernardino before the start of the night’s hardcore shows on April 3, 2026.
(Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)
As the fast-paced and anti-establishment genre known as punk went mainstream in the ’80s, a harder and more unhinged variant emerged in the States; bands like Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Black Flag pushed the limits of vocalization and instrumentation into dissonant new sounds that would make up the subgenre known as hardcore punk.
“As a teenager pre-social media, the music scene was the release for teen angst,” said music photojournalist Zach Cordner. “It was a convergence of nationwide bands that would come to play at [the now shuttered Riverside venue] Showcase Theater, and through word of mouth people got inspired to make cassettes and zines.”
Cordner and his friend Ken Crawford grew up in Riverside in the ’80s and ’90s, photographing the initial wave of hardcore punk taking shape in the Inland Empire. They turned these photographs into a sprawling exhibition held at the Riverside Art Museum earlier this year, “60 Miles East.”
“The scene looks a lot different today than it did in the ’90s,” Crawford said. “It’s browner, it’s queer, and that’s a good thing, to see how it’s become way more diverse.”
Inside the church, the frontman of all-Latino hardcore band Barrio Slam emitted rough growls as the crowd broke into a bustling mosh pit. Teenagers did pinwheel kicks, wrapped Mexican flags over their shoulders and filled the air with chants of “F— ICE.”
Lead vocalist Victor Campos’ family moved from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Pomona, where he says he discovered hardcore through friends. Then, at age 14, Campos attended his first rock show.
“That was the first time that I saw hardcore and metal and the heavier side of music for what it was, and the violence and culture of the shows just sucked me in and I’ve been in it ever since,” Campos said. “It felt like freedom.”
Angela, 19, was in the mosh pit during Load Tha Nine’s performance when she was accidentally struck in the nose by another concertgoer on April 3, 2026, in St. John’s Episcopal Church in San Bernardino. Hardcore shows are characterized by intense music and rough dancing where bloody accidents are not an uncommon sight.
(Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)
Jose Ruelas and his Barrio Slam bandmates headbang as they perform on April 3, 2026, in St. John’s Episcopal Church in San Bernardino.
(Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)
Campos credits local Latino-led bands like Xibalba and Harsh Reality as inspirations to dive into making music and embrace his identity in the genre.
“In the I.E., it’s really the norm. We’re singing in Spanish, we’re proud. But when we tour, we see it’s not like that everywhere,” Campos said. “Some people still consider punk ‘not for us.’ My own family members will say, ‘You’re listening to white people music.’”
The show at St. John’s is just the tip of the Inland Empire’s DIY venue iceberg. Living rooms, restaurant dining rooms, tattoo shops and record stores have transformed into hardcore venues across the region as established locales closed down.
San Bernardino four-piece “beatdown” group Big Ass Truck is one band that found success beyond the I.E. scene. They signed to Nuclear Blast Records, and at the time of our interview, they had just returned from a tour of Europe.
“With the I.E. especially, we lose a venue like every week. If we have a venue, it’s not staying around for long. I’ve personally seen like three or four venues [in the last few years] just call it,” said Big Ass Truck vocalist Abel Abarca. “So we do get scrappy, and I think that’s what sets the I.E. apart from places like L.A. and O.C.”
San Bernardino hardcore band Big Ass Truck performs a surprise concert at Creator Fest on May 2, 2026, at Creator Tattoo in Pomona.
(Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)
Izzy Leyva, 17, describes being met with an immediate “sense of welcoming” at her first DIY hardcore show.
“It’s nice finding people my age to talk about life with. You can start conversations so easily,” Leyva said. “Especially after moshing with someone in the crowd. If you’re struggling to make friends in school, you’ll be able to find someone here.”
She enters the mosh pit fearlessly, dodging flailing arms to two-step — a synchronized dance move that requires punching and running in place — unleashing her energy in the punk sanctum.
“I never feel like an outsider here,” Leyva added.
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1.Mauricio Rivera performs with his band Barrio Slam on April 3, 2026, in St. John’s Episcopal Church in San Bernardino. (Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)2.Toni Feliz shows her “IE” tattoo, a nod to her hometown, at Creator Fest on May 2, 2026, at Creator Tattoo in Pomona. (Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)3.Izzy Levya, 17, two-steps during Marked for Death’s performance on April 3, 2026, in St. John’s Episcopal Church in San Bernardino. (Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)4.Fans dance and “two-step” during Barrio Slam’s performance on April 3, 2026, in St. John’s Episcopal Church in San Bernardino.(Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)5.Andres Rodriguez, 18, moshes during Marked for Death’s performance on April 3, 2026, in St. John’s Episcopal Church in San Bernardino. (Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)
As 25-year-old Guatemalan American vocalist Jorge Cruz entered the show, he embraced his friends and bandmates. Cruz, who fronts the voracious hardcore band KnuckleSandwich, says he sees TikTok as a major platform for hardcore fans to find one another.
“I saw shows online and was hooked … I used to be so nervous to be in the mosh pit, I’d throw up outside. But when I got in there for the first time, I feel like it changed me into someone who was more comfortable in myself,” Cruz said. “It was like a baptism.”
His music, ranging from songs like “Melting ICE” and corrido-hardcore fusion “El Corrido del Maton,” is inspired by his immigrant household upbringing and interest in Chicano studies.
“Especially with this growing anti-intellectualism going on, and conservatives in our government, writing about Chicano identity and the issues in America feels important,” Cruz said. “There’s no one out there to speak up for us than us.”
A day after attending the show, Garrett Boyer and Kenny Sylvia, longtime friends with nearly matching tattoo sleeves and baseball caps, stood talking in Creator Tattoo Parlor in Pomona.
The pair helps to run Division One, a local booking company that books anywhere from Corona storefront DBZ Books N’ Records to their very own tattoo parlor.
A few weeks prior, Boyer got a call from his sister: His niece was diagnosed with an aggressive childhood cancer called neuroblastoma that had spread through her body, causing his sister to tackle insurance and medical costs. Boyer said he reached out to the hardcore community for help and was “overwhelmed” by the response.
“The community really, really, really came together. A lot of people reached out and really quickly we threw this benefit show that raised thousands of dollars,” Boyer said. “That’s the core of what hardcore music should be and is. It’s community.”
A few months before that, they had united with local bands to throw a benefit show, raising money for immigrant coalition groups after increased ICE raids.
“We thought, ‘How could we not help?’ I’m second generation from El Paso. So many of my neighbors and even my partner’s family were directly affected,” Boyer said. “So many shows are not just about music but they can [impact] people’s lives.”
Brett Rock, bassist of San Bernardino hardcore band Big Ass Truck, performs during Creator Fest on May 2, 2026, at Creator Tattoo in Pomona.
(Katerina Portela / Los Angeles Times)
In Creator’s graffitied back lot area on May 2, bands Load Tha Nine, ’92 and Auditory Anguish opened up a DIY festival called Creator Fest, where 22-year-old Cynthia Garcia came out to “let off steam.”
Garcia, who fronts local band Exutoire, said discovering the local alternative scene “changed everything.”
“In high school, it was very much like nothing was happening. We’re all bored. We’re all depressed. We’re writing, and finally, we get to put the writing to use,” Garcia said. “We meet people that are like-minded and trying to get out of that boredom, and then [the music scene] just exploded.”
At Garcia’s shows, she says she constantly meets concertgoers from L.A., or even from San Diego, who drive hours into the I.E. to be part of its blossoming scene.
At Creator Fest, Abarca commanded the stage, building up the energy of the crowd until hair whipped in frenzies. Abarca says he sees I.E. hardcore continuing to evolve, fusing new genres and making the Inland Empire a place to watch as alternative music booms in the “scrappy” venues of San Bernardino, Corona, Pomona and Riverside.
“Latinos in the Inland Empire have always been hardcore,” Abarca said. “People just know it now because we make them hear us.”
Unlike the movies, where directors get the glory, TV directors sit lower in the hierarchy, below creators, producers and actors. In most series, which might employ several over a season, they are interchangeable — which isn’t to say they aren’t valuable, transforming words on a page into a four-dimensional living thing. But a director hired to helm a pilot, as James Burrows, who died Friday at 85, was again and again — almost as a lucky charm — helps set the tone for the series. Jake Kasdan’s input was crucial to the feel (and philosophy) of “Freaks and Geeks,” as Hiro Murai’s was to “Atlanta” (and most recently “Widow’s Bay”). In some cases a director is a co-creator in all but title and union affiliation. A show might subsequently pass to later hands, but they’ll be honoring its established look and feel.
But Burrows was more than a little well known. If you sat through the opening credits of “Taxi,” whose pilot he directed along with 74 other episodes — and why wouldn’t you, with its pleasing Bob James theme and Checker Cab crossing the Queensboro Bridge — you would have seen his name for weeks on end. You might have noticed it on “Cheers,” which he co-created and for which he directed 236 episodes, or on “Will & Grace” (246 episodes), or “Frasier,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Caroline in the City,” “Two and a Half Men,” “2 Broke Girls,”“The Neighborhood” or, just last year, “Mid-Century Modern” — all series whose pilots he directed. You might have caught it on episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Phyllis,” “Rhoda” or “Laverne & Shirley,” until you began to think that maybe there was nobody else directing network multi-camera situation comedies, the most human of television formats and a specialty from which he rarely strayed.
And you might have seen him as himself this year in the third season of Lisa Kudrow’s “The Comeback,” as the man she enlists to save a television pilot from hacky AI jokes. “Surprising only comes from a group of writers huddled in a corner, beating themselves up to beat out a better joke,” he says.
“As director, I am there to help create the ensemble, to do everything I can to foster a community among the company, and to train a new set of actors to behave as a group and respect one another,” he wrote in his 2022 memoir, “Directed by James Burrows.” He famously took the cast of “Friends” to Las Vegas before the show premiered in order to foster bonds in a soon-to-be-impossible state of anonymity. “I guess I have a gift for creating families,” he told the New York Times in 2023.
But if “Friends” refers to the characters and the people who play them, it includes the audience too. Burrows’ talent was to midwife a real relationship between the viewer and the viewed, “You want to go where everybody knows your name,” runs the “Cheers” theme, and where you know everyone’s name. The families he excelled at creating were yours as well, and one watched knowing that these things happened in real time in real space, and that you could be in the room, if you made the effort. Tickets were available.
The son of Abe Burrows, who wrote or co-wrote the books for “Guys and Dolls,” “Can-Can” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and co-created the radio comedy “Duffy’s Tavern” — set, like “Cheers,” in a bar, though the younger Burrows denied any influence — he’d been directing dinner theater when he had the idea to write to Mary Tyler Moore, whom he’d met on the set of a never-opened “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” musical. His stage experience (and his Yale School of Drama degree, presumably) proved eminently transferable to the proscenium reality of multi-camera situation comedy.
What Burrows shows share — the ones we remember, at least, out of many we don’t — is that they’re fundamentally joyful. They lack cynicism. They’re expressive of their times without being showily edgy. They walk a line between freshness and familiarity, which makes one want to return week after week. They may push an envelope — “Friends” was something new, after all — but subtly. We can assume, given his reputation and the fact that he could have retired on “Cheers” alone, that he liked what he did and did what he liked, and regard his choice of projects as a form of personal expression in itself, the basis of a body of work that has and will live on.
Comedy director James Burrows, the 11-time Emmy-winning director who co-created “Cheers” and helped turn such long-running sitcoms as “Taxi,” “Friends,” “Will & Grace” and “The Big Bang Theory” into fan favorites, has died, his family confirmed to People. He was 85.
“We celebrate the extraordinary life and enduring legacy of James ‘Jimmy’ Burrows, who passed away peacefully today surrounded by his loving family,” his family said in a statement to People. “For more than five decades, Burrows was one of the most influential and beloved directors in television history. As a legendary director, mentor, and creative force, he helped shape generations of comedy and brought immeasurable joy to audiences around the world.”
A master of the multi-camera sitcom, Burrows started his career shooting episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1974 and “The Bob Newhart Show” in 1975. He soon joined the quality-oriented production company, MTM, which counted James L. Brooks, Steven Bochco and Gary David Goldberg among its alumni.
“They were smart enough to know that it’s better to have a director who can talk to actors rather than a director who can move cameras. You can’t really learn how to make something funny, but you can learn to move the cameras,” Burrows said in a 1995 interview with The Times.
Burrows was born in Los Angeles and later moved to New York with his family where he attended the High School of Music & Art. He graduated from Oberlin College and completed a graduate program at the Yale School of Drama. He worked years as a stage manager with his father, a playwright and director, assisting on shows such as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” starring Moore and Richard Chamberlain.
He solidified his name in television with “Cheers,” co-creating the lively Boston travern “where everybody knows your name” with Glen and Les Charles. Over its 11 seasons on the air, Burrows directed 237 of its 275 episodes, emerging as a behind-the-scenes comedy legend.
“You bring ‘em in, you sit ‘em down and they talk. That’s all ‘Cheers’ was,” Burrows told The Times. “The word is more important than the goofiness. It was all about the words — which is how I was trained, how my father was trained, how anybody who reads books is trained. It’s the word.”
His father, Abe Burrows, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter and director who performed in radio comedies and co-wrote the books for the Broadway musicals “Guys and Dolls” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” The younger Burrows said that growing up on radio comedies helped him hone his ear for humor.
“I know what’s funny, and I probably know the best way to deliver the joke. Whether it’s walking out of a room, facing that way, facing this way,” Burrows said in a 2010 interview with The Times. “I just have a sense of that.”
Another skill he learned from his dad? was working on his feet.
“He’d run the scenes over and over. He created this wonderful camaraderie, which I always try to do. I love to do ensemble shows because that’s where you get the camaraderie.”
Burrows, often considered a fatherly manager, tried to bridge the gap between actors and writers and notably took the cast of “Friends” on a trip to Las Vegas before directing 15 episodes of the blockbuster comedy. He also threw a party for the “Mike & Molly” cast to build rapport because he believed when everyone liked each other, it showed onscreen.
Actors would know when a joke landed when they would hear Burrows giggle as the scene unfolded.
“I’m the guy that wants you to walk the comic plank for me,” he said. “Take it as far out as you want to take it and I’ll bring it back. Sometimes I’ll take it further. But trust me.”
With his slate of hits — he’s credited for directing several shows in NBC’s primetime “Must See TV” lineup of the 1990s — Burrows amassed sizable wealth and, from an early age, was in constant demand by those seeking his magic touch for their show. However, he also saw his fair share of flops: Henry Winkler’s “Monty, “Cafe Americain” with Valerie Bertinelli and a slew of promising pilots that never got off the ground. He also felt that ABC’s “The Associates” and “The Class” on CBS were canceled too soon.
From 1998 to 2006, Burrows helmed every episode of “Will & Grace,” the Emmy-nominated sitcom about a woman and her gay best friend that aired on NBC for eight seasons during its original run. To Burrows, it was the funniest show he ever worked on. He was also behind the camera for the comedy’s 2017 revival, which brought the envelope-pushing antics of Will, Grace, Jack and Karen back for three more seasons.
“It was a fairytale literally and figuratively,” he said in a 2016 Hypable interview. “It was not of the real world in a strange kind of way. These were exaggerated characters. Although they were grounded with Will and Grace, there was this exaggeration that made the stuff you could do and get away with on that show so extraordinary.”
He won his 11th Emmy Award serving as an executive producer on 2019’s all-star re-staging of “Live in front of a Studio Audience: ‘All in the Family’ and ‘Good Times.’” A year earlier, he was nominated for directing the “‘All in the Family’ and ‘The Jeffersons’” TV special.
James Burrows behind the scenes.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
Throughout his career Burrows had a penchant for directing pilots because it meant “you’re better than an episodic director” and could create something new in the writer-driven medium of television. He was also drawn to “more uptown, the more urbane, the more sophisticated” comedies. He tried doing cinema once — 1981’s “Partners” with Ryan O’Neal and John Hurt — and said the result confirmed his belief that he was built for television.
“I’m not a cinematic guy. I’m a theater guy. For what I do, I need a live audience,” he said in a 2016 interview with the Television Academy.
Among his favorite TV moments were the pilots for “Frasier” and “Third Rock From the Sun,” the long-awaited kiss between Sam (Ted Danson) and Diane (Shelley Long) and Woody’s (Woody Harrelson) wedding on “Cheers,” Rev. Jim (Christopher Lloyd) taking his driving test in “Taxi,” Ross (David Schwimmer) being attacked by a cat in “Friends” and Will, Grace, Jack and Karen getting in the shower together on “Will & Grace.”
Late into his career, Burrows continued to work in the multi-camera sitcom format, which is shot in a studio, usually before a live audience. In 2013, he was honored by the Television Academy, and, in 2016, he celebrated directing his 1,000th episode of television programming, crossing the milestone with an episode of “Crowded.” NBC marked the milestone with “Must See TV: An All-Star Tribute” special. According to critics, the show — billed by several outlets as the elusive “Friends” reunion and came off as a living eulogy to Burrows — fell short and did not do the legendary director justice.
In all, Burrows was nominated for 45 Emmy Awards and 17 Directors Guild of America Awards.
Walter Parazaider, the saxophonist and co-founder of the rock group Chicago, has died. He was 81.
Parazaider died June 17 of complications from Alzheimers disease. In a statement posted to social media on Wednesday, the band said that “Chicago is heartbroken at the sad news of Walter Parazaider’s passing this morning. We extend our deepest condolences to his family, friends and countless Chicago fans who are all grieving his loss today.”
His daughter, Felicia Helen Parazaider, also posted on Facebook that “I love you poppy, my Pal…You coloured our world.”
Born in Maywood, Ill., Parazaider began his music career as a clarinetist, before founding Chicago with childhood friends in the group’s namesake city. The band’s pop hits like “25 or 6 to 4” and “Saturday in the Park” were staples of the ‘70s and remain beloved fixtures of classic rock. His diverse woodwind skills helped give the band its regal sound, adding saxophone riffs to hits like “Just You ‘n’ Me” and a poignant flute solo on “Colour My World.”
While Chicago’s lineup changed often, Parazaider remained with the group until retiring in 2018. In April of 2021, Parazaider wrote in a statement on Chicago’s website that “I was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease. Needless to say, my wife, daughters and myself were shocked and devastated. It has taken awhile to process this news and the fact is, we still are. The good news is we have a wonderful medical facility here and I have a very good doctor. I am working hard and not going to give up.”
Chicago gave credit to Parazaider for conceiving of the band’s distinct instrumentation, and the work ethic that made them stars. “A Rock & Roll band with horns was Walt’s idea,” Chicago’s statement continued. “He put the band together and they rehearsed in the basement of his mother’s home. He is also the one who did the hard work to book shows for the young, unknown band, performing top 40 covers at local bars in and around Chicago.
“We are forever grateful for his contribution,” they continued. “Perhaps his greatest gift was bringing people together. This amazing music may have never been heard had it not been for Walt’s vision.”
Parazaider is survived by wife JacLynn and daughters Laura and Felicia.
Few people do simmering panic as nimbly as Sarah Goldberg.
In her role as Dr. JoAnne Felder, a performance psychologist tending to the mercurial psyches of the billionaire man-children of Silicon Valley on the new AMC satire “The Audacity,” Goldberg careens from serene to slapstick as she tries to keep a lid on her increasingly unruly life.
It is the latest in a string of enviably layered characters for the Vancouver native, including her Emmy-nominated breakout turn as aspiring actor Sally Reed on the HBO contract killer dramedy “Barry” and the coolly calculating portfolio manager Petra Koenig on the network’s drama “Industry.”
“I’m definitely learning some large tech and finance words that I didn’t know,” she says with a laugh about her recent wealth-adjacent roles on a Zoom from London, where she makes her home. “I’m not sure if I’ll retain them.”
Given the accolades, it seems likely Goldberg only needs to memorize her lines and the rest will follow.
While she has given a distinctive performance in each of her roles, one of several threads tying the characters together is a moment when fear, rage, excitement, ambition or all of the above collide but must be contained. While that discipline sometimes devolves into delicious displays of apoplexy — witness Goldberg’s incredible, expletive-littered elevator meltdown in “Barry” — the 40-year-old actor is more often the face of diplomacy while telegraphing cortisol levels in the red beneath her placid exterior.
“As a blond Canadian, I really ran the risk of being the girl next door,” she says of her attempt to dodge typecasting onscreen after cutting her teeth onstage in London and New York in the mid-2010s. “I didn’t want to be the girl next door … maybe the girl next door with bodies in the basement.”
While the only bodies to be found in JoAnne’s basement on “The Audacity” are her eavesdropping son and his friends, the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art (LAMDA) graduate has accomplished the mission of subverting what might have been a perky ingenue image with the role. (One she will continue, since the series has already gotten a Season 2 order.)
When the ethically challenged therapist starts dabbling in insider trading thanks to info gleaned from her patients — including bold tech names Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen) and Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis) — the slippery slope awaits.
Goldberg with “The Audacity” co-star Billy Magnussen.
(Ed Araquel / AMC)
“I think that she started her career with a desire to help people and somewhere along the line she’s become incredibly jaded and she’s exhausted by being the most intelligent person in the room and yet having no material wealth to show for it,” says Goldberg of her character, whose struggles extend to motherhood of son Orson (Everett Blunck) and marriage to child psychologist Gary (Paul Adelstein).
It does not help that JoAnne is surrounded by people who have no trouble sliding headfirst down the slope as if it were an Aspen trail.
“She’s working with people who have so many houses that if one burns down, it doesn’t matter, and yet she’s struggling to keep the roof over her own head. So somewhere along the line she starts making these little contracts with herself thinking, ‘In this sea of moral bankruptcy, is my tiny little transgression really so bad? Or is it even justified?’ But these little small pacts start to snowball. You can see somebody torn between their better judgment, their core instinct, their humanity, and someone who is so frustrated that they’re stepping toward a kind of nihilism.”
That sense of inner conflict appeals to Goldberg, who says she knew instantly that she had to play JoAnne when she read the script by showrunner Jonathan Glatzer. “It’s rare for me to go out and be like, ‘I have to play this role!’” she says, adding with a laugh, “I can be quite passive. I can be quite Canadian in the American market. I felt like he’d found this incredible line of satire with pathos, which is my favorite kind of style.
“I’m always interested in playing characters on the precipice of losing their moral compass and which way they decide to go,” she continues. “And if JoAnne has anything in common with Sally from ‘Barry,’ because they’re such different characters, it’s that. … I love that Jonathan’s given JoAnne very mundane relatable problems in a world where the scale is so off and there’s a lot that the average person can’t relate to in that bubble.”
Goldberg has also been busy creating her own bubble, writing, producing and starring in the Canadian-Irish series “Sisters” — which just concluded its second season on AMC — with Irish actor Susan Stanley, her best friend since their LAMDA days. The odd couple sibling comedy finds Goldberg playing Sare, a buttoned-down Canadian who goes to Ireland to find her long-lost biological father (Donal Logue) and discovers shambolic half-sister Suze (Stanley).
“I was pretty shocked at how hard it is to get something made,” she says of the series’ six-year journey to screen. “And then to be in a leadership position where you’re inviting everyone to dinner and you’ve got to make sure there are three courses and being responsible for everybody’s well-being — it was wildly challenging, but absolutely thrilling.”
While she prepares to return to JoAnne’s world in Palo Alto — her hometown of Vancouver serving as a double — Goldberg feels very fortunate about where she’s landed.
“I’ve been so lucky at this stage in my career to work on scripts that I feel are really saying something and characters that I feel are morally complex and also to be in the business at a time where female characters are more complicated.”
David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its sun-drenched life and landscapes in colorful, wildly popular paintings, has died.
He was 88.
Calling himself “an English Los Angeleno,” Hockney immortalized the city’s sparkling swimming pools, palm trees and beautiful young men, then went on to experiment with intricate photo collages, portrait suites, painted and filmed images of Yorkshire landscapes, iPad drawings and more.
Since his Pop Art paintings in the early ‘60s at London’s Royal College of Art, Hockney was rarely out of the limelight and, more important, rarely out of fresh ideas for how to draw, paint, film, print, photograph or otherwise express his creativity. The David Hockney Foundation owns more than 8,000 of his works, including about 200 sketchbooks, more than 230 self-portraits, opera designs and portraits of family and friends.
Hockney loved Hollywood — the people and the place — and liked to say he was brought up in England and Hollywood because of the time he spent at the movies. His peroxide blonde hair reportedly was inspired when he was a student and saw Clairol TV ads claiming “blondes have more fun.” But it was his interest in everything from Elvis Presley to the Hubble Space Telescope and his sense of humor that set him apart. Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes once called him “the Cole Porter of modern art.”
He was open about being gay, even when homosexuality was outlawed in Britain. His early love affair with artist Peter Schlesinger, a younger man he met when teaching a summer drawing class at UCLA in 1966, inspired Hockney’s monumental 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” a centerpiece of Jack Hazan’s 1974 film “A Bigger Splash.” The painting’s 2018 auction at Christie’s drew a record $90 million for a living artist.
He was a dedicated reader and student of art, paying homage in his work to Picasso and Cubism as well as to Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh and Cezanne. A lover of opera, he often had it playing loudly in the studio and enjoyed taking visitors on curated car trips through the Hollywood Hills or Malibu while listening to Wagner. He designed sets for major companies in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London and elsewhere over the years, and some of his set models were later shown in museums.
David Hockney’s work “Gregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4)” is part of his solo exhibition “David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed” at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs. (Courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum)
(Courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum)
His solo shows drew enormous crowds to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as early as 1988. In 2017 a major retrospective of his work, keyed to his 80th birthday, was presented at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paris’ Centre Pompidou and London’s Tate Modern. Chronicling Hockney’s arrival as an important artist in the “ravishing” Met retrospective, the New Yorker writer Andrea K. Scott called it “a revelation.” It was, she wrote, “a retort to all the eye-rollers,” including herself, who dismissed his work “as, at best, a guilty pleasure.”
In 2012 he received the coveted Order of Merit, which Queen Elizabeth II presented to him at Buckingham Palace.
David Hockney was born the fourth of five children to a working-class family in Bradford, Yorkshire, on July 9, 1937. He has said he started “making marks on paper” at 8 and received private painting lessons before moving on to Bradford School of Art in 1953. The first painting he sold was a portrait of his father in 1955. He attended the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 until his graduation in 1962 and received the school’s Gold Medal.
After college he did not slack off, noted his biographer Christopher Simon Sykes. In his 2014 book, “Hockney: The Biography,” Sykes pointed out that the artist’s first flat had a chest of drawers near the bed on which he had painted, in large capital letters, the words “get up and work immediately.”
David Hockney in 2017.
(Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul.)
Hockney lived by that command for the rest of his life, turning out canvas after canvas, photo after photo. In the ‘80s came his extraordinary multi-image photographic collages of friends including writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy and such landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Canyon and Pearblossom Highway.
“The Polaroids started oddly enough when I’d just finished a long period of work in the theater, which is of course playing with perspective and illusion,” he once told The Times. “People say, ‘You are a painter, and photography is a sideline.’ But nothing is a sideline for me.”
That included his continuing fascination with technology. The artist’s long career swept in artworks made not only on cameras and canvases, but on such things as fax machines and photocopiers. Hockney liked to experiment, whether it was with state-of-the-art printing devices or centuries old painting techniques. He went several times to a show of portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres at London’s National Gallery in 1999 and was greatly taken with the photographic’ quality of Ingres’ 19th century drawings. Certain that Ingres had used something optical to achieve that quality, Hockney bought himself a camera lucida, a small device that works like a prism. He then applied Ingres’ methods–as Hockney imagined them–to his own portraits of friends and family, and in 2001, he published “Secret Knowledge,” exploring his theories on early artistic uses of optical devices.
His death was confirmed by the Associated Press and New York Times.
Hasley was a veteran TV writer who taught screenwriting classes at UCLA Extension. He was also a friend of Caitlyn Jenner and helped write the former athlete’s motivational book “Finding the Champion Within,” according to his biography.
The L.A. County medical examiner released Hasley’s identity Tuesday but had yet to rule on his cause of death.
More than two dozen personnel with the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a report of a hiker in grave medical condition off Nichols Canyon Road near Hollywood Boulevard shortly before 7 p.m. Saturday.
A helicopter was used to reach the patient and allow paramedics to provide urgent medical care. They were unable to save him, and he was declared dead shortly after, according to the LAFD.
Hasley hailed from Pittsburgh and played university football before venturing to Hollywood to pursue his dreams as a writer. He wrote on 37 episodes of “The Smurfs” in the late 1980s and early ’90s as well as several episodes of “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” according to IMDB. His TV writing credits also included “Swift Justice,” “Ghost Stories,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Young Riders” and “Highway to Heaven.”
He was able to channel his love of sports while working with NBC on the network’s project “Star Salute to the U.S. Olympic Team,” where he met Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner, according to his professional biography.
The pair became friends, and Hasley went on to help write a book about Jenner’s philosophy on overcoming adversity in sports and life. He was commissioned to ghostwrite several other motivational books including “Passion, Profit, & Power” for hypnotist Marshall Sylver and “The Slight Edge” for self-help expert Jeff Olson.
Hasley loved sharing his passion for writing with students at UCLA and described the process of writing as akin to assembling a puzzle, where one tries many different combinations of pieces before finding the perfect fit, according to his teaching biography.
“I personally believe that when you know your characters well enough they will start dictating their actions,” he wrote. “When that happens writing becomes a euphoric experience.”
In addition to teaching and writing, he enjoyed golfing, horseback riding, fighting City Hall over an environmental issue, volunteering in soup kitchens and speaking to youth organizations, according to his bio.
Hasley was formerly married to actor Robin Riker, best known for her roles on “Brothers” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.”
He lived in the Hollywood Hills not far from where he suffered the medical emergency. A neighbor told the New York Post they had seen him earlier Saturday carrying groceries home. “It’s very sad he had to die all alone like that,” the neighbor said.
Times staff writer Sonja Sharp contributed to this report.
You can’t own the beach in California. Our shoreline is public — thanks to the Coastal Act and the Coastal Commission — even when everything around it gets expensive and complicated. You can live next to it, monetize it and build a personality around proximity to it, but the wet sand itself belongs to everyone.
Jackie Snow takes a selfie by the new public stairs at Escondido Beach, also known as Hidden Beach.
(Jackie Snow)
In 2024, my colleague Jaclyn Cosgrove walked 27.4 miles of Washington Boulevard in a single day, from Whittier to the ocean. I read it in awe of the shape of it. One street. One day. A city revealed in a straight line.
And then a thought occurred to me, I could do something like that. What if I walked the entire L.A. shoreline? What would happen if I went to the beach and just kept walking along the crest of its waves? Except the shore does not reward this approach. It closes. It opens. Erosion pushes you onto the road and lets you back when it feels like it.
I set out to walk the 75 miles along the Los Angeles coastline anyway. I started at the mouth of the San Gabriel River and worked north toward the Ventura County line, taking 10 trips from the end of November to the second week of January, mostly waiting on tides and weather to cooperate.
Being a surfer helped. I already knew that wet sand means public access in California, that satellite view tells you things the default map doesn’t, and that tides can make or break an outing. For someone wanting to do a similar journey, the California Coastal Trail website is a valuable resource. You can walk long stretches and return back, but I went point to point, which means figuring out how to get back to your car. I usually Ubered, although public transit exists on some stretches. The slickest option is going with a friend who has a car: leave their car at the end, drive yours to the start, and walk. Their car is waiting at the finish to bring you both back to yours. Beyond that, bring more water than you think you need to especially as most stretches have no fountains, no services and no shade. Pack snacks that will sustain you throughout the journey, wear a hat and put on sunscreen, then reapply it. Even on gray, marine-layer days, you’re exposed for hours with nothing overhead.
If you’re inspired by this mega-trek but want to instead do a micro version, I suggest the 5.7 miles from Malibu Pier to Escondido Beach. You can park at one end and take a picturesque bus back where a tasty lunch at the pier’s Malibu Farm awaits at the finish. One last tip I picked up: be nice. People sometimes will give you water, or offer help, wanting to see you get to your destination too.
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1.A red-tailed hawk perched on a coastal access sign along the boardwalk in Long Beach.2.A bench off the Long Beach boardwalk, near the start of the 75-mile walk.3.Birdhouses located near the Long Beach boardwalk.(Jackie Snow)
Alamitos Beach to Port of Long Beach: 4.9 miles
I start at the mouth of the San Gabriel River at Alamitos Park at about 10 a.m. on a busy Sunday at the end of November, walking with a friend. The first stretch is a flat, easy boardwalk. We stop at the Long Beach Museum of Art, which sits on the bluffs overlooking the water, and grab lunch at Claire’s, the museum’s outdoor cafe. From there, we walk toward the mouth of the Los Angeles River, passing through the marina, where boats sit quietly and a pirate ship is inexplicably for sale. We don’t make it up the man-made pier to the Queen Mary. Instead, we turn around just short of it, one river book-ending the other.
Looking back toward the marina near the mouth of the Los Angeles River, one river bookending the other.
(Jackie Snow)
Cabrillo Beach to Portuguese Bend Beach Club: 8.7 miles
I park at Cabrillo Beach, along the Port of Los Angeles, around 6:30 a.m. People are already playing ping-pong. Someone is dancing alone on the sand.
I start along the Cabrillo Beach Walking Path, which you enter at the south end of the beach where the sand ends and the bluffs start. In what feels like two seconds, I’m up on the cliffs, which quits partway and dumps me onto the residential streets of Coastal San Pedro, a neighborhood that looks quintessentially California. The houses are probably a few million dollars each, but they’re tidy bungalows, not the kind of aggressive beachfront wealth that makes you feel like you’ve wandered somewhere you’re not supposed to be.
I pass through Point Fermin Park, home to a lighthouse perched above the water. Down below, the beaches are rocky and loud. The waves are being sucked forcefully back out between the rocks, a sound that feels more industrial than oceanic. There’s more neighborhood walking on West Paseo Del Mar, interrupted by a Little Free Library stop where I add a few books to my bag. I hit the San Pedro hike trails, and the coastline turns dramatic, and suddenly I can’t step two feet off the path without risking a fall, but it’s breathtaking in its beauty.
Cabrillo Beach at the Port of Los Angeles, where the second walk began.
(Jackie Snow)
I hit another closed section, this one bordering Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes. Not wanting to end up on a Secret Service list that bars me from flying, I find another way around, on a surprising trail that curves between holes that’s part of the Ocean Trails Reserve. I climb down to the beach and start picking my way along the rocks toward the Portuguese Bend Beach Club, moving slowly and trying not to break my neck. You can definitely skip this part.
A security guard named Gilbert Blair waves me over and explains to me what I already know: I’m allowed to walk on the wet sand, but everything else is private. When I tell him what I’m doing, he starts offering advice, pointing out places on my Google map he thinks are closed because of last year’s heavy rains. This area is some of the shiftiest parts of all of California, with landslides going back all through the geographical record. In 2024, areas were moving 9 to 12 inches a week, although it has slowed down to 1 to 2 inches a week. He tells me the unstable land actually created a new beach, which the coast almost never does. People came from all over to see it, he says, gesturing toward a new form of sand that locals have called “unreal.”
Blair is nice, but not nice enough to wave me off the wet sand and through Portuguese Bend’s private roads so I can call an Uber. I have to backtrack, spending more time than I’d like carefully navigating the rocks. I briefly consider stopping at the nearby Trump National Golf Club to eat and use the bathroom, but I’m hot, sweaty and not in the mood to test my welcome.
The trail descending toward the rocky beaches below Point Fermin, where waves get sucked back out between the rocks with a sound more industrial than oceanic.
(Jackie Snow)
Terranea Beach to Palos Verdes Estates Shoreline Preserve: 5.4 miles
Based on Blair’s advice, I skip a section that isn’t open to the public and probably not safe. I drive Palos Verdes Drive South, a rutted, uneven road that skirts the area and feels vaguely off-roading. I park at Terranea Resort, which charges a fee, but there is also nearby free public parking. I pick the walk back up at the charming tucked-away Terranea Beach. As I head north, the trail climbs. I can see stretches of shoreline closed off, tantalizingly visible with no way to reach them.
I stop at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center, a modest but free museum perched above the water. Several people are gathered outside with binoculars, scanning the horizon. They tell me humpbacks were spotted farther out earlier, feeding. It’s easier to see them on the far side of Catalina, they explain, but they still watch from here, every day, sunrise to sunset, December through May. This is the Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project, run by the American Cetacean Society. Volunteers have been coming here for 43 years, counting whales as they migrate past the point.
The Point Vicente lighthouse, perched above the water where Gray Whale Census volunteers keep watch.
(Jackie Snow)
Volunteers with the Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project scanning the horizon. They’ve been counting whales here for 43 years.
(Jackie Snow)
After I peel myself away from looking for whales, the tides won’t allow me to climb down to Honeymoon Cove. I stay on the cliffs and admire the impressive houses around me. I continue until I round the Palos Verdes Estates cliffs, on Paseo del Mar, and see the long, flat stretch of built-up beaches unfurling ahead, South Bay-style, Malibu faint in the distance.
I’ve only done about 15 miles of my walk and suddenly I see how much more there is to go. I’m hot. I’m tired. I packed bad snacks. The sheer expanse of it, frankly, stresses me out. I had planned to make it to Rat Beach in Palos Verdes Estates, but I call it early.
The small coves that punctuate the Palos Verdes coastline, visible from the cliffs above.
(Jackie Snow)
Palos Verdes Estates Shoreline Preserve to El Porto Beach: 7.9 miles
I start back at Palos Verdes Estates cliffs. A couple of turns in, I come across my first real surf spot of the walk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a surf break from this high up. The waves look less like waves and more like pulses of energy moving under the skin of the ocean.
When I finally hit Rat Beach and see how flat the coastline stretches ahead, I feel like dropping to my knees and kissing the ground. After days of cliffs and detours, the openness feels generous.
Hermosa Beach is busy with volleyball nets in use at a level that suggests Olympic aspirations. Forty minutes later, I stop atErcole’s in Manhattan Beach two blocks off the boardwalk and demolish one of its famed burgers. Instead of stopping where I planned, I keep going and end at my familiar surf spot El Porto.
Surfers walking out to the break at El Porto.
(Jackie Snow)
El Porto Beach to Ballona Creek Jetty: 4.8 miles
I’m back at El Porto Beach, this time walking a paved boardwalk through a thick, foggy marine layer with my husband and a friend who’s in town visiting.
Suddenly, my friend realizes he’s dropped his wallet somewhere north of El Segundo. Cue a round of retraced steps and mild panic. An angel named Dr. Gaz finds it, looks up my friend, and bikes it over so we don’t have to retrace any further. The wallet is returned. Our trio survives. We keep walking, stopping at Ballona Creek Jetty.
A dog and his man relaxing on the beach in Marina Del Rey.
(Jackie Snow)
Marina Del Rey to Will Rogers Beach: 7.4 miles
In this classic boardwalk stretch, we eye the muscle men of Muscle Beach, pause for a quiet break atSmall World Books in Venice and walk next to skateboarders (including one dressed as a Santa) in Santa Monica, before ending at Will Rogers State Beach.
The rocks and tide pools just past Malibu Lagoon, where the king tide pulled the water back farther than usual.
(Jackie Snow)
Will Rogers Beach to Malibu Pier: 7.7 miles
I do this stretch with my husband on New Year’s Day, parking at Will Rogers Beach Lot Three and timing it to a king tide. The highs are higher, but the lows are lower too, which is the part we’re interested in.
Even with the king tide low, the beach opens up and pinches closed without warning, and we move between wet sand, rocks we feel like traversing, and the shoulder of the Pacific Coast Highway when we don’t.
Soon enough, we hit the section of burned-out houses that still haunt the beach nearly a year later. I think I can still smell the smoke. It’s the quietest stretch of the whole walk, and the only place the emptiness feels like loss instead of calm.
The Malibu coastline near Escondido Beach.
(Jackie Snow)
When we finally reach the Malibu Pier, it feels like stepping back into civilization. People are on the beach. Nobu is packed. We eat at Malibu Farm and sit indoors, grateful for chairs, shade and food that isn’t trail mix.
Afterward, we take the bus back to the car from a stop near the Pier on the PCH, which turns out to be one of the most beautiful bus rides in existence, with the coastline framed perfectly by wide windows.
Malibu Pier to Escondido Beach: 5.7 miles
We come back the next day for another king tide, despite rain in the forecast. I start on the other side of Malibu Lagoon State Beach, which looks like nothing else on this walk. It’s swampy and green and quietly buzzing, reminding me of Florida, my home turf. Birders are out, rain jackets zipped, binoculars already up.
There are still rocks and little rivers to navigate, but the tide is so low it’s exposing tide pools I didn’t know existed up here. The sand is packed and forgiving, and we cover distance quickly until the rain really starts coming down.
We exit using the new stairs at Escondido Beach, also known as Hidden Beach, which were installed in 2023 after a multidecade battle over access. I take them slowly as I celebrate a mostly triumphant walk.
The Malibu coastline just south of Point Dume.
(Jackie Snow)
Escondido Beach to Zuma Beach: 6.7 miles
I head back to Escondido Beach, a few days later at low tide, though the tide is already coming in. That turns out to be a mistake. My second mistake is coming alone. As I scramble over rocks helpfully labeled with a sign warning not to climb on them, it’s dangerous, I notice my phone has no service. I decide the safest option is to soak my hiking boots instead along the incoming tide.
With my shoes sloshing and Google Maps satellite view looking deeply uncommitted to the stretch just south of Point Dume, I try to exit. Nope. Gated community. Not ready to give up, I keep going.
The surfer south of Point Dume whose companions offered to unlock the gate.
(Jackie Snow)
I spot a woman surfing and stop to take a photo. Her non-surfing companions start chatting with me. When they hear what I’m doing and where I’m trying to go, they offer to unlock the gate. It’s a genuinely kind gesture. But since I’m doing this for you, reader, I ask if there’s an exit farther along. They say there are stairs up ahead, probably reachable. I tell them, in the nicest way possible, that I hope I don’t see them again, and keep going.
My shoes are now collecting water on every step, the bottoms of my pants are wet, and everything underfoot is baseball-sized rocks, which I think is the worst possible rock size for walking. I round the curve. I spot the stairs.
If I had turned off satellite view, the stairs would have been obvious. So much for trying to read the coastline.
I climb out and walk to the tip of Point Dume and look south. I can see the South Bay, where I called it early weeks ago, hot and tired and hating my snacks. I’m still hot. I’m still tired. My snacks are still crummy. But standing here, salty and damp, I realize I don’t want this to walk to end.
The view from the cliffs near Point Dume.
(Jackie Snow)
Zuma Beach to county line: 5.3 miles
Today I timed the hike with a tide going out and my husband joins me so I don’t have a repeat from last time. We park along the PCH at Zuma. The first stretch we go by “Hannah Montana’s View,” a very persistent Google map label. It’s calm until a curve, where a gaggle of adolescent boys, shirtless and shoeless, are trying but failing to climb over the mussel-covered rocks ahead of us. For the second time on this walk, I have to turn around and back-track to the last exit, maybe a quarter mile back.
Luckily, the sighting of a Little Free Library makes the detour feel less like a failure and more like a reward. We cut through a small gated community that turns out to have a door for exactly this purpose, a quiet acknowledgment that people do, in fact, want to walk through here. There is so much rock walking. So much. Eventually we reach Leo Carrillo State Beach, where Los Angeles actually ends and Ventura County begins. Despite the name, County Line Beach is another mile or so away.
Gated Lechuza Point neighborhood has a beach access road that lets walkers get to the shore.
(Jackie Snow)
I watch people walk across the county border without noticing it at all, no fanfare, no announcement, no sense that anything has changed. They keep going. I stop. They are not done walking, but I am.
I haven’t seen every inch of the Los Angeles County coastline. I double-checked my walking distance and I’m still not at 75 miles, more like 65. The number I found online is probably not entirely accurate (the coastline is constantly changing). Maybe it’s closer to 70. But I have seen whale-watch perches, burned-out Malibu lots, crowded boardwalks and magnificent waves. The coastline is both fragile and welcoming — and walkable — if you’re willing to chase the tides.
Peabo Bryson, a Grammy-winning R&B singer known for his duets from Disney classics “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast,” has died. He was 75.
His family confirmed to The Times that he died Tuesday in Marietta, Ga. The cause was complications from a stroke he suffered over the weekend.
“We are tremendously moved by the outpouring of love, prayers and support from fans, friends, and colleagues around the world,” the family shared. “While our hearts are broken, we find comfort in knowing how deeply Peabo was loved and how many lives were touched by his voice and his generous spirit. His legacy and music will live on for generations to come.”
Bryson was a fixture on the R&B scene for decades, scoring with such hits as “Tonight I Celebrate My Love” and “If Ever You’re in My Arms Again.”
Peabo Bryson, pictured performing in Washington, D.C., in 2016, won Grammy Awards in back-to-back years in 1993 and 1994.
(Teresa Kroeger / Getty Images)
In a career peak in 1992, the singer was featured on recordings that topped four separate charts: “A Whole New World,” a duet with Regina Belle from the Disney animated movie “Aladdin,” topped the Pop and Adult Contemporary charts; “The King and I” album, featuring Bryson, was No. 1 on the Classical Crossover charts, and Kenny G’s “Breathless” album, featuring Bryson on “By the Time the Night Is Over,” topped the Contemporary Jazz charts.
He nabbed two Grammy Awards back to back in 1993 and 1994 for his performance of “Beauty and the Beast” with Céline Dion, and his performance of “A Whole New World” with Regina Belle.
“I don’t think there’s anything I can’t do,” Bryson told The Times. “I see myself as a true Renaissance man. I don’t like one-dimensional concepts of myself.”
Robert Peapo Bryson was born on April 13, 1951, in Greenville, S.C. He grew up attending concerts his mother would bring the family to, and by the time he was in high school, he knew he wanted a career in music.
In 1978, he told David Nathan, an editor for Blues & Soul magazine, that his mother wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of him chasing his dreams in the rhythm-and-blues biz and worried he’d get into trouble.
“As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been into music,” Bryson said. “It’s all I ever wanted to really deal with. … I had to make that decision, when I was around 14, as to what I was going to get into, career-wise. Well, I’d thought about being a doctor or something like that, but I really felt that music was my thing.”
He cut his teeth as a backing vocalist in various groups, but none of his bandmates could properly pronounce “Peapo,” his French West Indian name, so he changed up the spelling to make it simpler. The stage name Peabo was born. In the late 1960s, he linked up with “My Elusive Dreams” hitmaker Moses Dillard. “I started out just singing, although I progressed into percussion, guitar and, much later, playing piano — that was basically when I started getting into songwriting,” he told Nathan.
In 1967, he signed his first record deal, with Bang Records, and in 1976, he made his solo debut with the single “Underground Music” and his eponymous album, “Peabo.” The next year, he hit it big time and signed with Capitol Records, where he put out back-to-back gold-selling albums: “Reaching for the Sky” in 1977 and “Crosswinds” in 1978.
Peabo Bryson performs at the Centennial Olympic Park’s Fourth of July Celebration in Atlanta.
(Robb D. Cohen / Invision / Associated Press)
By the ’90s, Bryson was at a career high, collected Grammy nominations and became the definitive voice of Disney duets. But the music scene was changing, and Bryson wasn’t keen on the new direction. He told The Times in 1994 that MTV had stopped considering talent as the criteria to be played on the music channel and that he thought mainstream music had taken a hostile and negative turn.
“I guess I [tick] people off because I don’t go away,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m like a tenacious forest fire — you snuff me out over here, and I’m still burning down the back 40 just when you think it’s over. I have a great faith in God, and because of my great faith in God, I have faith in the self.”
Fortunately for legions of fans of the soulful balladeer, Bryson was right and he wasn’t going anywhere for another couple of decades. The Grammy winner continued to grace stages with his flashy blazers and smooth baritone, and recently performed a concert with Jeffrey Osborne at Trilith Live in Fayetteville, Ga.
The event in early May was a standalone performance, apart from the crooner’s Golden Touch tour, which he announced last year, amid his celebration of 50 years in the music industry.
In recent years, Bryson said he had been hitting the gym and prioritizing his health after a scare seven years ago when the artist suffered a heart attack at his Georgia home. He told the Soul Train Cruise 2020 that he flat-lined for nearly 30 minutes, “long enough to make friends on the other side.”
“It turns out that dying is not that hard,” Bryson said. “Didn’t hurt that much. It’s the living afterwards that’s the really difficult part. I mean, why are you still here? You have to ask yourself those hard questions: Are you a good father? Are you a good husband? Are you a good friend? Are you a good brother? Are you a good human being?”
Bryson said he was able to answer yes.
“Then you have to ask yourself the question that makes the answer null and void — can you be better?”
Bryson is survived by his wife, Tanya Boniface Bryson; son Robert Bryson (who goes by Kit); daughter Linda Bryson; and three grandchildren.
Memorial arrangements will be announced at a later date.
