I know these Presidential debates aren’t debates in the historical sense.  Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing how both men do on a topic of immense complexity.  Is Mitt Romney going to be more forthcoming about what tax deductions he’d want cut to keep his tax reform plan from ballooning the deficit?  Will President Obama  give more detail about how he would improve the economy, short of a government stimulus that could never get through a GOP Congress?

I’ll be live tweeting during the debate.  Join me @AirTalk #debates.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

When "Offramp" host John Rabe's father, Bill, created the list at Lake Superior State University in Michigan he likely didn't know it would thrive nearly 40 years later.  As language evolves there should never be a shortage of words and phrases we want to "kick to the curb."

This morning on "AirTalk," I asked listeners to pick the ones they "hate on."  We got some good ones, including my overused "unpack," as in "let's unpack that idea."  Falling into word patterns can happen so subtly that we don't even know it until someone points it out.

My nomination for the list -- "it is what it is."   What are yours?

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Director Michael Apted (L) with Larry Mantle in the AirTalk studio.

This past Wednesday on "AirTalk," film director Michael Apted came in to talk with us about his eighth documentary in the series that's followed the lives of 13 people, beginning in 1964 when the kids were seven.  They've shared their stories with Apted every seven years, and he's clearly invested a lot of emotion into this project.

"56 Up" is wonderful for how it shows the mid-life evolution of the participants.  Apted includes scenes from earlier interviews, so that we see what aspects of today's 56-year-olds were present in childhood and what turns their lives have made over these years. 

"56 Up" is showing at the Nuart in West Los Angeles, and Apted will be doing Q-and-A at some of the screenings.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

After the San Francisco 49ers beat the Atlanta Falcons for the right to go to the Super Bowl, I tweeted my appreciation of a California team going to the game.  If no local team is in the running (or exists), I'm always glad to root for a Bay Area team that makes it.

My tweet got responses from some Southern Californians who have no interest in supporting a San Francisco team, especially given the Giants' World Series championship.  It goes without saying that many Dodger fans are loathe to support the Giants, under any circumstances. 

Given the historic bad blood between the teams, that's no surprise, but I think it runs even deeper.  The divide between Northern and Southern California is about more than sports, or even water rights.  It's rooted in distinct cultural differences between the two.

However, California has evolved to the point where the bigger cultural divide now might be between coastal and inland regions.  Rural Northern Californians typically dislike San Francisco far more than Angelenos do.  Similarly, inland Southern California residents often see Los Angeles as the prohibitively expensive home of two-hour traffic jams.

Until the Inland Empire or the San Joaquin Valley get major league teams, we won't see that rivalry playing out at a stadium near you.   In the meantime, I'm cheering on the Niners, and my state, on February 3rd.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Shout out to my 20 million brothers and sisters-  The one in seven U.S. taxpayers who waited until the last minute to file. 

This year, the IRS even gave us 'til April 18th-  So the 18th is when I filed- For my extension!  See you in October!

In my defense, it was not due to lack of effort.  It feels like I spent 200 hours on my taxes this year, because they were unusually complicated. 

Back when I was in my twenties?  Much effort was put into stacking red milk crates for bookshelves and trying to fold up a futon without mangling my fingers-30 years later, I'm trying to do really smart grown-up things.

To wit, my life partner and I have been business partners for almost 20 years.  We used to be young-  Now we're-ahem-"less young"-  Picture the Boomers you see in those ads, silver-haired, in wet suits, running towards the ocean with surfboards, very at peace with nature and our fully-funded 401-K plans - Except that we don't surf and, regarding those 401-K plans?

Well, what I have written on the notepad I stole from Charles Schwab is-  And I quote:
"Retirement and write it off, and something about medical." 

When I look at this enigmatic scribble, an image comes to me: A friendly thirty-something man dressed in charcoal gray business casual- And a desk, and a plant-  And that man is saying:

"Sandra, by all means, you need to form a C corp!  NOT an S corp!"

But wait, is that what he said? Maybe it was:
"Sandra, by all means, you need to form an S Corp!  NOT a C corp!"

It was like being in school and confronting a page of long division- Or sitting in a deadly after-lunch class like "US Government"-  There's this mix of incomprehension, coupled with boredom, that makes it all sound like white noise.

S corp, C corp-  These things involve a part of my brain that refuses to fire.  All I know is there was one kind that was right, it's not the one I did, at some moderate expense, and now I'm going to jail. 

Where at least I won't have to fold a futon.  I think.

Next week: Separate Bathrooms, Separate Quicken Accounts

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Dave Ramsey—  The financial radio talk show host—  Says every couple has two people.  One is the nerd with the calculator.   The other is the spendy free spirit. 

In my couple, I am the nerd.  I am calmed by a seven-by-seven Ken Ken and a mechanical pencil.  No surprise that I have used Quicken now for several decades.  But it seems in the last five or 10 years—  What with the Russian hackers stealing our info to get porn—  The cheapo, Windows-based laptops Quicken favors have gotten very buggy. 

So buggy, I bought a sacrificial Dell laptop just for Quicken.   But even that lasted barely six months without crashing.  So Charlie, the free spirit, took over paying the bills!  Writing checks by hand!  Notating them in a large, impressive leatherette binder!  The checks are pretty—tan and sort of antique-looking.  There's a stagecoach on them.

This was all charming until I realized it was tax time. To get all my financial info into the computer, I was going to have to hand-enter each check.  With a quill pen and a butter churn.

While in the joyous process of hand-inputting each check that went out in calendar year 2016— I learned some interesting things!

That beautiful 8-lane highway we drove on that time we visited friends in Orange County? That was a toll road that we apparently didn't pay for. 250 dollar fine! Plus--We're subscribers to something called Cook's Country Magazine, even though I am NOT into "homestyle cooking." And -- we've been paying hundreds of dollars a month for gym memberships that I didn't know we have!

Argh!

Losing it, I throw in the towel and buy myself my own personal version of Quicken—for Mac—  There's a help line to call—  And unbelievably, an operator immediately answers.  He's a courteous gentleman with a lilting, slightly British accent.  He answers my "sign in" question, and asks: "Do you want me to stay on the line while you try it?" "Sure!" I say, surprised.

We click pleasantly through a few more windows—  He's marvelously patient, and attentive—  Wanting to be entertaining, I actually start reciting my passwords aloud as I type them.  

"Let's see—2, 3, 4—asterisk, star, Sparky Sparky, that was my first pet— "Now I'm actually going to have to go downstairs to get my purse," I say, "and maybe go to the ladies' on the way 'cause I've had a lot of coffee— "
"It's fine!" he says—
"Well you can continue playing Solitaire or whatever you're doing!" I say.  And he chuckles!
Doing your taxes?  It takes a village.  And a butter churn.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

The Getty spent $65m (and change) for this late Manet masterpiece, "Spring."

A  132-year-old vision of springtime has landed permanently at the Getty Museum, smack in the middle of this California autumn: "Spring (Jeanne Demarsy)," one of Impressionist painter Edouard Manet’s  last completed pictures.

Here's what Getty Director Timothy Potts had to say about the artist:

Manet was the ultimate painter’s painter: totally committed to his craft, solidly grounded in the history of painting and yet determined to carve out a new path for himself and for modern art. ... Alone of his contemporaries (the only one who comes near is Degas), Manet achieved this almost impossible balancing act, absorbing and channeling the achievements of the past into a radically new vision of what painting could be.

"Spring" somehow manages to be the evocation of youth itself and all its hopes. The subject is 16-year-old actress Jeanne Demarsy, just then seeing her stage career ascend at the same time Manet neared the end of his own career. (He died at age 51 in 1883,  soon after the painting went on display.) 

For most of the years since its creation, the picture has been in private hands. It was recently on loan to the National Gallery.

Getty Assistant Curator Scott Allan said that the Getty worked hard to acquire "Spring" and was lucky to get her. According to news reports, the Christie's auction price paid was an eyebrow-lifting $65 million — about double the top previous sale price for a Manet. "We don’t discuss the price," Potts said.

At the Getty, "Spring (Jeanne Demarsy)" hangs next to an early Manet in the museum's Impressionist-Post Impressionist gallery. It was intended to be one of the "Four Seasons" by the late-19th century French master. The series was never completed (although "Autumn" hangs in a museum in France).

(More seasoning: Manet's "Autumn." Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy, France)

Allan said that, unlike many of Manet's early works, "Spring" was intended to hang in the Salon, the French art establishment’s showplace of traditional painting, which had rejected innovators like the Impressionists for decades. That led most of the Impressionists to disdain the Salon. But Allan said Manet was extremely pleased that his late work was accepted there. 

Here's Potts again:

So popular was it that "Spring" became the subject of one of the first color photographs of a work of art. Its acquisition by the Getty brings to Los Angeles the most important — and beautiful! — painting by this artist left in private hands and one of the great masterpieces of late-19th-century art. 

The painting depicts a lovely teenager, dressed in the peak of 1880s fashion in a blue-on-white printed dress; a flowered, fringed hat; and a parasol balanced on her left shoulder. The background features white rhododendrons, barely in blossom.

Mlle. Demarsy stares off to the left, the demure image of a confident young woman at the earliest spring of her adulthood, with an entire creative life before her, already immortalized before the world by one of the century’s greatest artists.

But Manet was himself at the peak of his accomplishments,  just before his sudden demise.
 
"Spring" became one of Manet’s most popular works, deeply appreciated by art lovers young and old and by critics of both the old guard and the avant garde. It was his last picture to hang in the Salon. Manet’s powers would soon decline, and he devoted much of his last few months to watercolors, said Allan.

(Getty director Timothy Potts looks at the Getty's new painting, Manet's "Spring." Getty Museum)

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Frank Romero with one of his French paintings, in his home in the South of France. But every year, he and his wife Sharon throw a big studio sale for Christmas, and you're invited.; Credit: John Rabe

"Live! Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!" - Auntie Mame.

Your calendar is filling up, but here are four holiday events you'll want to make room for:

Every year, pioneering Chicano artist Frank Romero and his wife Sharon throw a big studio sale that includes works by a wide group of artists, and a lot of food and drink. It's just as much a party as a sales event, and Frank and the other artists are always there to meet and greet. And now that the couple is spending more time at their home in France, it's a chance for their old friends to catch up with them, so who knows who you'll see from L.A.'s arts community.

RELATED: See Frank's new works - French scenes with an East LA flavor

The Romero Studio annual Christmas party and sale is Saturday, Dec. 6, 6-10pm; and Sunday, Dec. 7, 1-5pm, at Plaza de la Raza, Boathouse Gallery, 3540 North Mission Rd., LA CA 90031 (in Lincoln Park across from the DMV — which BTW is a very good DMV).

Then, on Sunday, Dec. 14, at 4:30pm,  it's the Advent Procession of Lessons and Carols, at St. James Episcopal Church, which a friend describes as "one of the truly beautiful choral events of the season," and the highlight of the Choir of St. James' season. It's free and it's at St. James' Episcopal Church in Koreatown (3903 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles 90010).
 

"Auntie Mame," the 1958 Rosalind Russell movie with more quotable quips than a weekend getaway with Oscar Wilde, has become something of a Christmas tradition. It's screening at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre on Wednesday, Dec. 17, at 7:30. As delightful as this movie is any day of the week on your TV at home, this is a film to be seen in 35mm with a theater full of people reacting to every bon mot and heart-touching moment.

GO INSIDE: The Disney Hall organ, "Hurricane Mama," turns 10

Last year, my husband and I blindly went to Disney Hall for the Holiday Organ Spectacular. We expected some music and a little fun. But it really was spectacular. It's back this year, on Friday, Dec. 19, with organist David Higgs leading the evening from the console of Hurricane Mama.

If you've never seen or heard the organ in person, this is a great evening because Higgs — a teacher as well as master organist — gives you a guided tour of every stop, and every mood the organ can produce, from cathedral-loud to country-church-quiet. At the end of the night, he breaks the audience into parts to sing "The Twelve Days of Christmas," and you may sing as loud as you like.

These are just a few curated selections, but they're just the tip of the iceberg in Southern California; please make your own holiday event recommendations in the comments below. 

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

One of 4,000 "The Far Side" panels Gary Larson drew over 14 years. The full collection is now out in paperback.; Credit: Gary Larson

Off-Ramp animation expert Charles Solomon reviews "The Complete Far Side: 1980-1994" by Gary Larson.

It’s hard to believe the last panel of Gary Larson’s wildly popular comic strip “The Far Side” ran 20 years ago: January 1, 1995. The comics page of the LA Times (and many other papers) still feels empty without it.

RELATED: Charles Solomon interviews artists responsible for look of "Big Hero 6"

During its 14-year run, "The Far Side" brought a new style of humor to newspaper comics that was weird, outré and hilarious. The strip became an international phenomenon, appearing in over 1,900 newspapers worldwide. Larson won both the National Cartoonists' Society Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year and the Best Syndicated Panel Award. An exhibit of original artwork from the strip broke attendance records at natural history museums in San Francisco, Denver and here in L.A. Fans bought tens of millions of "Far Side" books and calendars.

Much of the humor in “The Far Side” derived from Larson's seemingly effortless juxtaposition of the mundane and bizarre. When a bug-housewife declares "I'm leaving you, Charles...and I'm taking the grubs with me," it's the utter normalcy of the scene that makes it so funny. Mrs. Bug wears cats eye glasses, while Mr. Bug reads his newspaper in an easy chair with a doily on the back.

Or, a mummy sits an office waiting room reading a magazine while a secretary says into the intercom, “Mr. Bailey? There’s a gentlemen here who claims an ancestor of your once defiled his crypt, and now you’re the last remaining Bailey and … oh, something about a curse. Should I send him in?”

"The Complete Far Side" contains every strip ever syndicated: more than 4,000 panels. It should probably come with a warning label, "Caution: reading this book may result in hyperventilation from uncontrollable laughter." Except for a few references to Leona Helmsley or other now-forgotten figures, Larson’s humor remains as offbeat and funny as it was when the strips were first printed.

Andrews and McMeel initially released this collection in 2003 in two hardbound volumes that weighed close to 10 pounds apiece. You needed a sturdy table to read them. The three volumes in the paperback re-issue weigh in around three pounds and can be held comfortably in the lap for a while.

Because “The Far Side” ended two decades ago, many people under 30 don’t know it. The reprinted collection offers geezers (35 or older) a chance to give a present that should delight to that impossible-to-shop-for son, daughter, niece or nephew. How often does an older adult get a chance to appear cool at Christmas or Hanuka? 

And if that ingrate kid doesn’t appreciate it, "The Complete Far Side" also makes an excellent self-indulgence.

Charles Solomon lends his animatio expertise to Off-Ramp and Filmweek on Airtalk, and has just been awarded the Annie's (The International Animated Film Society) June Foray Award, "for his significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation." Congratulations, Charles!

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Rob Marshall is either the bravest director in Hollywood or the most foolhardy. Three of his five theatrical films — the musicals "Chicago," "Nine" and now "Into the Woods" — don't just invite comparison to the eccentric genius of other artists, they insist on it.

Originally a Bob Fosse stage project, "Chicago" was so imbued with Fosse's vitriolic spirit that even in Marshall's more straightforward hands the movie version felt like the missing piece in a triptych with Fosse's "Cabaret" and "All That Jazz."

"Nine" is the musical created from Fellini's masterpiece "8 1/2."

(Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini's "8 1/2")

Odd enough that someone thought Fellini's intimate but epic fugue on his own creative doubts and sexual fantasies should be adapted by others for Broadway; stranger still to re-import the hybrid back to the screen, in the workmanlike form Marshall gave to it.

And now we have "Into the Woods," a film placing Marshall in the long line of moviemakers defeated by Sondheim's difficult musical brilliance and penchant for challenging material. It's distinguished company, reaching back all the way to "A Hard Day's Night" director Richard Lester's re-invention of "A Funny Thing Happened (On the Way to the Forum)" as a kind of psychedelic Keystone Cops movie, and forward to Tim Burton's more adept but still wrong-headed Murnau-meets-Hammer-Horror approach to "Sweeney Todd."

Even director Hal Prince, the principal theatrical collaborator during Sondheim's most fertile and formative period, made an absolute hash of their shared stage success "A Little Night Music" in a film version later disavowed by both men, and mostly remembered for Elizabeth Taylor's chirpy and discernibly flat rendition of "Send in the Clowns."

Liz singing "Send in the Flat Clowns"

It's just possible that the real problem is that Sondheim's self-reflexive and deconstructive impulse (his musicals are almost always and to varying degrees commentaries on the Musical itself) makes his projects unfit for screen adaptation. In movies, we miss the artifice of the proscenium, the sweat on the actor's brow. But if any of Sondheim's late-period projects held out the hope of a successful movie version it was surely "Into the Woods," a droll recombination of the fairytale form's literary DNA into something like Sondheim's masterpiece "Company," set in a realm of magic beanstalks and slippers made of glass.

The characters are straight out of the Disney pantheon (or "Shrek"): Cinderella meets Rapunzel meets Red Riding Hood meets Jack and his Beanstalk, with a generic Wicked Witch, a couple of not so charming Prince Charmings, plus a peasant couple thrown in. But the issues at stake — marital fidelity, raising children, the fear of aging and death — are complicated, and filled with gray tones which Sondheim and librettist James Lapine masterfully etched across the fairytale's Manichean black and white.

What seemed audacious when Sondheim and Lapine conceived it in 1987 ought to fit comfortably into the era of "Sleepy Hollow" and "Maleficent," but in Marshall's hands, it does not. The good news is that though populated by what old school TV shows used to call a Galaxy of Today's Brightest Stars (Anna Kendrick as an appealingly unglamorous Cinderella; Chris Pine as the nymphomaniac Prince who stalks her; Meryl Streep quite moving in the Wicked Witch role made famous on Broadway by Bernadette Peters) this is mostly a very well-sung movie. There have been controversial excisions and revisions (enabled by Lapine, who is Marshall's screenwriter), but as an introduction to one of Sondheim's more beloved scores, "Into the Woods" makes for a solid musical primer.

WATCH: The "Into the Woods" trailer

But though Marshall has taken a lot of flack for daring to cut out characters (most notably the stage production's Narrator, who served as a kind of Greek Chorus in the original) and for softening plot points (Rapunzel died onstage), the big problem is that Marshall isn't nearly ruthless enough in rethinking "Into the Woods" as an honest-to-God movie. There are many moments (Johnny Depp ending a scene with a stagy howl at the Moon that virtually screams "and... fade out!;" the unseen death of a major character) where Marshall embraces the limitations of stagecraft when something bigger and more cinematic is needed, as if afraid to mar the pedigree of Broadway with Hollywood's debased visual stamp.

"Giants in the Sky," Jack's coming-of-age number, where he describes finding manhood in the sexual and physical dangers available above the clouds in the Giant's Castle, is a showstopper onstage, where we're willing to accept rhetoric in place of physical immediacy. Onscreen, it's simply frustrating for a character to suddenly appear and tell us he's just had the adventure of a lifetime, and that it's too bad we missed it.

The Woods themselves — both character and symbol onstage, a kind of living maze representing moral confusion — are lush here and geographically nondescript, like a particularly plush unit set, done up in a generic Lloyd Webber-meets-Disney house style.

Perhaps most unfortunately of all, Marshall seems constitutionally incapable of conveying the pervasive satiric impulse at the heart of the Sondheim/Lapine original, which could have been called "What Happens After Happily Ever After." Without ironic distancing, the film's second half, where the characters betray each other in decidedly contemporary sexual and self-interested terms, plays as non-sequitur.

It's possible to imagine a more idiosyncratic movie director who both understands and embraces the arsenal of cinematic effects available through editing, camera movement and design transforming "Into the Woods" into a rousing cinematic triumph — the young Terry Gilliam comes to mind. But Hollywood doesn't really embrace its daring cranks and visionaries very often, as Gilliam's difficult career demonstrates. Whenever possible, today's studios like to import genius at a safe remove, and then hand it off to a reliable journeyman who won't make waves or piss off the suits. The limitations of that approach are visible in every scene of "Into the Woods," and perhaps they explain its failure best of all. It's one thing not to be up to the task of adapting a work of odd brilliance. It's something else again to not even take it on.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Actors Carla Gugino, Matthew Lillard and Sir Patrick Stewart pose at the "Match" screening during the Palm Springs International Film Festival on January 3, 2015 in Palm Springs, California. ; Credit: Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images for PSIFF

Is there a happier star in Hollywood than Patrick Stewart?

Certainly no one seems to be having more fun than the onetime Star Trek captain and current (and seemingly permanent) X-Man. And why shouldn't Sir Patrick be pleased with himself? He really has got it all: a thriving stage profile in both New York and London, the unconditional love of a vast and loyal fan base, and a film career that oscillates freely between franchise blockbusters and the small, character-driven chamber pieces Stewart so clearly relishes.

"Match" is about as small a movie as Stewart has ever appeared in: a well-intentioned three-character film studded with very funny dialogue courtesy of writer/director Stephen Belber, upon whose play "Match" is based.

Stewart plays an aging gay dance instructor named Tobi Powell, who may or may not have sired a child back in the swinging 60s – an era movies now take to have been 10 years of uninterrupted orgy punctuated by Beatles records and gunshots aimed at the Kennedy brothers.

As the saying goes, "If you can remember the '60s, you weren't there." Stewart's Tobi Powell was vibrantly there at the time, so it's perhaps natural that he can't seem to recall whether or not one of his rare couplings with a female partner might have had some unintended consequences.

Mincing slightly and speaking in an accent that sounds Midwestern by way of Wales, Stewart is an absolute blast to watch. His genuine (and usually underutilized) flair for comedy is roguishly on display, allowing "Match" to shift between pathos and farce with an assurance born more of the performer's bravado than the emotional contours of Belber's somewhat overeager text.

Though allegedly a bit of a shut-in, Tobi is a minor masterpiece of a lost and exuberant art form: the exaggerated star turn. It's unsurprising Frank Langella got a Tony nomination for playing him on Broadway a decade ago, and at least a bit unexpected that Stewart has gone completely unnoticed this awards season, even by the nomination-happy Golden Globes.

Belber's best writing is mostly his comedic stuff. One aria comparing cunnilingus to knitting may just be the best scene of its type since Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in "When Harry Met Sally" a quarter century ago.

Solid and believable supporting turns from Carla Gugino and Matthew Lillard add to the fun until Belber's script bogs down in the third act into the kind of paint-by-numbers epiphany shtick even TV has given up on at this point.

WATCH: The official trailer for "Match," starring Patrick Stewart

Everybody cries. Everybody changes. Everybody yawns.  Or I did anyway.

Still, go see this movie — or better yet, watch it on your phone, since it's shot almost entirely in close up — to see a grand and gracefully aging actor strut his stuff with contagious delight. You will definitely laugh, and, God, does this movie hope you'll also cry.

But if you do weep, don't be surprised if, like Tobi himself, you hate yourself in the morning.

Off-Ramp contributor R. H. Greene is covering the 26th Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival, where he recently saw the new comedy "Match" starring Patrick Stewart. "Match" comes to theaters and video-on-demand on Jan. 14.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A scene from Tomislav Mrisic's "Cowboys (Kauboji)," which screened at the Palm Springs Film Festival.; Credit: Kino films

It has escaped the average filmgoer's notice, but Eastern Europe has been in the midst of a cinematic renaissance for quite a while now. A few individual titles and filmmakers have bubbled to the surface in U.S. cinemas, including Danis Toanovic's Serbian antiwar satire "No Man's Land," which won an Oscar in 2001, and Cristian Mungiu's Romanian abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days," which nabbed the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2007.

Those are both great movies, but they are also the small tip of a very large iceberg. This year, Estonian filmmaker Zaza Urushadze's "Tangerines" — a humanist drama about the Georgian civil war of 1992 — is a leading contender for a foreign film Oscar.

As of now, its main competitor for the trophy would seem to be the Polish film "Ida" by Pawel Pawlikowski, which has taken most of the top critics prizes for foreign film this awards season. And who has heard of Radu Jude, the witty Romanian director of "The Happiest Girl in the World," or Kamen Kalev, Bulgaria's great hope for the cinematic future? Among so many others.

A sort of "Waiting for Guffman" with a Croat twist, the delightful Croatian Oscar entry "Cowboys (Kauboji)" isn't in the same league as the best Eastern Europe has to offer, and in an odd way this is one of its strengths.

Tomislav Mrisic's film utterly lacks pretension, which is not to say that it has no point to make. If there's an Eastern European precedent for "Cowboys'" assured mix of satire, drama and farce, it's probably the "Loves of a Blonde"-era Milos Forman.

Mrisic shares with Forman an acute eye for the foibles of small town bureaucracy and a soft humanism that simultaneously allows "Cowboys" to embrace its rag-tag ensemble of eccentrics and to spoof them mercilessly.

(A screen shot from Croation Oscar entry "Cowboys (Kauboji)")

The plot sees Sasa (Sasa Anlokovic), a failed and hangdog theater director with health problems, returning to his small and economically desolate Croatian town, where he is enlisted by an old friend-turned-local-bureaucrat to bring Big City "culture" to the sticks.

Aware that his lung cancer may have fallen out of remission and that time may be running out for him, Sasa sets about the task of creating what may be his last opus with the clay available to hand: a half dozen unskilled, uneducated and, in most cases, un-hygienic misfits, culled from the dregs of the town. They decide to create a Western stageplay based on their shared love of "Stagecoach," "High Noon" and John Wayne. Something decidedly unlike "Stagecoach" is the result.

There are titters and belly laughs abounding in "Cowboys" — a film that may actually be even funnier to an American audience than it is in Croatia, given Mrisic's deft mangling of the worn-out genre cliches of old school horse opera.

The performances are all solid and specific: This is no undifferentiated cluster of cliche yahoos, but rather a broadly drawn ensemble, in which each character has a specific logic and an unspoken need he or she is trying to fill.

WATCH the "Cowboys" trailer in the original Croatian

Mrisic finds much to mock in his small town provincials, but also much to celebrate. "Cowboys" is a smart film that still sees goodness everywhere it looks, which makes it a refreshing change not just from the American school of rote affirmation comedy but also from the relentless bleakness we associate with so much European fare.

For all the farce on hand, "Cowboys" is in the end a covertly passionate defense of the creative act: Its imperishability and its importance for its own sake, excluding aesthetic considerations. It is also a plea for that hoary old chestnut, the healing power of laughter. While that may read like a cliche, with "Cowboys," Mrisic's point is made.

Off-Ramp contributor R.H. Greene is covering the 26th Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival and will be posting regularly from there.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Andrew J. West stars in Anna Mastro's "Walter"; Credit: "Walter"

It's always dicey to characterize a major film festival based on the movies you personally see there, because no matter how diligent you try to be, your impression will always be statistically anecdotal.

I'll see perhaps 10 percent of the films at this year's Palm Springs International Film Festival by the time they roll up the red carpets for the final time, added to the 25 or so I'd watched before I got here, owing to the festival's unique programming policies.

Not bad considering there are 190 movies being screened. So I think I've got the feel of things here. I wouldn't want my doctor to diagnose me based on a test with a 35 to 40 percent chance of accuracy, but I'm not a doctor. Instead of "Do no harm," I quote Spencer Tracy to myself. He said the secret to the creative process is to "just look 'em in the eye and tell 'em the truth."

And the truth is, with the exception of a couple of documentaries and a horror movie, virtually every film I've seen at Palm Springs so far shared some obvious characteristics: the Palm Springs International Film Festival loves it some poignancy and affirmation.

I've already commented on "Match," the Patrick Stewart acting showcase, and "Cowboys," a very funny Croatian comedy with cross-currents of seriousness. I may comment later about "Today," Iran's Oscar submission. (It's terrific by the way, a deeply affecting story about a burnt out cab driver who gets yanked into the world of a battered, unwed mother who steps into his cab.)

(Still from "Today” (Emrooz) by Iranian filmmaker Reza Mirkarimi)

I also saw an Anne Hathaway passion project called "Song One" here. I'm not going to write about it because I'm not in the mood to stomp on somebody else's butterfly. Plus the dramedy "1001 Grams" by the splendiferous-ly named Norwegian Bent Hamer, whose deadpan satire is routinely compared to Jacques Tati.

WATCH the official trailer for "1001 Grams," which includes some foreign languages

At their best, these are all movies that want to move the audience to tears before bouncing a ray of hope off the screen at them. At their worst, these movies are about pain in the same way Novocain is. They acknowledge its reality, in order to neutralize it.

Filmmaker Anna Mastro's debut film "Walter" (one of the Palm Springs premieres) fits what seems to be the festival's programming model, too, and is, I think, a really quite appealing little indie film, with the by now familiar mildly magical realist bent.

It's is a story about grief, though one with a screwball premise so that it doesn't quite present that way at first. Walter (portrayed with charisma and nuance by Andrew J. West) is a 20-something slacker, but a very uptight one, with a soldier's commitment to dress and routine.

He still lives with mom (Virginia Madsen, now shifting toward the character actress portion of her career with ease and grace) and has a job one rung above fast food worker on the ladder of success: He's a ticket taker at the local multiplex.

But what the world surely sees as failure, Walter knows to be his cover for a far more important vocation. Walter's father died when he was just 10 years old; ever since the funeral, Walter has realized something we don't: His real job in life is to decide where people go after they die.

His snap judgments secretly send people to heaven or hell ... until a dead guy from Walter's past shows up and demands that Walter determine his fate, and then all hell breaks loose.

It's an odd premise, bordering on the labored, but Mastro and her extremely appealing cast pull it off, in part by wearing their influences on their sleeves. The fingerprints of Wes Anderson are all over this picture, especially in terms of the way shots are framed and music is used, and I was able to identify the pivotal contribution of "Beasts of the Southern Wild" co-composer Dan Romer by ear, long before I noticed his screen credit.

I suppose that's supposed to be a damning criticism of a first-timer, but I don't see it that way. Tarantino aped Scorsese for years and virtually remade a minor Hong Kong gangster picture when he debuted with "Reservoir Dogs."

Spielberg acknowledges his debt to David Lean. Hitchcock's apprenticeship at Germany's UFA film studio resulted in a lifelong visual and thematic debt to the great Expressionist master Fritz Lang.

The question is, what do you do with your influences, how do you make them your own? And Mastro — who has a real gift for casting, pacing a scene and maneuvering her actors easily between farce and seriousness — has her own talents. She understands how Anderson's visual syntax has become a cinematic shorthand for quirk, and she deploys it to that effect, then tells the story at hand.

There are some issues with that story, though. There's a girl in concessions (Leven Rambin) Walter likes, and there's a bully at work. For all its surface oddity, the mechanical underpinnings of "Walter" frequently feel like they belong in an "American Pie" sequel.

And yet this movie won me over. I liked its faith in the movie palace as a place that still vibrates with the marvelous. I found a dream sequence, where Rambin undresses to camera while sprawled on a rich yellow bed of movie house popcorn hilarious and deeply expressive.

But I think my affection for this picture is mostly centered on Mastro and her cast, which includes a standout performance by Justin Kirk as a very grounded ghost and a broad but successful cameo from William H. Macy as Walter's psychiatrist. They're all groping toward something rather grim and real about loss, while doing their best to serve up some laughs and wonder along the way.

It touched me, because it feels kind of wise.

Off-Ramp contributor R.H. Greene, former editor of Boxoffice Magazine, is in Palm Spring this week to cover the 26th Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival. Look for his missives here, and listen Saturday at noon to Off-Ramp, when he'll interview Chaz Ebert about her late husband Roger Ebert's contributions to the film festival circuit.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

There are still a couple dozen tickets left for one of the most interestingly-cast performances of H.G. Wells, Orson Welles and Howard Koch's "War of the Worlds." On Saturday, Jan. 17,  generations of Star Trek actors will take on the world's most famous radio show.

The cast — directed by Jim Fall — features: René Auberjonois (“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”), Michael Dorn (“Star Trek: TNG”), Dean Haglund (“The X-Files”), Walter Koenig ("Star Trek"), Linda Park ("Star Trek: Enterprise"), Jason Ritter (“The Event”), Tim Russ (“Star Trek: Voyager”), Armin Shimerman (“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”) and Wil Wheaton, playing... Orson Welles.

The performance is a fundraiser for Sci-Fest LA, the new annual science fiction play festival, so tickets aren't cheap — but they're scarce, and this looks like a memorable night.

KPCC and "Off-Ramp" celebrated the 75th anniversary of the broadcast last year by distributing the original 1938 performance, and a new documentary, internationally... introduced by George Takei, another original Trek actor you might have heard of.

War of the Worlds: Sat., Jan. 17,  8 PM; The Acme Theatre, 135 North La Brea Ave. LA CA 90036

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A Southern California Edison sign outside the San Onofre Nuclear Plant.; Credit: Grant Slater/KPCC

Large utilities cut off power to millions of Californians over the past two months to reduce the risk that power lines might spark new fires. Nearly 200,000 Southern California Edison customers were blacked out, some for days at a time. These public safety power shutoffs mean that many rural residents lose a lot more than just their electricity. 

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Blowing snow on the Grapevine.; Credit: Photo by FrankBonilla.tv via Flickr Creative Commons

We’ve spent a lot of time recently stressing out about bad weather here in Southern California. It’s been too hot, too dry and too smoky. So, we thought it'd be appropriate on Thanksgiving to give thanks to this latest storm, which should leave you feeling good.

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The engineered Dominguez Gap Wetlands in Long Beach filters stormwater and runoff from the Los Angeles River, then the water is siphoned under the river to a spreading ground to the west.; Credit: Sharon McNary/KPCC

Angelenos are used to looking up Heal the Bay's annual beach water quality report card each May as we search out the cleanest places to swim and surf.

Now, the environmental advocacy group is focusing on a new target — the often polluted water that flows into the ocean from the mountains and across the L.A. Basin.

In a first-ever report, it concludes the managers of 12 watersheds from Malibu to Long Beach are making too little progress toward cleaning up this major source of pollution in the Pacific.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Levi Draheim, 11, wears a dust mask as he participates in a demonstration in Miami in July 2019. A lawsuit file by him and other young people urging action against climate change was thrown out by a federal appeals court Friday.; Credit: Wilfredo Lee/AP

A federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by nearly two dozen young people aimed at forcing the federal government to take bolder action on climate change, saying the courts were not the appropriate place to address the issue.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday the young plaintiffs had "made a compelling case that action is needed," but they did not have legal standing to bring the case.

The lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, was filed in 2015 on behalf of a group of children and teenagers who said the U.S. government continued to use and promote the use of fossil fuels, knowing that such consumption would destabilize the climate, putting future generations at risk.

By doing so, the plaintiffs argued, the U.S. government had violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.

Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz agreed with some of that assertion, writing in a 32-page opinion that "the federal government has long promoted fossil fuel use despite knowing that it can cause catastrophic climate change."

But, he continued, it was unclear if the court could compel the federal government to phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess greenhouse gas emissions as the plaintiffs requested.

"Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power," Hurwitz wrote, "Rather, the plaintiffs' impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government."

The decision reversed an earlier ruling by a district court judge that would have allowed the case to move forward.

Philip Gregory, who served as co-counsel for the plaintiffs, strongly disagreed with the 2-1 ruling, saying in an interview with NPR that they would seek an "en banc petition," which would put the issue before the full 9th Circuit for review.

Gregory, who spoke to some of the young plaintiffs following the decisions, says they were hopeful that their pending petition will be considered, "because as we all know, this Congress and this President will do nothing to ameliorate the climate crisis."

Both the Trump and Obama administrations opposed the lawsuit. All three of the judges involved in Friday's ruling were appointed under Obama.

Hurwitz and Judge Mary Murguia made up the majority but the third, Judge Josephine L. Staton, wrote a blistering dissent.

"In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response — yet presses ahead toward calamity," she wrote. "It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

February satellite readings in the troposphere (the lower atmosphere) of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a pollutant primarily from burning fossil fuels, show a dramatic decline compared to early January when power plants were operating at normal levels.; Credit: /NASA Earth Observatory

As China seeks to control the spread of COVID-19, fewer cars are driving, fewer factories are running and — in some places — skies are clearer.

Air pollution levels have dropped by roughly a quarter over the last month as coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities have ramped down so employees in high-risk areas can stay home. Levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant primarily from burning fossil fuels, were down as much as 30%, according to NASA.

"It is an unprecedentedly dramatic drop in emissions," says Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, who tallied the reductions. "I've definitely spoken to people in Shanghai who said that it's been some of the most pristine blue skies that they remember over the winter."

Myllyvirta estimates that China's carbon emissions have dropped by a quarter over the same period. While that's a tiny fraction of its overall annual emissions, it's substantial in a worldwide context, since China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

There's potentially a health benefit — although any gains due to a drop in pollution are set against the toll taken by the coronavirus outbreak.

Air pollution is estimated to contribute to more than 1 million premature deaths in China each year. Fine particle pollution, also known as PM 2.5, can enter the bloodstream through the lungs and has been linked to asthma attacks, heart attacks and respiratory problems.

Even a short-term reduction in air pollution can make a difference.

"There is no question about it: When air quality improves, that will be associated with a reduction in health-related problems," says Jim Zhang, professor of global and environmental health at Duke University.

Zhang says that was evident during the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing. To help improve the air, government officials shut factories and dramatically limited car travel before and during the games. Levels of some air pollutants dropped by half.

He and colleagues studied a group of young men and women in Beijing and found that during that time period, their lung and cardiovascular health improved. He also followed pregnant women.

"What we found is that the kids whose mothers had a third trimester pregnancy during the Olympics when the air quality was better, their birth weight was substantially higher than the kids who were born a year before and a year later," he says.

But health specialists sound a cautionary note.

"It would be a mischaracterization to say that the coronavirus was beneficial to health because of these air pollution reductions," says Jill Baumgartner, associate professor and epidemiologist at McGill University.

"The health impacts from the virus itself, the stress on the health-care system, the stress on people's lives — those health impacts are likely to be much greater than the short-term benefits of air pollution on health," she says.

Baumgartner says people with health issues other than COVID-19 may have avoided seeing doctors during the outbreak or potentially couldn't receive treatment they needed in areas with overtaxed health systems.

Those isolated at home and avoiding crowds may also have been exposed to more indoor air pollution.

"People spent a lot more time indoors and it's possible that they were exposed to higher levels of indoor tobacco smoke," Baumgartner says. "Or in the suburban areas, it's possible that they were using their traditional wood or coal stoves for heating."

Not all cities have experienced the recent improvements. In mid-February, Beijing saw a spike in pollution due to local weather patterns trapping air in the region.

The drop in air pollution and carbon emissions is also likely to disappear as Chinese industry ramps up again in an attempt to offset its economic losses.

"If you think back to the global financial crisis, the immediate impact was for China's emissions to fall," says Myllyvirta. "But then the government response was to roll out the biggest stimulus package in the history of mankind that then drove China's emissions and global emissions up for years."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer, seen here in 2017, says his office has reached a settlement with a company that had been selling at-home tests for the coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration says it has not authorized any at-home tests.; Credit: Christopher Weber/AP

Mike Feuer, the city attorney of Los Angeles, announced on Monday that his office had "filed a civil law enforcement action against, and achieved an immediate settlement with," a company that had been "illegally selling" an at-home test for the coronavirus.

The Food and Drug Administration has stated that the agency "has not authorized any test that is available to purchase for testing yourself at home for COVID-19."

But in March, Yikon Genomics Inc. offered a coronavirus test for sale online, claiming that the test could be performed "using a simple at-home finger stick blood sample." The company offered tests for $39 each and, in a since-deleted tweet, stated, "Our COVID-19 Test Kit is now FDA APPROVED!"

Yikon's "unlawful, unfair, and fraudulent business acts or practices," the LA city attorney alleged in the lawsuit against the company, "present a continuing threat to members of the public."

At a news conference, Feuer said that FDA validation of tests is crucial because an inaccurate result could lead someone infected with the coronavirus to "unknowingly expose others."

Under the settlement between Yikon and LA authorities, the company agreed to stop marketing or selling home test kits unless they receive FDA approval. Yikon also agreed to provide refunds to anyone who purchased its test kits, though Feuer said it's unclear how many tests were sold.

Yikon Genomics released a statement saying it "is committed to complying with all state & federal laws and regulations regarding the marketing & sale of medical devices. We intend to pursue FDA approval for the market & sale of COVID-19 test kits, which we hope will aid in mitigating this global health crisis."

The Trump administration has said it will "aggressively" prosecute cases of fraud related to the pandemic, and state attorneys general have also pledged to take legal action against scams around the country.

In LA, Feuer said his office continues to investigate other companies' sales of unapproved test kits.

"This is not an isolated incident," Feuer said, noting that his office separately sent a cease-and-desist letter to the California-based Wellness Matrix Group, which, as NPR first reported, had also been offering "at-home" test kits for sale.

"Whenever consumers are motivated in part by fears," the city attorney's office stated in its lawsuit against Yikon, "they are particularly vulnerable to fraudsters, scammers, and 'snake oil' hucksters and charlatans."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Updated at 10 p.m. ET

Australia's High Court has found reasonable doubt that Cardinal George Pell sexually assaulted two boys in the 1990s and has overturned his conviction.

The court acquitted the former Vatican treasurer of the charges, and no retrial will be possible.

Pell, 78, had been serving a six-year prison sentence in the case. The High Court ordered that he be released.

He was convicted of sexually abusing two 13-year-old choirboys at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne.

As an adult, one of them went to the police in 2015 and accused the cardinal of abusing him and the other boy in 1996. The other individual died of a heroin overdose the previous year without reporting abuse.

In a statement after the acquittal, as reported by Reuters, Pell said, "I hold no ill will toward my accuser, I do not want my acquittal to add to the hurt and bitterness so many feel; there is certainly hurt and bitterness enough."

Pell was convicted in 2018 and an appellate court upheld those convictions last year.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference's comments on the acquittal recognize that the outcome will be good news for some people and "devastating for others."

"The result today does not change the Church's unwavering commitment to child safety and to a just and compassionate response to survivors and victims of child sexual abuse. The safety of children remains supremely important not only for the bishops, but for the entire Catholic community. Any person with allegations of sexual abuse by Church personnel should go to the police."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

The Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments remotely this week, and for the first time the arguments were streamed live to the public.; Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

For the first time in its 231-year history, the Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments remotely by phone and made the audio available live.

The new setup went off largely without difficulties, but produced some memorable moments, including one justice forgetting to unmute and an ill-timed bathroom break.

Here are the top five can't-miss moments from this week's history-making oral arguments.

A second week of arguments begin on Monday at 10 a.m. ET. Here's a rundown of the cases and how to listen.

1. Justice Clarence Thomas speaks ... a lot

Supreme Court oral arguments are verbal jousting matches. The justices pepper the lawyers with questions, interrupting counsel repeatedly and sometimes even interrupting each other.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who has sat on the bench for nearly 30 years, has made his dislike of the chaotic process well known, at one point not asking a question for a full decade.

But with no line of sight, the telephone arguments have to be rigidly organized, and each justice, in order of seniority, has an allotted 2 minutes for questioning.

It turn out that Thomas, second in seniority, may just have been waiting his turn. Rather than passing, as had been expected, he has been Mr. Chatty Cathy, using every one of his turns at bat so far.

Thomas broke a year-long silence on Monday in a trademark case testing whether a company can trademark by adding .com to a generic term. In this case, Booking.com.

"Could Booking acquire an 800 number, for example, that's a vanity number — 1-800-BOOKING, for example?" Thomas asked.

2. The unstoppable RBG

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg participated in Wednesday's argument from the hospital. In pain during Tuesday's arguments, the 87-year-old underwent non-surgical treatment for a gall bladder infection at Johns Hopkins Hospital later that day, according to a Supreme Court press release.

But she was ferocious on Wednesday morning, calling in from her hospital room in a case testing the Trump administration's new rule expanding exemptions from Obamacare's birth control mandate for nonprofits and some for-profit companies that have religious or moral objections to birth control.

"The glaring feature" of the Trump administration's new rules, is that they "toss to the winds entirely Congress' instruction that women need and shall have seamless, no-cost, comprehensive coverage," she said.

3. Who flushed?

During Wednesday's second oral argument, Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants, a case in which the justices weighed a First Amendment challenge to a federal rule than bans most robocalls, something very unexpected happened.

Partway through lawyer Roman Martinez's argument time, a toilet flush could be distinctly heard.

Martinez seemed unperturbed and continued speaking in spite of the awkward moment.

The flush quickly picked up steam online, becoming the first truly viral moment from the court's new livestream oral arguments.

4. Hello, where are you?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, considered one of the most tech-savvy of the justices, experienced a couple of technical difficulties with her mute button.

In both Monday and Tuesday arguments, the first time she was at bat, there were prolonged pauses, prompting Chief Justice John Roberts to call, "Justice Sotomayor?" a few times before she hopped on with a brief, "Sorry, Chief," before launching into her questions.

By Wednesday she seemed to have gotten used to the new format, but the trouble then jumped to Thomas, who was entirely missing in action when his turn came. He ultimately went out of order Wednesday morning.

5. Running over time

Oral arguments usually run one hour almost exactly, with lawyers for each side having 30 minutes to make their case. In an attempt to stick as closely as possible to that format, the telephone rules allocate 2 minutes of questioning to each justice for each round of questioning.

Chief Justice John Roberts spent the week jumping into exchanges, cutting off both lawyers and justices in the process, to keep the proceedings on track. Even so the arguments ran longer than usual.

But in Wednesday's birth control case, oral arguments went a whopping 40 minutes longer than expected.

Justice Alito, for his part, hammered the lawyer challenging the Trump administration's new birth control rules for more than seven minutes, without interruption from the chief justice.

Referencing a decision he wrote in 2014, Alito said that "Hobby Lobby held that if a person sincerely believes that it is immoral to perform an act that has the effect of enabling another person to commit an immoral act, the federal court does not have the right to say that this person is wrong on the question of moral complicity. That is precisely the question here."

Christina Peck is NPR's legal affairs intern.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Two tents in Hollywood erected beneath the 101 Freeway during a January rainstorm. (Matt Tinoco/KPCC)

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Albert Rad, a mobile phone wholesaler who fled religious persecution in Iran decades ago, said that he fully backs President Trump's decision to assassinate Iran's top military commander. ; Credit: Josie Huang/LAist

Los Angeles is home to the largest Iranian population outside of Iran. The killing of top Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani is generating some strong emotions here. KPPC’s Josie Huang reports from Persian Square in Westwood. 

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: Courtesy Randy Newman

Read the full article at LAist

A spike in texts and calls to crisis hotlines reflects Americans' growing anxiety about the coronavirus and its impact on their lives.; Credit: Richard Bailey/Getty Images

Normally, Laura Mayer helps the most acutely suicidal callers find the nearest hospital emergency room. But in a pandemic, that has become a crisis counselor's advice of last resort.

"It's a difficult decision because we do know that by sending them into an overburdened health care system, they may or may not get the treatment that they need," says Mayer, who is director of PRS CrisisLink in Oakton, Va., which also takes calls for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. "The resources may or may not be there, and we're exposing them to the illness."

So instead, counselors are devoting more time to each caller, offering ad hoc therapy and coaxing them to talk through their pain. These days, that pain often has many sources: lost jobs, severed relationships and sick family.

"The type of call and the seriousness of the call is very different this year than it was in previous years," Mayer says. "There's environmental issues, internal issues, family issues. ... It's never one thing."

America's crisis centers and hotlines are themselves in crisis. As people grapple with fear, loneliness and grief, on a grand scale, those stresses are showing up at crisis hotlines. Not only are the needs greater, but their clients' problems are more acute and complex and offer a window into the emotional struggles Americans face.

Across the board, hotlines of all kinds are reporting increases in volume.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration saw a fivefold increase at its National Helpline in March. The Crisis Text Line says its volumes are up 40% in the pandemic, to about 100,000 conversations a month.

Volunteer counselors and good Samaritans are responding by lining up to help.

But Mayer says the heaviness takes its toll. Those offering this kind of support end up needing support themselves.

"This illness is starting to impact each of our crisis workers and counselors themselves personally," she says. "So everyone is kind of a client right now, and that's been really challenging."

Nancy Lublin, CEO and co-founder of the Crisis Text Line, says she is bracing for sustained need. "This echo of the physical virus, the mental health echo, we fear it's going to last a very long time and that the intensity will remain," she says.

Over the last two months, the focal point of the emotional pain has shifted, she says. Initially, the spike in traffic was over anxiety about the virus itself. That shifted to complaints of isolation. Now, texters talk of depression and grief.

"So we've doubled the number of conversations that are about grief, and there the top two words that we see are 'grandma' and 'grandpa,' " she says.

And it's no longer just young people texting. Adults are complaining of loneliness, sexual abuse and eating disorders.

"As the quarantines go on and continue, we're seeing it's the people over the age of 35 who are increasing at a higher percentage of our volume," Lublin says. "For the first time, we're seeing people over the age of 60 texting us."

Texting is an ideal medium, she says, for those stuck at home with no personal space: "You don't have to find a quiet space where no one else can hear you."

And for some, that might be the only form of escape. The text line has seen a 74% increase in references to domestic violence. "We see words like 'trapped' [and] 'hurt,' " says Lublin.

Many shelters have shut down, and some of those in-person centers, including the Salvation Army in Philadelphia, now rely on their own hotlines instead.

Arielle Curry, director of the Salvation Army's anti-human trafficking program, says many of her clients can't afford cell phones and have lost touch; those who remain in contact are in dire straits, searching for a shorter supply of money or drugs, and are often suicidal. Curry says addressing those acute emotional needs by phone is frustrating; sometimes she doesn't even know where they are and can't send help to intervene.

"You can't ... comfort someone and look them in their eyes and support them face-to-face," she says. That makes it hard, Curry says, not to feel helpless and hopeless herself.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Physical and occupational therapists carry bags of personal protective equipment on their way to the room of a COVID-19 patient in a Stamford Hospital intensive care unit in Stamford, Conn., on April 24. This "prone team" turns over COVID-19 to help them breathe.; Credit: John Moore/Getty Images

Intensive care teams inside hospitals are rapidly altering the way they care for patients with COVID-19.

The changes range from new protective gear to new treatment protocols aimed at preventing deadly blood clots.

"Things are moving so fast within this pandemic, it's hard to keep up" says Dr. Angela Hewlett, an infectious diseases physician at University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and medical director of the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. To stay current, she says, ICUs are updating their practices "on an hourly basis."

"We are learning at light speed about the disease," says Dr. Craig Coopersmith , interim director of the critical care center at Emory University. "Things that previously might have taken us years to learn, we're learning in a week or two. Things that might have taken us a month to learn beforehand, we're learning in a day or two."

The most obvious changes involve measures to protect ICU doctors, nurses and staff from the virus.

"There is a true and real probability of infection," says Dr. Tiffany Osborn a critical care specialist at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. "You have to think about everything you touch as if it burned."

So ICUs are adapting measures used at special biocontainment units like the one at the University of Nebraska. These units were designed to care for patients affected by bioterrorism or infected with particularly hazardous communicable diseases like SARS and Ebola.

The Nebraska biocontainment unit "received several patients early on in the pandemic who were medically evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship," Hewlett says. But it didn't have enough beds for the large numbers of local patients who began arriving at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

So the nurses, respiratory therapists and physicians from the biocontainment team have "fanned out and are now working within those COVID units to make sure that all of our principles and protocols are followed there as well," Hewlett says.

Those protocols involve measures like monitoring ICU staff when they remove their protective gear to make sure the virus isn't transmitted, and placing infected patients in negative pressure rooms, which draw air inward, when possible to prevent the virus from escaping.

One of the riskiest ICU procedures is inserting a breathing tube in a COVID-19 patient's airway, which creates a direct path for virus to escape from a patient's lungs. "If you're intubating a patient, that's a much higher risk than, say, going in and doing routine patient care," Hewlett says.

So ICU teams are being advised to add several layers of protection beyond a surgical mask.

Extra personal protective equipment may include an N95 respirator, goggles, a full face shield, a head hood, an impermeable isolation gown and double gloves.

In many ICUs, teams are also placing a clear plastic box or sheet over the patient's head and upper body before inserting the tube. And as a final safety measure, the doctor may guide the tube using a video camera rather than looking directly down a patient's airway.

"It usually takes 30 minutes or so in order to get all of that equipment together, to get all of the right people there," says Dr. Kira Newman, a senior resident physician at UW Medical Center in Seattle. "and that would be a particularly fast intubation."

But most changes in the ICU are in response to an ongoing flood of new information about how COVID-19 affects the body.

There's a growing understanding, for example, that the infection can cause dangerous blood clots to form in many severely ill patients. These clots can kill if they block arteries supplying the lungs or brain. But they also can prevent blood from reaching the kidneys or even a patient's arms and legs.

Clots are a known risk for all ICU patients, Cooperman says, but the frequency and severity appears much greater with COVID-19. "So we're starting them on a higher level of medicine to prevent blood clots and if somebody actually develops blood clots, we have a plan B and a plan C and a plan D," he says.

ICU teams are also recalibrating their approach to ensuring that patients are getting enough oxygen. Early in the pandemic, the idea was to put patients on mechanical ventilator quickly to make sure their oxygen levels didn't fall too far.

But with experience, doctors have found that mechanical ventilators don't seem to work as well for COVID patients as they do for patients with other lung problems. They've also learned that that many COVID-19 patients remain lucid and relatively comfortable even when the oxygen levels in their blood are extremely low.

So many specialists are now recommending alternatives to mechanical ventilation, even for some of the sickest patients. "We're really trying now to not intubate," Osborn says.

Instead, ICU teams are relying on devices that deliver oxygen through the nasal passages, or through a mask that fits tightly over the face. And there's renewed interest in an old technique to help patients breathe. It's called proning.

"Instead of them being on their back, we're turning them on their front," Osborn says. The reason, she says is to open up a part of the lung that is collapsed when a patient is on their back.

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; Credit: Alyson Hurt/NPR

To safely phase out social distancing measures, the U.S. needs more diagnostic testing for the coronavirus, experts say. But how much more?

The Trump administration said on April 27 the U.S. will soon have enough capacity to conduct double the current amount of testing for active infections. The country has done nearly 248,000 tests daily on average in the last seven days, according to the nonprofit Covid Tracking Project. Doubling that would mean doing around 496,000 a day.

Will that be enough? What benchmark should states try to hit?

One prominent research group, Harvard's Global Health Institute, proposes that the U.S. should be doing more than 900,000 tests per day as a country. This projection, released Thursday, is a big jump from its earlier projection of testing need, which was between 500,000 and 600,000 daily.

Harvard's testing estimate increased, says Ashish Jha, director of the Global Health Institute, because the latest modeling shows that the outbreak in the U.S. is worse than projected earlier.

"Just in the last few weeks, all of the models have converged on many more people getting infected and many more people [dying]," he says.

But each state's specific need for testing varies depending on the size of its outbreak, explains Jha. The bigger the outbreak, the more testing is needed.

Thursday Jha's group at Harvard published a simulation that estimates the amount of testing needed in each state by May 15. In the graphic below, we compare these estimates with the average numbers of daily tests states are currently doing. (Jump to graphic)

Two ways to assess whether testing is adequate

To make their state-by-state estimates, the Harvard Global Health Institute group started from a model of future case counts. They calculated how much testing would be needed for a state to test all infected people and any close contacts they may have exposed the virus. (The simulation estimates testing 10 contacts on average.)

"Testing is outbreak control 101, because what testing lets you do is figure out who's infected and who's not," Jha says. "And that lets you separate out the infected people from the non infected people and bring the disease under control."

This approach is how communities can prevent outbreaks from flaring up. First, test all symptomatic people, then reach out to their close contacts and test them, and finally ask those who are infected or exposed to isolate themselves.

Our chart also shows another testing benchmark for each state: the ratio of tests conducted that come back positive. Communities that see around 10% or fewer positives among their test results are probably testing enough, the World Health Organization advises. If the rate is higher, they're likely missing a lot of active infections.

What is apparent from the data we present below is that many states are far from both the Harvard estimates and the 10% positive benchmark.

Just nine states are near or have exceeded the testing minimums estimated by Harvard; they are mostly larger, less populous states: Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Several states with large outbreaks — New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut among others — are very far from the minimum testing target. Some states that are already relaxing their social-distancing restrictions, such as Georgia, Texas and Colorado, are far from the target too.

Jha offers several caveats about his group's estimates.

Estimates are directional not literal

Researchers at the Global Health Initiative at Harvard considered three different models of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak as a starting point for their testing estimates. They found that while there was significant variation in the projections of outbreak sizes, all the models tend to point in the same direction, i.e. if one model showed that a state needed significantly more testing, the others generally did too.

The model they used to create these estimates is the Youyang Gu COVID-19 Forecasts, which they say has tracked closely with what's actually happened on the ground. Still the researchers caution, these numbers are not meant to be taken literally but as a guide.

If social distancing is relaxed, testing needs may grow

The Harvard testing estimates are built on a model that assumes that states continue social distancing through May 15. And about half of states have already started lifting some of those.

Jha says, that without the right measures in place to contain spread, easing up could quickly lead to new cases.

"The moment you relax, the number of cases will start climbing. And therefore, the number of tests you need to keep your society, your state from having large outbreaks will also start climbing," warns Jha.

Testing alone is not enough

A community can't base the decision that it's safe to open up on testing data alone. States should also see a consistent decline in the number of cases, of two weeks at least, according to White House guidance. If their cases are instead increasing, they should assume the number of tests they need will increase too.

And Jha warns, testing is step one, but it won't contain an outbreak by itself. It needs to be part of "a much broader set of strategies and plans the states need to have in place" when they begin to reopen.

In fact, his group's model is built on the assumption that states are doing contact tracing and have plans to support isolation for infected or exposed people.

"I don't want anybody to just look at the number and say, we meet it and we're good to go," he says. "What this really is, is testing capacity in the context of having a really effective workforce of contact tracers."

The targets are floors not goals

States that have reached the estimated target should think of that as a starting point.

"We've always built these as the floor, the bare minimum," Jha says. More testing would be even better, allowing states to more rapidly tamp down case surges.

In fact, other experts have proposed the U.S. do even more testing. Paul Romer, a professor of economics at New York University proposed in a recent white paper that if the U.S. tested every resident, every two weeks, isolating those who test positive, it could stop the pandemic in its tracks.

Jha warns that without sufficient testing, and the infrastructure in place to trace and isolate contacts, there's a real risk that states — even those with few cases now — will see new large outbreaks. "I think what people have to remember is that the virus isn't gone. The disease isn't gone. And it's going to be with us for a while," he says.

Daniel Wood contributed to this report.

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President Trump has said he wants to see the country begin to reopen. The pandemic crashed the economy by keeping people at home, leading to millions of job losses.; Credit: Pool/Getty Images

The White House coronavirus task force rejected detailed guidance drafted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how workplaces ranging from schools to bars to churches should resume operations to prevent the spread of the virus because it was viewed as "overly prescriptive."

President Trump has said he wants to see the country begin to reopen. The pandemic crashed the economy by keeping people at home, leading to millions of job losses. The White House task force issued guidelines on how to gradually and safely reopen but left decisions up to governors based on conditions in their states.

Experts have warned that a rush to reopen could have disastrous implications for containing COVID-19. Many businesses have said they want more details about how to do things safely.

The draft detailed guidance was provided to the task force in late April, a couple of weeks after it released its April 16 guidance to states for reopening.

The task force sought "certain revisions" to the CDC's detailed guidance, two administration officials told NPR. But revised recommendations were never returned to the task force.

The Associated Press first reported on the task force decision to shelve the detailed guidance. Copies obtained and published by the AP, The New York Times and The Washington Post revealed detailed, staged directions for child care centers, schools, camps, restaurants and bars, churches and mass transit providers about how to safely resume operations.

"I think many people would argue that it is not the role of the federal government to tell specific entities — whether they be schools or churches or businesses — how they should go about doing things because the nation is so diverse," one of the administration officials said.

The task force said that some of the points may be helpful, but they needed to "zoom out a little bit and not be so prescriptive," according to the official. The task force said they would welcome a new set of recommendations, but that never happened, the official said.

"Issuing overly specific instructions — that CDC leadership never cleared — for how various types of businesses open up would be overly prescriptive and broad for the various circumstances states are experiencing throughout the country," the second administration official said. "Guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn't be the same guidance for urban New York City."

The United States last month reached 1 million known coronavirus cases, representing one-third of all coronavirus cases worldwide. Nearly 74,000 Americans have been felled by the disease as of Thursday, according to data compiled by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

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The high school senior sitting across from Franciene Sabens was in tears over the abrupt amputation of her social life and turmoil at home. Because of the coronavirus, there will be no prom, no traditional send-off or ceremony for the graduates of Carbondale Community High School in Carbondale, Ill. And Sabens, one of the school's counselors, could not give the girl the one thing Sabens' gut told her the teen needed most.

"I want to hug them all, but I really wanted to hug that one," Sabens remembers.

Instead of a desk between counselor and student, there were miles of Internet cable and a computer screen. No hug. No private office. This is Sabens' new normal.

"Zoom is just not gonna ever bridge that gap," she says. "That one was pretty rough."

The job of the school counselor has evolved over the years, from academic guide to something deeper: the adult in a school tasked with fostering students' social and emotional growth, a mental health first responder and a confidant for kids, especially teens, who often need a closed door and a sympathetic ear. But the closure of nearly all U.S. schools has forced counselors like Sabens to reimagine how they can do their jobs. And the stakes have never been higher.

Why students need counselors now more than ever

Between closed schools, social isolation, food scarcity and parental unemployment, the coronavirus pandemic has so destabilized kids' support systems that the result, counselors say, is genuinely traumatic.

Sarah Kirk, an elementary school counselor in Tulsa, Okla., is especially worried about her students who were already at-risk, whose families "really struggle day to day in their homes with how they're going to pay the next bill and how they're going to get food on the table. Being home for this extended period of time is definitely a trauma for them."

For so many children, Kirk says, "school is their safe place. They look forward to coming. They don't want to leave when the day is over. And to take that away from them, I do worry about the traumatic experience that will cause for many of our students."

Counselors say part of the trauma comes from students being isolated from each other.

"In a middle school, that social piece is so important," says Laura Ross, a middle school counselor in Lawrenceville, Ga. Yes, they do a lot of connecting via social media, and that's still happening, "but that face-to-face and being with their friends... they're missing that."

Students are also experiencing a kind of grief "over what they've lost," Sabens says, especially seniors. "Losing out on the end of their senior years — something that they've dreamed about their whole life... has really been overwhelming for them. So there have been a lot of tears. There have been a lot of questions... 'What did we ever do to deserve this?'"

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. Instead, Sabens says, she tries to let students know "that it's OK to not be OK. I mean, most of the world is not OK right now... It's OK to grieve about what you're losing because it is tragic."

Brian Coleman, a high school counselor in Chicago, says trauma is nothing new to many of his students, but he hopes awareness of the potentially traumatic effects of school closures means "trauma-informed care is going to really, really explode in ideally healthy, meaningful ways."

That means school leaders should right now be planning for the future, asking how they can best support students when they come back to school, Ross says, "making sure that we're prepared to deal with some of those feelings that are going to increase — of anxiousness, of grief, of that disconnect that they had for so long."

Broken connections

Not only are many students grieving and struggling with new trauma, it's also harder now for school counselors to help them. That's because counselors have lost one of the most powerful tools they had before schools closed: access. Before, counselors could speak to entire classrooms about bullying and how to manage their feelings, plus they enjoyed office space where students could drop in for a quick visit or schedule a tough conversation.

"I think about my eighth graders," says Laura Ross in Lawrenceville. "My office is in their hallway. I mean, they just stop by to say hello. They stop by when they're upset, just to come in and talk and, you know, figure out their feelings."

But all of that has changed. Today, a face-to-face video meeting is the closest a counselor can get to the old ideal. Before that can happen, though, Sabens says she has to find her students.

"Email, email, email, email — lots of emails," she says, calling it her "primary mode of communication with the students."

Connecting is even more complicated for elementary school counselors whose students generally don't have cell phones or email addresses. In Tulsa, Sarah Kirk says this inability to speak directly with children is "exactly what keeps me up at night."

So far, Kirk has mostly been in contact with parents and caregivers. "That's whose [phone] number I have... But it's really up to the parent if they want to hand the phone over [to the student]." She worries that, if a child is not OK at home and needs help, she won't know.

Kirk's focus on these calls has also shifted away from academics toward "the basic needs of our kids... making sure they have enough food. We're making sure they're safe."

Evelyn Ramirez, a first-year middle school counselor in rural Redwood Valley, Calif., agrees: "Our main priority right now is just to check the welfare of each student."

Ramirez, a first-generation Mexican-American, says online learning can put additional strain on immigrant and low-income families. "I feel for the students whose parents don't know English or don't really know how to help their students."

"It's no longer private"

NPR spoke with counselors across the country, from California to Georgia, Oklahoma to Ohio, and nearly all said they worry about even the best-case scenario — when they're able to connect with a student face-to-face using video chat technology. Their fear: privacy.

At school, "we have some sort of office space... where students can feel like they're having a private conversation with counselors," says Coleman in Chicago. "Now we're asking them to be vulnerable in some capacity at home. And for so many students, home is a space where they're triggered or they don't feel comfortable sharing ... because it's no longer private."

Yes, the student's bedroom door may be closed, says Ramirez in Redwood Valley, but "at any given point, someone can walk in or, you know, mom's down in the living room. She can probably hear [our] conversation." And that might keep students from really opening up about things like basic stress or even abuse.

The same holds true for many elementary school counselors.

"We do small group counseling for kids [who] are adjusting to a variety of changes, and there's an element of confidentiality that's built into that group," says Marie Weller, an elementary school counselor in Delaware, Ohio. "So I can't do a group online. I can't use Canvas or Zoom or Google Hangouts for a group because I can't get the confidentiality. So [I'm] trying to figure out, how can I check in?"

Getting creative

In Lawrenceville, Laura Ross admits: These have been trying times. But there's also a surprising upside, she says. The distance from students has forced her to get creative about how she uses technology to build a bridge back to them.

Before the outbreak, Ross helped create an after-school club for students who identify as LGBTQ+. When school closed, Ross set up a Google Classroom and asked if the club's members wanted to continue to meet virtually. "They definitely did. And the reactions were just a relief that they were still going to have the support of that club... the place that they could truly be themselves."

Ross says they even meet at the same time each week, just on Zoom.

On her last day in the office, before Ohio closed its schools, Marie Weller remembers starting to leave — then hesitating beside the childlike puppets she sometimes uses in her classroom counseling presentations. "Huh," she thought. "Maybe I'll be able to use these."

Weller and her fellow elementary school counselors say one important part of their job is making sure all students have the social-emotional skills and coping strategies they'll need to navigate a complex world. How can they do that now, from home?

Weller improvised.

She set up a smartphone camera in her house, surrounded by those puppets — a kind of surrogate classroom audience — and set about recording mini counseling lessons from her kitchen. Instead of the chime she normally uses to begin a lesson, she rings a mixing bowl with a red spatula. To teach kids about how and why they should filter what they say, leaving hurtful thoughts unspoken, she opens the coffee maker to show them how a real, paper filter works.

Weller does her own editing and even got permission from folk music favorites The Irish Rovers to use their song "What's Cooking In The Kitchen" as her opening theme. The resulting videos are brief, rich and charming, with lines like, "Your brain's amygdala acts like a guard dog."

And in Tulsa, Sarah Kirk is doing something similar, posting videos where she's sitting on the floor of her house, surrounded by colorful pennants and stuffed animals. Her dog, Crew, a cuddly 80-pound sheepadoodle (nearly as big as Kirk), even makes a camera-blocking cameo.

In her first episode, Kirk read a story meant to reassure children she can no longer hug. It's about how we all have an invisible string that connects us, even when we're far apart.

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Friday, March 13, was the last time Alexandra Sullivan saw her fellow yearbook staffers in person.

"We were trying to get as many pictures of people as possible 'cause we knew we wouldn't be able to take any more," Sullivan, 18, says.

Like most U.S. public school students, Sullivan is learning from home now. And much like her lessons, her work on the yearbook continues.

Sullivan is the yearbook profiles editor at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. She's one of 10 seniors who were also on staff two years ago, when a gunman opened fire at their school. Back then, she and her classmates had to adapt to an unimaginable tragedy. Now, they have to adapt again – this time, to the pandemic.

"This book has to get done and we'll do whatever we have to do to finish it," she says, "which is exactly how we approached the '18 book."

Senior Caitlynn Tibbetts, the yearbook's co-editor-in-chief, was also on staff when the shooting happened. She says there's a collective grief among seniors over what their class — which has already lost so much — is losing now. They won't be able to dance together at prom, or walk across the stage at graduation.

"This class especially has gotten screwed over so much through the past four years," Tibbetts, 18, says. "The last two months were supposed to be the best, and they were supposed to make up for everything that we've been through. And it's really hard on us to kind of just watch it all disappear."

Amid all the uncertainty, she says, one thing is clear: The yearbook must get done, and it must get to students.

High school yearbooks are like time capsules. They record theater productions, which teams went to state finals, who was voted most likely to succeed.

And when a news event makes history – leaving a mark on students and society – it's the yearbook's job to document it. At Stoneman Douglas, that's meant changing plans just weeks before the yearbook is due.

Yearbook advisor Sarah Lerner says, "Having done one under unthinkable circumstances before, I hate to say that we're kind of, you know, used to it, but, for the seniors on staff, we are."

Two years ago, after the shooting, the yearbook staff pivoted to include remembrances of the victims. Tibbetts and Sullivan stepped up to help write them, and anything else that was needed at the last minute, while other yearbook staffers took time to attend funerals.

This year, they're making room for two new spreads about the pandemic.

"One of them is more of a factual-based one, how it's affected our community, including businesses," Tibbetts explains. "The other spread is focused on the effect it's had on us personally, both with online schooling and especially with seniors."

Logistically, putting the yearbook together and writing the new sections has been a challenge. Unlike 2018, they can't be in the same room with each other to finish the design.

"We have to social distance and our parents wouldn't let us go out," Tibbetts says.

They mainly rely on a group chat with everyone on the staff. "It can get hectic," Tibbetts says, "especially when it's all happening at like 12 a.m."

Lerner and her students missed the original deadline to finish the book, on April 6. But the printer, Walsworth, says the company is being flexible with Stoneman Douglas and other yearbook staffs across the country. Lerner says she's aiming to get the book in by the end of April.

Once the printed copies come back, more than 1,200 books will somehow have to be distributed to students. Lerner has some ideas for how to do that safely.

However, there's one important yearbook tradition they may not be able to save.

"We may not actually get to sign books this year," Lerner says. And that's been hard to accept.

"As a teacher, I really like to get my students to sign my book, you know, and I like to sign theirs and I like to see the kids carrying them around at school."

Lerner says she's sad that might not happen this year. But at least this time, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School aren't on their own.

"Unlike the 2018 books, this situation is not unique to us," she says. "So there's comfort in knowing that all staffs are going through the same issue. It's not just us."

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This week, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that more than $300 million from the first coronavirus rescue package will go to two education grant competitions for K-12 and higher ed.

States will be able to apply for a piece of the $180 million allotted to the "Rethink K-12 Education Models Grant" and $127.5 million allotted to the "Reimagining Workforce Preparation Grant."

The money is 1% of the more than $30 billion set aside for education in the CARES Act. Those billions are intended to help states with the highest coronavirus burden.

States can access the money by creating proposals to fund virtual or work-based learning programs. The grant categories include two of DeVos' pre-existing pet policy ideas: "microgrants" that go directly to home-schooling families, and microcredentials that offer a shorter path to workforce preparation.

On the higher ed side, the secretary has long pushed for workforce-oriented education and shorter paths to a degree. She's been praised for this stance by online and for-profit colleges, while traditional institutions have been less sanguine.

Similarly, the secretary is a longtime advocate of alternatives to public schools, including home schooling. She has praised programs like Florida's Gardiner Scholarship, which provides up to $10,000 to the families of children with special needs to support home schooling. Last fall, DeVos proposed a $5 billion "Education Freedom Scholarship" program, which would have used federal tax credits to support, essentially, a voucher program that families could use both for private schools and home schooling.

While this week's announcement is significant for the policy directions it signals, it's a comparatively small amount of money. Education groups have asked the federal government for $200 billion (with a B) more in funds to maintain basic services.

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A for-profit college received millions of dollars from the federal government to help low-income students whose lives have been upended by the coronavirus outbreak, but that same school, Florida Career College (FCC), is also accused of defrauding students.

A federal class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of students in April calls FCC "a sham" and alleges that, long before the pandemic, the college was targeting economically vulnerable people of color. The plaintiffs say the vocational school enticed them with false promises of career training and job placement — but spent little on instruction while charging exorbitant prices and pushing students into loans they cannot repay.

The lawsuit comes as thousands of colleges across the country are receiving federal emergency relief in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Through the CARES Act, FCC has been allotted $17 million. The law requires that at least half of that money goes directly to students, but makes few stipulations for the rest of it.

Experts say the complaint against FCC raises serious concerns about the college's ability to safeguard taxpayer dollars, as well as its ability to serve its own students.

In a statement to NPR, Florida Career College General Counsel Aaron Mortensen says: "This lawsuit is baseless legally and factually. Though we cannot comment because the matter is in litigation, we will aggressively fight these false allegations."

Equipment was "at best limited, and at worse, nonexistent"

Plaintiff Kareem Britt was working as a cook when he noticed a Facebook ad for FCC.

"Are you tired of working minimum wage jobs? Eating ramen noodles?" the ad asked. "Are you ready to step up to steak? HVAC degrees make $16 to $23/hr."

An FCC representative told Britt that a degree could change his life and that the school would help him land a job. He qualified for a $6,000 federal Pell Grant and an FCC "scholarship loan" for $3,000. Britt decided to enroll in the HVAC training program.

After classes began, though, Britt says equipment necessary to learn the trade was in short supply. "Tools, machinery, and other learning devices were at best limited, and at worse, nonexistent," according to the complaint.

When it came time for the school to help Britt find a job, he says, FCC found him just two, two-week placements, and he failed to find HVAC work on his own. Making matters worse, once he'd finished school, Britt learned that he had also taken on federal loans worth $9,500, which he must now pay back as a hotel cook, the same kind of job he'd held before enrolling.

Reverse redlining

The complaint alleges that Florida Career College, along with its parent company, specifically targets economically vulnerable people of color.

"They are recruiting at majority Black high schools," says Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, one of the organizations representing the plaintiffs. "They are putting up billboards in towns where the population is mostly Black. And they're doing a lot of advertising on social media where you can choose to target your ad essentially by race."

Stephen Stewart is Jamaican and says he was drawn to an FCC ad on Instagram. He decided to visit campus, and says one word captures his experience: "pressure."

Like Britt, Stewart was considering FCC's HVAC program. After his tour, when a representative told him the program would cost more than $20,000, Stewart balked. He remembers the representative pushed, telling him: "'I know so many students that have went here... I'm talking about people with five, six kids in a worse situation than you're in.'" Stewart was 20 at the time and childless. "'You're telling me that they can go through this, make their payments and pay off their tuition, and you can't?'"

Stewart enrolled in FCC's HVAC program after being promised that, within a year, the school would find him a job in his field.

The complaint takes aim at these recruiting practices. It alleges that FCC is selling the promise of a career and financial success to cash-strapped communities of color where college feels out of reach, "discriminating against students on the basis of race by inducing them to purchase a worthless product by taking on debt they cannot repay."

According to Education Department data, 85% of FCC's students are people of color.

This practice of discriminating by targeting students of color has a name: Reverse redlining — a reference to the historical practice of excluding African-American families from home ownership and denying them access to services. Reverse redlining is illegal, and it's what sets this suit apart from previous legal battles over alleged predatory practices by for-profit colleges.

"In a weekly memo to my board last Friday, I said, 'So the new angle of attack against our sector is that we are predatory to minority communities,'" says Steve Gunderson, head of Career Education Colleges and Universities, an organization that serves as the national voice for career education schools like FCC.

"We have always celebrated the fact that approximately 45 to 50% of the students in our schools are African American and Hispanic," he says. "We're proud of that."

"Classes were a scam"

Long before the federal government granted FCC $17 million in pandemic relief, the school was already largely government-dependent. According to federal data, the lion's share of FCC's revenue — 86% — comes from federal financial aid funds, namely Pell Grants and student loans.

At the same time, federal data also suggest that the college fails to prepare many students for their chosen professions. Under an Obama-era rule known as "gainful employment," schools could lose access to federal aid if graduates don't earn enough income to repay their student debts. According to the complaint, 16 of the 17 FCC programs evaluated under the gainful employment rule failed that metric, meaning graduates weren't able to repay their loans. (The gainful employment rule was repealed in 2019.)

The median annual earnings of FCC graduates who ultimately found employment ranged from $8,983 to $32,871, according to the suit, which helps explain why, according to the most recent federal data, just 23% of FCC students have been able to pay down any of their loans' original balance within three years of leaving.

"Classes were a scam, a waste of time," says Stephen Stewart. The equipment was "limited" and "outdated," he says, and the instructor admitted to the class that he had little experience with HVAC. Stewart's worst day, though, came near the end of his nine-month program when he visited the career services department to ask when they'd help him find a job as they had promised.

Stewart says he was given a list of possible HVAC companies and told, "'You gotta get your job.'" So he did, with no help. But Stewart says it was clear that FCC hadn't given him the skills he needed to keep up in the job, let alone succeed, and he ultimately left. Today, Stewart is $15,000 in debt and says he feels "shattered" by the whole experience.

"The thing that upsets me the most about this is how much it preys upon people's hopes and dreams," says Ben Miller, who studies higher education accountability at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "You know, you have a lot of folks who want to make a better life for themselves. They have maybe one shot at college, and you rip them off and basically ruin it."

But Gunderson takes a very different view, as head of the national association for postsecondary career colleges.

"[This lawsuit] is so frustrating, because this is nothing more than an organized national effort to destroy the reputation of the [career college] sector," he says.

Gunderson insists that career colleges, including FCC, have been held to unrealistic standards. He points to the gainful employment rule, which he says measured students' incomes relatively soon after graduation. "You've got to go into the five- or 10-year mark before most of these occupations have what you and I would call our respectable salaries."

But federal data also show that, even 10 years after enrolling in FCC, more than half of its students still didn't earn more than the typical high school graduate.

Gunderson says this lawsuit is just the latest salvo in a decade-long fight to discredit for-profit, career colleges — a fight he calls "monotonous and disappointing."

"Even if you're doing a terrible job"

The law requires that at least half of the $17 million FCC is receiving through the CARES Act must go directly to students, but makes few stipulations for the rest of those funds. In a letter, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said institutions have "significant discretion" on how to award the assistance to students.

"We stand ready to deliver these funds," said Fardad Fateri, the head of FCC and its parent company, International Education Corporation, in a press release. "It is important we get these grants into the hands of our students right away, so they can better deal with this crisis."

FCC's $17 million is a small piece of the more than $14 billion lawmakers set aside in the CARES Act to help colleges and vulnerable students during the coronavirus pandemic. But Ben Miller says, in Congress' haste to help schools that serve low-income students, lawmakers are giving money to many schools with questionable records like FCC's.

"When there's no consideration of quality or outcomes, it's potentially a big award, even if you're doing a terrible job," Miller says.

Meanwhile DeVos has also championed separate policies that have made it easier for schools like FCC to continue to enroll students and receive federal student aid even as their graduates struggle. In 2019, DeVos repealed the Obama-era gainful employment rule that would have denied low-performing schools access to federal student aid.

Under the Trump administration, the Education Department has also changed the College Scorecard, a website meant to help prospective students compare colleges by price and performance. The department has removed easy access to schools' loan repayment rates. In 2018, it also removed another important metric: How the earnings of a school's graduates compared to the earnings of high school grads.

"Rather than highlighting institutions that show the best employment and loan repayment outcomes for students, this administration has made a concerted effort to hide this information from students with no explanation as to why," says Michael Itzkowitz, who was director of the College Scorecard during the Obama administration. "What's become more transparent is their willingness to prioritize certain institutions — namely for-profits — even if those aren't the best options for students choosing to pursue a postsecondary education."

The Education Department did not respond in time to requests for comment.

When students filed suit against the now-defunct for-profit Corinthian Colleges, claiming, like Britt and Stewart, that their schools had made promises about job placement and future earnings that they simply did not keep, DeVos revised another rule, known as "borrower defense," to make it more difficult for defrauded borrowers to get their money back. But the revision was so strict that 10 Senate Republicans joined with Democrats in March to rebuke the education secretary and reverse her decision.

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Patt Morrison's outfit for March 26, 2013. ; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

For good or ill, I have six-months’ worth of winterish wardrobe in a part of the world with six weeks’ worth of winter. Indoors and AC are great equalizers, yet I am rushing to get in the wools and tweeds before we start sweating – probably in April. [President Richard Nixon loved to have a fire in the fireplace of the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House, so much so that he cranked up the AC so he could enjoy a cozy fire even in August.]

So I had to give a season’s last hurrah to this Jacquard brocade coat with coppery embroidery and brown velvet piping, worn over your plain ol’ brand X brown jersey dress.

Rose-gold is such a flattering shade, hence the bracelets. [The lampshades at the Belle Epoque Paris restaurant Maxim’s were made of soft pink silk because it made ladies’ complexions look so much better.] 

Brown and orange doesn’t sound like a very tasty combination, but they do work, I think, in the subdued brown tartan shoes with rhinestone buckles the color of sunset. They put me in mind of the more prim Pilgrim buckles on Roger Vivier shoes like the ones Catherine Deneuve made famous in "Belle de Jour," a movie all about a young woman who was rather the opposite of prim behind closed doors.

The crosshairs tartan pattern in the center of the buckles make me think of a submarine periscope, which makes me think of the Lusitania — sunk 98 years ago this May 1 — which served to help nudge the United States into World War I. Now that I think of it, the brown felt and velvet hat is rather World War I-ish, too.

Hi, sailor!

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Audrey Hepburn I am not, but every once in a while, a girl’s gotta go for the gamine look, right? The ankle-length or capri trousers, the ‘50s pink and black color scheme. This is not the ‘’Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Audrey Hepburn, but the 1957 “Funny Face” Audrey, the intellectual beatnik girl who agrees to do a photo modeling shoot for Fred Astaire in exchange for a trip to Paris, where she can to worship at the feet of her “empathicalism” guru, Professor Flostre, who turns out to be just another “mec” on the make.
 
Of course I had to sneak in some commentary in this ensemble: the shirt in sweetheart-pink with stylized black silhouettes of classic runway shapes over the years …  and the shoes, with the pink-and-black face of a sassy manga girl. This one I like. Some of the sex-bomb manga girl illustrations look more like teen boy fantasy porn versions of those classic Keane portraits of solemn-faced, big-eyed children.
 
If you think Meryl Streep was a tough cookie in “The Devil Wears Prada,” check out the original: Kay Thompson and her star turn as the glamorous, tyrannical fashion mag editor in “Funny Face”! [Why do the handbags carried by women in the movies always look empty? Par for the fantasy, I suppose.

The only woman who comes close to achieving the empty handbag is the Queen, who, if rumor is believed, carries only a handkerchief and lipstick and eyeglasses in hers, maybe one or two other items, and on Sunday some money for the church collection plate. I’m convinced she keeps it handy mostly as a prop. Poor lady: it’s always a sedate British-made Launer handbag and she orders four new ones a year. Maybe at least in her imagination she goes online and buys a Stephen Sprouse Louis Vuitton neon graffiti bag, just for the heck of it.]
 
The Harry Potter cast did a little bit about the Queen’s handbag for her 80th birthday:

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Robert F. Kennedy's speech at the Ambassador Hotel. Sandi Gibbons the woman in the white dress on the bottom right.

She’s spent her life on both sides of the microphone.

For half of her career she was a reporter, finding herself in places like the Ambassador Hotel ballroom on the night Robert F. Kennedy was shot, and in the courthouse covering Charles Manson.

For the other half of her professional life, she spent a lot more time in L.A.’s courthouses as the spokeswoman for the L.A. County District Attorney’s office. She served three DAs, and now she’s hanging it up. Her retirement lunch was attended by three past and present DAs, with a fond message from a fourth, and as many of her reporter and DA friends could fit in the restaurant.

RELATED: Veteran reporter, DA spokesperson Sandi Gibbons is retiring

Sandi Gibbons has tales to tell, and here she recounts a few funny, moving and plain old perplexing ones from her life in court. And I can tell you from knowing her, she is one great dame.

Correction: Original headline spelled Sandi Gibbons' name "Sandy"

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Patt's Hats for Monday, April 8.; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

The twinset, in russet and camel colors, was my ‘homage’ to Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, who died Monday at the Ritz Hotel in London.
 
If you're unfamiliar with a twinset, it's the classic matching sweater-duo ensemble, sleeveless or short-sleeved sweater under a cardigan, a style much favored in the U.S. by June Cleaver and sorority girls in the 1950s, like the classic insufferable rich sorority girl parody from “Auntie Mame":

And in Britain by a lady of a certain age and certain class. It is usually worn with pearls, ideally three strands. Odd numbers of strands are considered more chic than even numbers. It’s probably what she wore “off duty” as prime minister.

One can’t see her [see, I’m channeling her already!] lounging about Number 10 Downing Street in velour sweats, but on duty and on display in her prime ministerial position, though, she almost always wore a kind of uniform, a brightly colored suit, ladylike but not alluring, and not unlike what the Queen wears. [In the same spirit, the Queen wears twinsets when she’s off-duty and having fun, which is to say at some horsy event or another.] 

Because Thatcher was Britain’s first woman prime minister, Britons enjoyed handicapping the relationship between their head of state [the Queen] and the head of government [the prime minister]. Theirs was not the affectionate relationship of, for example, the Queen and Winston Churchill. And the best sartorial story about the relationship is the story – which has entered into myth if not into the annals of fact – that Mrs. Thatcher’s office once called Buckingham Palace in advance of a joint appearance to find out what the Queen would be wearing so Mrs. Thatcher wouldn’t commit lese majeste and wear the same color.

The Queen, Mrs. T’s office was informed, doesn’t take any notice of what other people are wearing.
 
I wrote about Mrs. T when she came here in 1991 to celebrate the 80th birthday of her “political soulmate,” former president Ronald Reagan. She visited the Reagan library, under construction, and the JPL, among other spots. You can read that account here.
 
And here’s my obituary of the former PM.
 
I last saw her in 2002, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, at the celebration of the Queen’s golden jubilee. I actually heard her before I saw her – that unmistakably clear voice whose pitch she worked hard to shape into the pitch and tone that became part of her political toolkit. Her funeral, next Wednesday, will be at St. Paul’s. 

Now back to my outfit! The skirt is a vintage Sonia Rykiel, which is worth the constant battle with moths to keep it in repair. I like vintage for myriad reasons: no one else is wearing what you’re wearing … the fabrics are usually of much better quality and more interesting than present-day ones … and unlike current store-bought things, vintage has the merit of being environmentally friendly.
 
I was tickled to see my viewpoint endorsed by the accomplished Vanessa Paradis, the charming and glamorous French singer and actress, Chanel model, Lagerfeld muse, and the new face of H&M’s new environmentally conscious line. Here she talks about embracing those virtues herself. Merci, Vanessa!
 
Oh, I spared the oysters and didn’t wear pearls with my twinset. Rose gold is the choice du jour.  Real? I wish!

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Patt's outfit for April 12, 2013.; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

You don’t believe it looking out your windows in Southern California today, but spring it is. Perhaps I am forcing the spring by wearing bouquets on my stems – I think I can identify ranunculus, poppies, dianthus, and maybe roses?

I don’t know how authentically botanical fabric print designers think they ought to be, but I have an unshakable childhood recall of a bedroom in my great-grandmother’s house wallpapers in blue roses, and I was for years thereafter convinced that I could grow myself some blue roses.

And is there a happier color than this jacket’s coral/peach, or a springier fabric than the cotton-blend pique? It’s not as strenuous a shade as it would be in its brightness equivalent elsewhere on the color wheel, like electric blue or acid green. [And if it were, well, I’d wear it anyway!]

But the cloche hat – Daisy Buchanan, eat your platinum heart out. The ruched ombre silk ribbon on the crown and the minute bits of bent and curled ostrich feathers, like hatchlings on the hat! [I like saying that even more than I like writing it: "ruched ombre." It sounds like a fantastical concoction of molecular gastronomy: "the rambutan brûlée this evening is topped with ruched ombre."?     

Any bets on whether the May release of "The Great Gatsby" will revive 1920s chic? Who’s ready for dropped waistlines, lower heels and  long sautoir necklaces?

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Patt's Hats for April 17, 2013.; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

Is it, by chance, Helena Bonham Carter’s birthday? This begged me to take it out of the closet this morning, a frock very much a la Bonham Carter mode. [We all do know that her husband, Tim Burton, is from Burbank, right?]
 
The dress is from Stefanel – anyone know of Stefanel? An Italian company that’s done especially knockout knits. I don’t know that it has any shops here in the U.S. but I hazarded into Stefanel in Europe and liked the attitude, as well as the silhouettes, and this one in particular.
 
The sweater-ribbed knit band at the bottom puts an edge on the frou-frou of the skirt, as do the big hardware snaps on the bodice.  [That word, froufrou, or frou-frou, meaning fussy or embellished, or covered with "furbelows." "Furbelows"  is one of my favorite fashion words.
 
"Froufrou" dates to France in about 1870, when women’s clothes were exactly that. Sarah Bernhardt, one of my style icons, starred in a play entitled “Frou-Frou.”   

Of course Bernhardt gets to die ravishingly and at length in the play – she had more ways of expiring than James Bond’s villains ever dreamed up – and even though she only performed in French, American audiences ate it up when she toured here. Bernhardt said she could always recoup her fortunes in the United States, and “Frou Frou” helped her to do just that.
 
This dress, with the taffeta bubble skirt, reminded me of the style worn by Tom Wolfe’s New York society matrons in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” It’s the magnificently seminal social novel about race and wealth in 1980s New York. Wolfe he called the women “social X-rays” for the bony gauntness they cultivated. If you have not read it, you really must. It lays the groundwork for the lifestyles of the Wall Street rich and notorious of today, and is one of my favorite novels.
 
The Lucite heel on the ankle boots – "Perspex," as the British call it – gives the effect of floating, ballerina-like, across the floor – an effect I will never achieve in real life, so must rely on footwear to give me a semblance of it.

I coveted the Lucite-wedge shoes that Maison Margiela sold briefly at H&M, but didn’t have the stamina to wake up at dawn and line up at 6 a.m. back when they went on sale, so these shoes gave me a bit of the same look, along with a full night’s sleep.

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; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

This is my Earth Day homage, with the green cotton poplin coat and the nifty closures. Couture and hardware experts! Can I beseech you to tell us what this type of closure is called? The round metal gizmo is a grommet, but what do you call the short bar at the end of a chain that goes through the grommet to secure it?

I hope there’s some fanciful medieval word for it, because in my fevered romantic brain, it has the feel of the kind of clothing closure that might have been used for a coat of mail or doublet or surcoat or cotehardie or any of a number of divinely archaic phrases for wardrobe items.
 
Can a print still be spring-y when it’s on a black background, like this one? I’ve heard that there’s a new vogue for prints in tshirts. I would welcome that, because I’m weary of the myriad dreary fan-girl T-shirts, and the clever or hip ones meant to show that you are unique, along with the other two-million people wearing the identical shirt. I’ve seen enough devil’s horns and skulls and snakes to fill the Book of Revelations, so let’s just move along, shall we?
 
These shoes I wear, but rarely. Otherwise they doze quietly in their red flannel shoe bag: my green patent-leather Louboutins. I’d coveted them since seeing them new in a shop in London, when they cost about as much as my plane ticket. I lay in wait for years for someone to put them up on eBay.

The name of the style is “Iowa.” Did the person in charge of naming styles for M. Louboutin know that Iowa is a flat agricultural state smack dab in the middle of the United States? Or perhaps he or she simply liked the esthetics of a word with three vowels and a consonant. What leads me to suspect the latter is the fact that Paris has a wanna-be TexMex cafe named “Indiana.”

When I went there, it was chockablock with images of Indians, who have nothing to do with TexMex food and are not much associated these days with the state of Indiana.
 
For the life of me, I can’t remember where I got the bracelet, but the blue-green-colored “art glass” cabochons practically glow, like that magnificent iridescence that you find in nature. It goes by the fine name ‘’goniochromism,’’ which you should really start throwing around more in general conversation. It’s the purview of butterfly wings and peacock feathers and  scarabs and abalone shells, of course, and of that changeable taffets which seems to have a recrudescence every few years on the racks of prom gowns, and probably should not.

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; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

From brights the other day to mutes today. You could call this color palette "blush and sand," which sounds like the title of a romance novel with a Valentino lookalike on the cover!

This is exactly the kind of sweater I used to tease my grandmother about wearing, the elaborately beaded 1950s cardigans that you saw on everyone from Babe Paley to Lucille Ball to … your grandmother. 

Of course, now I wish I had more of them! The best are the silk-lined cashmere or merino wool ones made in what was, for more than 150 years, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. The work of Hong Kong tailors is legendary, and now all the 1950s and early 1960s pieces are enjoying a tremendous vogue.

In this case the colors – bronze, blush and sand – are hushed, which lets the beading look more pronounced. The sleeveless top is a silk jersey criss-crossed with stitched bands of darker silk chiffon. King’s X? And then the skirt is bias-cut chiffon in very quiet hues. If designers gave quirky names to prints the way cosmetics makers do to lipstick and cheek color, we could call this one, "Shhh! This is a library!’"

So I’m glad that the shoes get paroled to holler. The nude patent color is ladylike, not loud, which is why I’m surprised but gratified that it’s hung around for a couple of seasons now. It’s a very versatile hue, even if it’s not making it as Pantone's color of the year.

No, the troublemaker part of this ensemble is the jeweled heels. Paul Simon sang of diamonds on the soles of one’s shoes; these are big dazzling rhinestones on the heels of mine. They gleam, they coruscate, they twinkle, they flash – amid all these well-behaved quiet colors, they send out a wink and a message that "I’m really a lively girl at heart, and at my feet."

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Patt Morrison's outfit for May 20. ; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

Here’s another version of those capris – these are a lace print from H&M – and while I’ve seen women wearing them with high heels, it just doesn’t seem right somehow. It so sullies the legacies of Mary Tyler Moore and Audrey Hepburn to pair them with anything but flats!

This is my version of a cutaway coat. In a coat like this I could attend Royal Ascot, or invent the telegraph. Obviously it’s a girl version, but I feel empowered, even … princely. At least Fred Astaire-ish. Maybe a pair of spats would make me feel more so. And I could waltz facing forward, not dancing backward, a la Ginger.

As for the adornments, I am not a hearts-and-butterflies kind of girl, but I do like to wear themed brooches in clusters or multiples, and this pair of hearts – just like a poker hand – seemed to work. One is the arrow-pierced one [not to be confused with the Pierce-Arrow, one of the handsomest motorcars ever made].

And the other, the enormous bogus diamond heart, I got from Butler & Wilson, the imaginative London costume jewelry [or better yet ‘jewellery’] designer. It’s my homage to a recent auction of what may be the largest perfect diamond in the world, 101.73 carats.

Harry Winston, the legendary jeweler, bought it for nearly $24 million and has chosen to call it, I am sorry to say, the “Harry Legacy,” which is not the kind of name a diamond like this deserves, one redolent of romance and myth, like “the Hope Diamond” or “the Koh-I-Noor Diamond.”

If you have any suggestions about what to name this magnificent perfect diamond, I’d love to hear them.

My own faux diamond’s name, I have decided, is “The Rhinestone Corazon.” How do you like it?

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Patt Morrison's outfit from her June 5, 2013 Patt's Hats entry. ; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

There are so many things  I like about this dress – the sleeve length, the boat neck, the fact that it’s navy and not black, and the fact that it wasn’t made in Bangladesh – but mostly it’s the gaily asymmetrical floral design that caught my eye.

The pattern is front and back, and I’m a stickler about those things. It looks like I have been loaded down with festive leis, but also loaded with one too many Mai Tais, so the flower garlands are askew as if I were listing a little bit.

There’s more of my current yellow shoe madness with these very Michelle Obama kitten-heel slingbacks in two different tones of yellow, one a more acid shade and the other more canary, or perhaps chrome yellow. That’s not to be confused with “Crome Yellow,” a very sardonic Aldous Huxley novel parodying the artsy intelligentsia set of 1920s England.

I hope you can see this bracelet. It’s a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry. The Victorians went way, way over the top on this stuff; some of it borders on the ghoulish, with lockets containing elaborately braided locks or even portraits or scenes made entirely from the hair of the deceased. I can admire the artistry but the sentiment can seem excessive. This piece, though, has a black and white enamel border around a tiny fly. Why a fly, I wondered. Then I read the inscription inside:

“From JR to AHR [clearly a husband to a wife] in loving memory of our darling little May Queen, died 7th August 1880, age 14 Mos.”

That inscription made the fly make sense. It’s a mayfly, a creature that lives a few days, or even just a few minutes, and here was this little girl, born in May – hence the May Queen reference to the mythical springtime queen of antiquity -- and died barely a year thereafter. So sweet, so sad, so human, all from an inscription on a bracelet. The girl’s parents are long dead, and so too are any siblings she may have had, but it can touch us more than 130 years later.

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Patt Morrison models a headdress from the movie "The Lone Ranger."; Credit: Michelle Lanz/KPCC

Trust me – you’re going to be seeing a lot of these between now and Halloween.

I went to “The Lone Ranger” premiere last month, and outside the theater, Disneyland began selling a version of the Tonto headdress dreamed up by Johnny Depp and his folks for his role in the film, which I found to be a rollicking, ironic version of the classic action adventure with some very sober scenes evoking Native Americans’ tragic history.

The inspiration, Depp says, was artist Kirby Sattler’s interpretive 2006 painting “I Am Crow.”

Depp himself has claimed Native American ancestry, and the bird atop his bean plays a substantial if silent role in the proceedings. It is an interpretive painting, as I said, not a literal rendering of any tribal makeup. In the Sattler painting, the bird is flying above the figure’s head, not perched on it.

But the movie’s invested in storytelling, not the fine points of accuracy. If it had been, it wouldn’t have made the historical solecisms of relocating both Monument Valley and the transcontinental railroad to … Texas.

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Patt Morrison's ensemble for Aug 8, 2013.; Credit: Dave Coelho/KPCC

What shall we call this color scheme? How about ‘Manhattan Mermaid’?

The petrel blues, the turquoises, the aquas – and then that uptown/downtown black, in this case a black linen duster over a Peter Max-style splashy-print silk dress. The way the hem pools at the sides a bit reminds me of the cut of Pre-Raphaelite ladies’ tunics; I’d love to dress “period” for a week to see whether I’d like it.

Imagine, a week of hoop skirts … a week of 1950s tailleurs … a week of bustles … a week of hobble skirts … a week of liberated Pre-Raphaelite velvet gowns!

The hat is so unmistakably summer in fabric and color that it doesn’t get out of the hatbox as much as it should, poor thing. And the shoes – I did not get them together, honest, but even though the prints don’t match, it’s the dissonance that makes them work better together than if they had.

The fabric is a very textured canvas and printed like batik. [They are not the soul of comfort – oh what a dreadful pun, but is there any other kind of pun? – but they look smart hooked over the railing of a chair in a chic bistro, which is where I intend to take them!]

And the bracelets, one from a great-aunt who had a fine eye for jewelry – the turquoise is almost Persian, it’s so green, but it’s more likely to be American. The cuff is definitely Southwest, with the rope-pattern trim and the irregularly shaped bezels, although the turquoises themselves are symmetrical.

Because I’m left-handed, my right arm bears the singular honor of being “ornamental,” and bearing the burden of the bling.

Summer on, ladies!

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