Essays on My Mind

To the onlooker, the interview should be indecipherable from a first date. It should be casual, yet probing. The subject should be made comfortable and at ease. The flow of questions should be conversational, revealing knowledge about the subject, but not putting words in the subject’s mouth. The interviewer

I am not a model, an actor, a singer or a well-known dilettante photographed incessantly by the paparazzi after becoming famous for my reckless and overly hedonistic lifestyle. I’m so unknown that I heard murmurs by photographers on a red carpet I recently attended, asking each other if Pitbull

Dear “So Delicious”, I happened across your “Mint Chip” Coconut Milk non-dairy frozen dessert while perusing the over-the-counter drug aisle for Zyrtec at Gelson’s in West Hollywood. The only reason I really use Zyrtec so much is because I walk my friend Sheena’s two dogs every day, one

When the television show “Smash” needed to cast an innovative songwriter and producer who could re-envision the character of Marilyn Monroe with a harder edge, they called Ryan Tedder, lead singer and frontman for OneRepublic to play himself. The long list of cross-genre artists that Tedder has either wrote songs

I’ve been having very morbid thoughts recently, like who would play me in a biopic of my life. I would really want James Earl Jones, because that voice has a gravitas I feel goes really well with my personality. I’ve seen my community change through the years. If

Dear ________________, I am writing to you because I consider you as a fairly good grocery shopper. I am worried about my subconscious. When I arrived home, I noticed a slew of healthy products, like kale, beets, avocados, cucumbers, tomatoes and almond milk. However, I also found ice cream and a

Over the past year, I began to fetishize pizza. After the better part of a decade of leading a gluten-free lifestyle due to my celiac, I had finally found numerous pizza shops in my neighborhood with gluten-free offerings. I had the artisan pizza shop I brought friends to, the pizza

Five years today, on the thirteenth anniversary of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s murder by a right-wing extremist and day of the 2008 US elections, I wrote an overly optimistic blog post that is thankfully no longer online. I had hoped that those elections would repair a divided America,

Everything is vain! – Ecclesiastes 1:2 I suppose it began in the netsuke exhibition at the LACMA that morning. It was a normal Saturday that began with a rooftop brunch with a friend and a trip to the museum where we share a membership. The Japanese Pavillion at the Los

On the scale of historic dinner parties, the Last Supper with Jesus and Rabbi Akiba’s Passover Seder in Bene Brak rank quite high. Jack Dorsey’s dinner at Zuni Cafe in San Francisco with three friends does not. But that did not stop Alyson Shontell from writing a sickeningly