Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

#26: Gilmore Street, North Hollywood This story is #26 on the hit parade of places I've called home. I figure I've lived so many places, each house, each apartment has a story attached. I'm slowly unraveling them here on a blog I began years ago, and then let go by the wayside. I wonder, is that the story of my life?  Ben and I met when I was living with Ella on Bentley Avenue in West Los Angeles. Seven years, five apartments and a sad as-yet-untold story later, Ben's and my long and winding road ended up in a dead end. All those miles, gone to waste. That's a story for another time, here's where that road took me... The Sticky-hot Days of Summer When the dust settled from my breakup with Ben, I made my way across town and moved into the smallest bedroom in Candy and Tina's three bedroom apartment in North Hollywood. Candy and Tina were a couple of more experienced tour guides I met working at Universal Studios. Funny, isn't it? It was Ben wh...

Laughing with my baby sister. Izmir, Turkey/ 1957 My sister, in an adjacent dressing room at Ross, is as doubled over with laughter as I am. We're trying on dresses and as we both squeeze into outfits designed with her twenty-something daughters in mind, there's plenty to snort about. She's taught me a word I wish I didn't know. Gunt. The kind of fat that goes from your gut to your—ahem, I can't even say it. But that's Nancy, my younger sister. Brash, a little bit bawdy, she's always been the one that's more out there, unafraid to teeter on the edge of conventional good taste and expressing herself like a modern day Wife of Bath. Unafraid of being herself, while I shrink back, the good girl, wrapped up in gentility. Unless I've had a glass or two of wine, that is. Wine and my sister have always had a way of bringing out the naughty in me. Don't get me wrong; we're not the kind of sisters who talk on the phone every day. We don...

Yesterday was our friend Joan’s 94th birthday, and since she’s British by birth Mark and I took her to the King's Head, our favorite British pub here in Santa Monica.      Joan is one of the many children evacuated from St. Peter Port on the island of Guernsey in June of 1940 just days before the Germans invaded the island.  Nothing was planned out, announcements were made in the newspaper and on the local radio that school-age children were being evacuated with their classes, and mothers with infants were told to arrange to leave as soon as possible. That and nothing more but scores of children were sent to the harbor.   Just ten years old, Joan  was sent with her classmates across the channel on ships sent by the British to Weymouth, then to Blantyre, in Scotland where she stayed, living with a volunteer family until her mother could join her. She isn’t sure how long she was there but her mother sent for Joan to join them in Stockport, in the county of ...

The Improv is a fairly famous LA comedy club on Melrose here in L.A. where hundreds—thousands—of comics have sometimes bombed and sometimes soared to new heights on its' stage over the years. I've been to the Improv countless times, but rarely for the laughs. For me, The Improv belongs to that period in the mid-eighties when I was in the last stages of a long, flagging relationship with an old boyfriend. For once, the nomenclature fits; I was twenty seven when we met, Ben was twenty five years older than me. Hardly a 'boy' friend, some might say. We were living together, fast approaching the suffocating, seven year itch mark, and I was twitchy, longing to find a way out, but lacking the guts to get out. Telling myself staying was the more noble course, that I didn't want to hurt him, that I couldn't leave after everything I'd done to get there, that he deserved better. What a load of crap. I was just a little coward. A passive aggressive whiner. ...