Blushing

I don't blush--much. I do scuff my toes a little when I get a complement, and Victoria Cummings at Teachings of the Horse has given me two "aw shucks" moments recently, the first with the Excellent rating for my blog and the second, more recent one this morning for "Excellence in Equine Care," no doubt for spoiling my Arabian Prince on a regular basis (and probably, though she didn't know it until now, for giving him better regular medical care than I bother for myself.) I thank Victoria very much for both of these designations. I'm happy to know I'm not just writing to myself every day.

I've been working on my list of places to pass the Excellent Award on to, which is why I didn't put it up here earlier. I'd happily give the award to each of the blogs written by other people I've got listed on the right side of the page. These are the ones I do check every day. Many of the blogs I read regularly have nothing to do with horses, but then, mine is pretty eclectic. So let me pass on an Excellent Award to:

The Patry Copyright Blog by Bill Patry, one of the geniuses of intellectual property law. I met Bill when he worked for the Copyright Office and I was a photographer in the D.C. area and I have nothing but respect for him, even if he may have gone over to an evil empire (he's now Google's chief counsel.)

Jane in Progress by Jane Espenson, a television writer acquaintance of ours who writes plenty of good advice on scriptwriting for newbies and wannabees. Jane's currently on Battlestar Galactica, but is quite well-known in our circles for her work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Wolfmanor Wisdom and Whimsy is written by Noel Wolfman who divides her time between producing animated films and making cloth dolls and selling patterns for them. There are lots of lovely pictures of things I'll never have time to make on her blog, but I might sometime get around to putting together the horsey-plush to cover a tissue box pattern she gave me! Noel is sort of the Martha Stewart in our crowd (but she'd probably agree that I'm better in the kitchen though I can't touch her in decorating.)

Behind the Bit by Stacey Kimmel-Smith recently had a post with videos of all different breeds of horses riding dressage at Grand Prix level. Loved watching the Arabian sport horse, although I though the canter pirouette was a little clumsy. The blog's got a lot of information and links on it.

Julia Sweeney has a very entertaining blog which I stumbled upon recently, not that I can remember exactly how. I've really enjoyed reading it.

I've found some wonderful horse-related blogs because of the links that Victoria and Arlene at Gray Horse Matters have up and from there on it's been a real adventure to find out what is available. As it happens, Victoria and Arlene have beaten me to handing out awards in that arena. But I can easily give my dear friend Melinda Snodgrass the Excellence in Equine Care Award because she raised beautiful, healthy Arabians (including my beloved boy) and is now beyond happy with her Lusitano stallion Vento, whose antics are taking up quite a bit of space at Melinda's Musings blog. Melinda is a novelist and television writer who lives in New Mexico. She's also an upper-level dressage rider. Her new novel, Edge of Reason, is due out in a matter of weeks and can be pre-ordered on Amazon and you can get a sample of it here. I read the manuscript several years ago and I'm looking forward to the next book in what is planned as an urban fantasy trilogy. Melinda gets the Excellent Award for blogging as well, because her posts on writing and politics are well worth reading.

I would also like to pass on the Excellence in Equine Care Award to Gayle Paperno, my trainer at Family Equestrian Connection. Gayle doesn't have a blog, but if you know anyone who is looking for a safe, classical trainer who is great with kids and adults with baggage in the Los Angeles area, I can't recommend her enough. She's the one who makes time to check on Ace and give him his lunch every day at a different barn than her own while I'm at work 7 miles away. She is all about what is best for the horse.

Pulitzer Prizes

Congratulations to Tracy Letts, playwright of August: Osage County, for his well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. I expect my niece and the rest of the cast will be doing the happy dance when they prepare for the show tonight. I can only imagine this will extend the show and make a London premier more likely. Next stop: the Tonies.

And mega kudos for those talented people on the fifth floor of the Washington Post building (where I hung out for about five years) for their six Pulitzer Prizes. I read the Post every day, thanks to the wonders of on-line publication, and I still think it's the best newspaper in America (sorry NY Times, which I also read every day.)

And how about that Bob Dylan? Good thing there are liner notes so you can find out what he's singing.

One Less Star in Hollywood

Before Morgan Freeman became the Voice of God, that part was owned by Charlton Heston.

He was Michelangelo, Cardinal Richelieu, El Cid, Andrew Jackson, Judah Ben-Hur, Christopher Leiningen, George Taylor, Robert Neville, Robert Thorn and dozens more in a career stretching back more than half a century. He was an action hero and a real movie star. He was one of those actors, like Sean Connery, who just filled up the screen by standing there. I have a vague recollection of him arriving late to the Academy Awards and picking up the speech that had been started by some poor actor trying to fill in because of traffic problems in L.A., but once he was on stage, he was in command.

Back in the days when I chaired the rights committee for ASMP, we set up a fund for our lobbying and other legal work on behalf of photographers' copyright rights. One member who sent in a sizable contribution offered her husband's considerable connections in order to further our efforts. I got the call to follow up on the offer. Even though I knew just who Lydia Clarke Heston's husband was, the last thing I expected was for him to answer the telephone.

As I heard the voice, all I could think was "Moses just answered the phone" and "calm down, you can't sound like an idiot!" It was all I could do to explain who I was and why I was calling and ask to speak to Mrs. Heston. He was most gracious in explaining she was not in and when I should call back. I thanked him, hung up, and immediately called my mother to scream "you'll never guess who I just talked to!." When I finally reached Mrs. Heston and said I was surprised when Mr. Heston answered, she laughed and replied "he just can't stand to hear the phone ring."

I did not have the opportunity to take her up on an invitation to visit when I was in Los Angeles a few months later but after I graduated from law school and was practicing law here, ASMP asked me to represent their interests in Sacramento on sales tax matters and requested that I ask the Hestons for their assistance, "since I had developed that relationship." That's a finer point than I would put on it, but I pulled out the address book (remember those?) and reached Mrs. Heston directly. She recalled our earlier conversations but said I would really need to speak to her husband who made those kinds of decisions. She would have him call me.

When I checked my office phone later that day, I heard the message "Ms. Valada, this is Charlton Heston." My husband heard it and insisted that I keep the recording (it's somewhere in storage, I think.) I returned his call and we spoke for a while (I wish I had THAT on a recording because he quoted a passage from Shakespeare) but he made some remark about whether he could be much help in Sacramento, since the Democrats were pretty much in charge there. I thought, but did not say, "Mr. Heston, I'm old enough to remember when you were one." I mentioned that we would be attending the Alex Theatre screening of Ben-Hur in Glendale the next night and he told me to be sure to come up and introduce myself, which turned out to be the only time I ever actually got to meet the Hestons. They were an elegant and gracious old-Hollywood couple, he tall but slightly stooped because of a riding accident in Major Dundee, she petite and attentive to his needs. They were married for 64 years, no doubt close to a Hollywood record.

We did get to see him do a reading at the public library with Lynn Redgrave one evening. I don't remember exactly what he read, but one thing was from a centuries-old copy of the King James' Bible, a massive tome he presented with great flourish. As David Steinberg put it "God spoke, in the voice of a Northwestern graduate." No more.

The Perfect Match

Thanks to Linda Polk's blog Hoofbeats, I found this cute little quiz to determine what my horse profile is. Big surprise: I am an Arabian (although with champagne taste on a beer budget.)

Arabians are arguably the most beautiful breed of horse in the world. The bright, enourmous eyes, the graceful arching neck, and the famous dished face. You have a fiery temper, it takes quite a rider to tame your spirit. In a good mood, you may be found elegantly trotting the length of the fence with elevated gaits, and your mane and tail waving like flags in the wind. Everyone envies your beauty... but beware if they make you mad!
Your owner is most likely to be rich, and own a famous arabian breeding barn. You'll probably have an entire web site dedicated to you.
Your colour will most likely be: Reddish Bay, Dapple Grey, Palomino, or a glimmering Chestnut.

The blog has some wonderfully funny posts, including a couple on strange horse laws and computer programs. Well worth digging through old posts to find them.

Off the Nightstand

After what seems like months, I have finally finished reading The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz. I'm still mulling over my thoughts about the book. I consider the Beatles to be an amazing success story: four kids from a poor city in post-war England manage, by talent and hard work, to take the world by storm. This is a typical American success story, but an extremely unusual British one, where class seems to trump everything and is not absent in the tale related in this tome. My big problem with the book is that I found it rather depressing, because the author treats the Beatles story as a tragedy.

I certainly agree that there are huge elements of tragedy at work, but the book ends with the break-up made official in 1970. They really walked away from the party when they were still in demand and then proceeded to have reasonably successful careers thereafter. I understate. That's not a tragedy from the Beatles P.O.V., just the audience's.

I've got a few quibbles with the book because of inaccuracies that anyone who was a fan in 1964 could spot, which, of course, makes me wonder about what else is wrong. In my case, there are two photographs which have captions that are dead wrong, and the information on one is carried over into the text. One shows George Harrison and Pattie Boyd at what is described as Paul McCartney's 21st birthday--an event that happened 8 or 9 months before they actually met on the set of A Hard Day's Night. The other is a picture of George and Pattie together "soon after they met on the set of Help!" Help was filmed a year after AHDN, and the couple had been together for a year by the time cameras rolled on the second film. So the book has them hooking up during the filming of both films, which is quite wrong. I hope someone fixes this in the next edition.

George and Ringo come out of the story as incredibly nice guys and Paul as not too bad (and very level-headed) except for a bit of an ego. I can forgive that. John, however, is a different story. With his temper and insecurities, he was a very talented, chauvanistic, and bigoted cad who was really lucky to not have a serious prison record. Meeting Yoko turned him into a toxic mess. She's a villain in the piece, an egotistical con artist with delusions of talent who latched on to John by preying on his insecurities in order to further her own "art." Brian Epstein doesn't come off too well either, as the book reveals huge mistakes on his part in signing deals for them. What a mess he made of the copyrights to the Beatles songbook, not to mention the merchandise and record royalties. It is astonishing to try and realize how much money the Beatles generated despite these mistakes and the 90% tax rate in Great Britain in order to still achieve millionaire status.

During the time I was reading the book, Paul McCartney's divorce was in the headlines (almost 40 years after the break-up of the Beatles) and even the death of Neil Aspinall, one of their oldest friends and once the head of Apple Corp., made the news last week. For me, it's really hard to believe that it's been 44 years since they first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show or that Paul McCartney has already passed that magic age of 64. Where does the time go?

Last night, Len woke me up to watch an old episode of "I've Got a Secret" which plays right into all this. "I want you to see who the guest is." I knew immediately--it was Pete Best, the original drummer for the Beatles. I knew not only because I had just been looking at pictures of him in the biography, but because I remember watching that episode of the show when it first aired in 1964 and his "secret" was that he "used to be the Beatles drummer." I didn't remember the particulars of the interview at all, which was pretty much a total PR fabrication. Best made it sound like it was his own decision to leave the Beatles and said that he wanted his own band. He was very pleasant, a bit shy, and when asked if he "regretted leaving" the Beatles gave some sort of an "only when" response. Since he was sacked by the Beatles after George Martin wasn't impressed by his abilities, he displayed a good deal of class. In a continuing bit of ironic timing, Pete Best's youngest brother is actually his half-brother, fathered by the lately deceased Neil Aspinall with the much older Mona Best. It's funny how things tie into each other.

I never got to see the Beatles play together live (in the flesh, not on Sullivan) and that's one of the things I can't put under my "it's never too late to have a happy childhood" list of things to do. I did see Paul McCartney play with his old back up band, Wings on their first tour (great performance, scary to be with that many people in a festival-seating event.) John and Yoko I passed in the 59th Street Subway Station one Saturday night in the early 1970s when I lived in New York and before that I saw them do"Give Peace a Chance" at an Allard K. Lowenstein benefit (in an audience-participation sing-along conducted by Mitch Miller at the Filmore East, if you can believe it.)

Excuse me while I go off and play the Beatles 1.

Best Laid Plans

My excitement of having three and a half lovely days to spend quality time with Ace and three lessons on him was severely dampened when I arrived at the barn on Friday afternoon. There I discovered a skip-loader racing through the arena depositing loads of DG into the run areas of the first three stalls and various workers using compacting devices, drills, hammers, and other implements of noise and destruction (or construction, depending on your point of view.) Needless to say, there were 10 horses in various stages of distress over the disruptions.

Let me make it perfectly clear. I don't object to the work being done--the stalls needed 12" of DG, not 2" over a foot or more of sand and I am surely happy to have a tack room almost outside of my stall door--I'd just like to know when things are going to happen so I can make plans accordingly. Communication seems to be lacking in most people who run barns but don't actually own horses. I had moved up my lesson to the afternoon and Gayle couldn't change it back to after 5 when I discovered the mess. What was more, there is no way this will take less than a week to finish. Horses have to be swapped out of their stalls and there needs to be a bit of time for the DG to set before they can be returned. They are working from early morning until about 5 p.m. and they left the skip loader in the arena on Sunday, making a turnout unsafe.

Gayle came at 3 on Friday and longed Ace during what should have been our riding time. It was good for him to concentrate on work with the havoc at the other end of the arena. He's doing much better about carrying himself and keeping the side-reins loose instead of leaning into them. Since we couldn't do our 11:15 on Saturday morning, I got to the barn, tacked Ace up, and walked the half mile over to Family Equestrian Connection's base barn to take my lesson in that arena. Gayle wasn't certain I'd be able to ride, since Ace hasn't spent a lot of time there and the distractions include a lot of noise and visual distractions. Plus there's the matter of walking under the overhang where the hay is through a small gate and past the goats. We did fine until I opened the gate and a truck spun out across the street in an attempt to pull a tree out by its roots. Ace nearly ran me down--something he's never done. Gayle came out and schooled him through the gate one step at a time, three times in a row. He left with no problem after the lesson. In the arena, we did just fine and then I let Ashley, Gayle's young assistant, take Ace for a real spin. He was tired when we walked home.

Sunday was the boy's birthday. If the skip-loader hadn't been in the arena, he would have had a nice turnout. No such luck. But I did bring him a special bran mash, for which he was greatly appreciative, as you can see. For a fastidiously clean horse, he sometimes lets his enjoyment get the best of him. He wouldn't listen when I suggested he take a drink to soften the crust left on his nose.

About the time he finished his snack, Patricia from RiverBottom Belles showed up to do a bio-scan on him. I am not entirely sure what goes on with the blinking lights and all--I'm cynical enough to call it California woo-woo medicine--but he really relaxes during the treatment and it doesn't cost all that much the few times a year I've been doing it. I'm told it helps in healing and maybe it is related to the things I got hooked up to when I was recovering from my broken arm. I just figure there's no harm done and he doesn't object to standing there with a silly horsie kippah and someone running a scan all over his body. It takes about 45 minutes and he's very cooperative.

His next door neighbor, Sebastian the Thoroughbred, has turned out to be a real thug. On Saturday, Sebastian took a piece out of Ace's dock and on Sunday he tore a big scrape across Ace's throat. It will all grow back, but Sebastian's got almost 2 hands over Ace, a boarding house reach, and is being fed 6 flakes of alfalfa a day by an owner who makes it to the barn maybe twice a week. He's got a lot of pent-up energy and Ace won't back down.

Instead of spending Monday with the boy, I worked on tax stuff and went to the barn for a lesson at my usual time of 5:15. Ace had been moved to the far stall since his was next to the one being dug up for resurfacing. It made it extremely inconvenient to get him tacked up and he's only got partial shelter if we get the promised rain tomorrow. He was also very twitchy. Why they couldn't bother to move his manger instead of feeding him on the sand, I have no idea. I moved it myself. They also didn't do anything to close off the feeder window into the actual stall, which is used for hay and feed storage. He could easily stick his nose in and tear open a bag of pellets or otherwise get into trouble. I went and moved that stuff as well. At least they did provide water buckets and fill them.

Because the construction was done for the day and the skip-loader was no longer in the arena, we were able to take our lesson. Unfortunately, we had to be really careful because the arena hasn't been dragged in weeks and no requests to do it have been honored. The area where the skip has been driving was more even than the rest of the arena, so that's what we used. It was an altogether terrific lesson with much progress being made.

I finished the day by ordering too much $1 sushi when I met my husband at Samsala. It's amazing how a special can wind up costing far more than the regular combo.

Birthday Boy

Every day is improved with a visit to my horse. He's always glad to see me and I can hear him nickering as soon as I get out of my car. He is definitely the best birthday present I ever got, even if I had to buy him for myself. It is never too late to have a happy childhood.

Ace will be 11 years old on Sunday (I just saw somewhere that was also the great Secretariat's birthday--almost 30 years earlier.) He was born with Comet Hale-Bopp in the sky and and a matching one on his forehead. Hence his registered name, Auspicious Comet. Ace comes from the initials A.C., not shorthand for the drug. I heard about his birth shortly after he arrived. He wasn't the bay mare my friend Melinda hoped for (Ace's sister Phaedra would fulfill that wish exactly two years to the day later) but he turned out to have good confirmation and a great personality. Everybody loved Ace, the horse who would rather hang around people than eat.

At the time he was born, there wasn't the slightest clue that he'd eventually come to own me. I hadn't been on a horse in over 20 years, I'd never taken lessons to ride, and I had never spent that much time around them. My grandfather never delivered on his many promises to buy my sister and me a pony (and not just because my mother wouldn't have allowed it, I'm sure.)

I got regular updates about this beautiful colt from Melinda every time we spoke. When he was a year old, I took a trip out to New Mexico for the Nebula (R) Awards Ceremony and stayed at Melinda's for a few days. In retrospect, it was probably love at first sight, even if he did try to take a chunk out of my shirt and shoulder when Melinda and I weren't paying enough attention to him out in the barn one day. I've never seen anyone react faster than Melinda did in disciplining him--he never knew what hit him and he's never tried that again.

I signed up for riding lessons that fall, but I had to put if off for a year when I broke a bone in my foot walking to my car. That's why you should be careful of cracks in the sidewalk. Len and I had originally talked about taking lessons together, but just before we were to start, he wound up in the hospital and I haven't been able to convince him to give it a try. His reaction is that he likes to know where he is on the food chain and is of the conviction that the horse is higher. I think that may be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

When Ace went under saddle sometime after his third birthday, Melinda and I started joking about me owning him someday. I think at the time she expected to campaign him as she had his mother, a lovely mare with an imperial bearing named Flames Sirocco, called Rocky or sometimes the Ayatolla of Rock 'n' Rolla for her temper. (Her sire, Bask Flame, seems to have had a reputation for that kind of hot-headedness. Ace's sire, Padron's Mahogany, apparently throws his own famous sire's much more mellow personality.) As it happened, Melinda was moving on to warmbloods to compete at higher levels of dressage where Arabians are not favored in the ring and she had finally gotten a bay mare out of Rocky's second breeding to Mahogany. Our conversations about where the gelding would end up became a little more pointed.

I paid a visit to New Mexico again in the spring of 2001 to see how Ace and I got along. At four, he was really too young a horse for as inexperienced a rider as I was, but we definitely bonded. I gave Melinda a down payment and came home to find a place for him to live.

My husband was totally against the idea of horse ownership, but I think Marv Wolfman said to him, "if she can afford the horse out of her own money, what's your problem?" I was in the middle of a big case for Harlan Ellison, and Ace is often referred to as "the pony that Uncle Harlan bought." I had to go to New Mexico to take depositions on the case at the end of June, whereupon we concluded the sale and Ace got on a transport the day after I flew home. He arrived the next day, unhappy about losing his family but glad to see a face he recognized when he looked out the door of the transport. He managed to gouge his flank in his panic to get off the bus.

It took a while for him to get used to the idea of being where he didn't know anyone. He kept calling out for voices that never answered. (When Melinda's Hanovarian Steppe arrived at Pierce for a brief stay about three years later, the two geldings were undeniably excited to see each other--it was a family reunion for them.) I've noticed that he's never become a "Siamese twin" with another horse, but he seems to get along with most other horses pretty well. The only other time he's had a difficult transition to a move was when we left Pierce--he settled down when two of his barn mates showed up a few days later. But the two moves since then have been uneventful. He seems to be just fine as long as I'm attentive--and I'm very attentive. He likes to flirt with other women, like my trainer Gayle or her assistant Ashley or Gina who does the evening feeding at the barn. Even Zsuzsu, who owned Ace's turnout buddy Otero at our last barn, fell for his charms and felt that she had to treat him with lots of carrots whenever she gave them to her own horses (I did reciprocate and Ace would be annoyed--it was as if he knew those could be his carrots.) He is definitely a woman's horse, but I will say that he's got plenty of respect for Harry Whitney, who has schooled him on several occasions.

I've had several people say to me that Ace is a "once in a lifetime horse" and I have to agree. He's all personality and art in motion when he moves. My friend Teddy noticed he bears a striking resemblance to the George Stubbs painting of Whistlejacket, the grandson of "The King of the Wind" Godolphin Arabian, although Ace has more chrome. Even other horses stop to watch him in action, as if they too know he is something special.

Broadway Baby

My sister called me about 1 a.m. New York time to let me know that Kristina's Broadway debut was an absolute smash. And that she's going on again in today's matinee. How cool is that? I got e-mail from Jim Newman, director of What's My Line Live on Stage, who managed to get to the show last night. He wrote:

So I just returned from the theatre having seen your niece's Broadway debut. "August: Osage County" is a play full of great lines and great performances. Kristina fit right in. Had I not known that it was her first night on Broadway ever, I would have thought she'd been part of the opening night cast along with all the other fantastic actors.

She looked radiant and beautiful (what a head of hair!)

She did not appear in the first act of the three act play, but she opens the second act with a four page monologue! She got laughs and applause on her lines, she had a big old kissing scene. Her character was playful and nervous and fragile and self-deluding and Kristina nailed every aspect.

During the curtain call, as usual the actors with less stage time take their bows first and the leads come last. In this case the four leads take their bows together. There was Kristina in the final four. It was a big, meaty role.

Thanks for letting my know about this. I would have missed it otherwise and it's not the type of experience I would have liked to miss.

I thought it was great to get an unbiased opinion of the performance . My sister said she sat through the monologue with tears rolling down her face--not the reaction a director might want to see in the audience of a comedy, but she's incredibly proud of her talented daughters. Me too.

Enter Stage Right: Kristina Valada-Viars

What a week it has been. A number of friends of ours were nominated for Hugo Awards, Len was nominated for the Eisner Hall of Fame and tonight, my lovely niece Kristina Valada-Viars will make her Broadway debut.

Kristina was hired last fall to understudy Kimberly Guerrero's role as Johanna Monevata in August: Osage County when the play moved from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre to New York. The show opened to rave reviews and the run has been extended until at least July, although there will be a change of theaters next month. About a month ago, she was given two other parts to cover as second understudy and tonight she goes on as the youngest daughter of the Weston clan, Karen Weston.

You have no idea how excited I am for her. This is what she's wanted to do ever since she was old enough to express the desire. She made her stage debut when she was very little and she's had amazing training--starting with my sister's children's acting classes at the Des Moines Playhouse. She appeared at the Fringe Festival in Scotland in Agnes of God when she was 16. She studied in London while she was an undergraduate at Grinnell and earned her SAG card with her appearance in The Door in the Floor.

The news came too late for us to jump on a plane and may be too late to send flowers, but we'll be there in spirit and waiting for my sister to call with a review after the show is over. At least she and my niece Stephanie will be able to attend, which is the most important thing.

Well Earned Recognition

We received word over the weekend that my husband, Len Wein, has been nominated for a 2008 Eisner Hall of Fame Award. It is a life-time achievement recognition which has him asking "is my career over?," but he's chuffed to be asked to the dance in such great company. Needless to say, I'm plenty proud.

Information about the award and the list of nominees can be read here and here. The voting is being conducted entirely on line and voting ends on April 18. If you are a professional in the comic book field, you can vote here. Unless my foray as his co-writer of Classic Comic's adaptation of "The Autobiography of Stephen Douglass" counts (my name is spelled wrong in the credits), I'm not eligible to vote.

This week marks the 40th Anniversary of Len's professional status as a writer. That's what happens when you make up your mind about what you want to do with your life at the age of 8 and you stick to your goal, I guess. Len will be the Comic Book Guest of Honor at MidSouthCon 26 in Memphis later this week (March 28-30). Drop by if you happen to be in the neighborhood.