Since our last visit, I’ve been involved with changing the terrain down on the beach we share with several other homeowners. Two guys, Roger and Mike, have shouldered most of the responsibility while I’ve provided what little muscle I still have for shoveling dirt, hauling downed trees, and hefting docks, including mine. And amid all this excitement, a bear, one they say probably is young and unafraid of people, has been upsetting garbage bins at lakeside cabins and wandering onto porches and decks up here on street level. So the DNR has a bear trap rigged down near where trash bins used to be before the bin owners wised up and moved them away. The trap looks like a series of barrels welded together with a steel gate at one end. The DNR gives our bear 10 days to be trapped; after that, the trap goes to another location with a nuisance bear.
I finished the first draft of my early years, written for my children and grandchildren, and now I find more and more stuff to add. It’s a depiction of what life was like for a boy in the Mount Hollywood area during the 1940’s, 1950’s and early 1960’s. In my case, my theater reviews are interspersed in the narrative.
Last night’s WPCA-FM story reading was Curtain!, a tale of an aging actor and his former mentee. It’s a story of a man who lives his life in comparison to more famous performers, whom he uses as teaching examples for the young woman who struggles to get her career started. While he chafes at his comfortable local celebrity status, he knows he has it easy being a “big frog in a small pond”. His mentee, whose career went nowhere despite his tutoring, resurfaces to raise a major question. I always appreciate WPCA sharing my story readings; it’s a privilege few writers enjoy.