louise on the left (coast)

As the mother of a food allergic kid, I know what it's like to anger people by requesting they make changes in how they eat or prepare food. Food is primal, and requesting changes about something primal is hard.  I've been on the food allergy road already, and it's not easy, I'm on it, 24/7. (I founded the blog  Parents of Severely Peanut Allergic Kids   as on a successful group on  Facebook .) However, right now I'm talking about something very different, and not really connected to those issues, I'm talking about changing how we feed children in schools.  I'm talking about why we need to teach them about food and nutrition earlier than in high school. The reality is, the school lunches they're serving the kids roughly 180 days a year are unhealthy and actually hurting our children, and it's not the school cafeteria's fault, it's the state and federally mandated choices that are in  need of rethinking. Support Food Education...

Play this.  Play this a lot. No, it's not terribly deep, it contains yet one more animated girl with big eyes who flies, but it will make you feel better, so just play it. Every time you feel crappy. Play this. Cause I plan to. And they say we don't have the money for Arts in Education. Well, to that I say "You're gonna change your mind once you spend one full day without flying."

Little did I know what evil lurked once I bought my kids iPhones...

What do legendary musicians Iris DeMent and John Prine, crazy-good writer, Joyce Maynard and Jim Barringer, a SF lawyer , for goodness sake, all have in common? True love, Baby, true love! Joyce and her true love, Jim got themselves hitched this summer and posted online that they sang a duet a cover of In Spite Of Ourselves including a few of their own verses at the end (see below). I happen to love the original song and think they're additional lyrics below are clever and creative enough to warrant my posting here. Watch: FROM JOYCE MAYNARD'S FACEBOOK PAGE: So , to accompany the pictures posted below by my friend, of Jim and me singing at our wedding last Saturday, I wanted to share the lyrics to John Prine's "In Spite of Ourselves", with my add-on verse. (Jim wrote a great one   , but I don't have it handy. I bet if you go to his FB page--Jim Barringer-- he'll oblige.....(and you'll get a nice big dose of lefty politics while you'...

I found this video with a tag line that said something like " What Made Dustin Hoffman Break Down Crying Like A Baby And May Make You Bawl, Too! See Here Why! " (Which may actually be a better title merely because it has two exclamation points in it.) And is, I suppose, a very effective way to get people to look at something -- but what makes this so moving, and important and "save-worthy" is just how well Hoffman articulates what I know to be true about being a woman. About being female while being pretty compared to being a woman when one is considered just not as young or as pretty or beautiful as others are. And this is true for all females, whether they are a child, or just a girl, or a young woman and certainly it is true of older women. Who were perhaps always not the prettiest one in the room all along. Or even true of those who used to be at one time, but are not anymore. And so I'm reposting this here as I think Hoffman's exploration of this...

We went to the LACMA Kubrick exhibit last month and didn't stop taking pictures so that you wouldn't have to. My blog post is self-explanatory. It tells in pictures all that captured my eye.  The LACMA exhibit, called  STANLEY KUBRICK , is a complete, chronological survey of the director's oeuvre guaranteed to leave all who go entirely gobsmacked. (Did I mention it's  13,000 square feet of film making awesomeness?) The collection of all production and design items (ie: Props, story boards, costumes, set design and all the other completely OCD research for his films) are for my former brilliant and creative students in my 2011 Production and Design students at The Orange County School of the Arts . (Warning: The body of work by Mr. Kubrick is not considered appropriate viewing for youngsters, so I suppose you shouldn't look at these if you are under 18.  Just sayin'.) May you all be inspired to take your creati...