Weho Tent Has Unique View of Kavanaugh/Ford Divide

Journalist, Barbara Howar, burst through every barricade and barn, a woman of means and beauty from North Carolina was able to storm in her day, she took Manhattan and the White House, when it had been occupied by a fellow Southerner, Lyndon Johnson. She is fiercely opinionated and capable of a juggling act I've never seen executed by anyone else of either gender, pulled off without flinching, when she managed to hurl thunderbolts at Al Gore and George W. Bush on alternate days of their Presidential campaigns, and score a bullseye each and every time. No chits, no matter how they hung or hadn't, ever have ruled her life and her daughter would concur with me, when I say she still is as fierce as ever.

My friend and former colleague, the legendary Ann Beatts, who was the first and only female writer on Saturday Night Live at its inception, through its first several years on air, showed me the courageous stuff that makes a woman powerful in what has been a man's world for the majority of her life, Howar's life and mine also, when, on the heels of the late night host having just been fired, who we were hired as "jockeys," Anne had made clear wasn't the horse we owned nor had bred, she instilled our white male studio bosses with knowledge they conspicuously lacked:

"Delivering a monologue is not an entry level position!"

What followed had been a deafening silence...and for a moment I truly was bewildered:

"Are we dead or are we fired...or please, please, if I'm dreaming, now is not the time for a wake-up call."

Anne taught me two of the most strategically important lessons of my adult life...never misspell someone's name and "it's always better to"...and now I must paraphrase for the greater good of all..."to let loose with our differences from inside the tent, not outside of it," and I am reminded of her words of wisdom, especially today, as a resident of West Hollywood...a city much like a tent...small when seen from the outside, but much roomier once you're inside and the view is singularly different than from anywhere else...at least in greater Los Angeles, if not all of Southern California.

When most progressives are consumed by the conspicuous gender divide, that has cracked the infrastructure of our country's foundation that had been laid down as the law by our Founding Fathers, in Weho, we have a multiplicity of what Stevie Wonder called "Inner Vision." We also feel constricted and assaulted by news of anti-LGBTQ bigotry at Azusa Pacific University. Diversity requires tolerance even before understanding makes for the peace of acceptance, and many members of the LGBTQ community seem more alert to issues posed by the "B" word, not yet understood, and are waiting patiently, with more determination to be educated than many people outside the tent, who seem ok with the prospect of being un-schooled forever.

There exists no pod of any size with accommodations that would appease two peas, such as Anne & Barbara, but there is a moment I will share that continues to resonate as a WEHO lesson of tents, insiders and outsiders, and, most importantly, for a world divided by cats and dogs, as it seemed only possible in my world, from which I always have had a singular pre-West Hollywood perspective. Two women, who had no real nor imagined reason ever to meet, nor to endanger me in that tight squeeze between a rock and a hard place, were destined to meet in an emergency of such a geo-specific kind. In the West Hollywood paradigm of zig zagging borders, I never focused on the fact that two of my closest and most brilliant friends, literally lived back to back from one another, as their homes faced streets in the opposite direction. With no disrespect intended for another brilliant writer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creative genius behind "Hamilton," it always seems to be in the back "room" where it happens, at least from my POV, and a back alley was the passage that led to the threshold that crossed the divide, that until that moment, had separated Beatts from Howar, as if the Hatfields from McCoys, as it literally is the divide that separates West Hollywood from Beverly Hills. Anne's pet dared to be a cat and crawl into Barbara's attic, causing a manic panic attack all around.

It would take too long to explain the huge chasm that divides people who are all cat or dog, but it's an anomaly of nature, less grand but as much of a canyon as any that exists. It was when I understood the derivation of a secondary meaning of "cat fight," but after a torn up attic, Anne had her cat back, no harm had been done to Barbara's beloved, always a Pug for her, dog. Fiercely opposed they found common ground for the greater good, that, at first seemed like a battle of one person's needs as a violation of another person's rights.

If they could work it out, there's hope for everyone, even at a lower median of talent and IQ.