Orange County's Leading Source Of News, Culture And Entertainment
Orange County's Leading Source Of News, Culture And Entertainment
HO CHI MINH CITY—It’s Sunday, Dec. 16, moments before 6 a.m. I’m sleeping like a dead man. In my suitcase on the credenza in my hotel room is a copy of UC Irvine’s “World Values Survey 2001—Vietnam.” Back home in Orange County, the study, released in late November, has become a Little Saigon controversy for …
MONDAY, Jan. 7 Newport-Mesa Unified School District trustee Jim Ferryman pleads guilty to a misdemeanor drunk-driving charge, something he hoped would close the book on the case. It didn't. Fellow trustee Wendy Leece, one of those Christian, conservative, Stepford wives who get this time marker's internal gear mechanisms all moist, uses the next board meeting …
Orange County suits are no doubt tickled pinstriped at how prominently our region figures in “The Ten Worst Corporations of 2001.” In some darkened boardrooms, it's probably a badge of dishonor that more than half of this year's crop boast corporate offices within our borders and all but one have at least a store or …
It wasn't my fault I was at Newport Beach's Gulfstream—formerly Cowboy, and the favored pickup joint for at least one guy whose opening gambit is (no shit!), “I own two companies.” No, I blame it all on tall drink of water Cher Greenleaf, who was taking some out-of-town marketing colleagues there for dinner. Of course, …
Photo by Jeanne RiceSoup for breakfast? ¿Porqué no? Among Vietnam and Mexico's many other sociocultural similarities (both screwed by Catholic colonizers, U.S. imperialism and apartment mogul George Argyros), both nations have produced a morning soup that makes cereal apparent for what it is (wet grains, man!) and can smack you out of a stupor. Vietnam's …
JANUARY The realfirst day of the millennium came and went without a hitch. Did anyone really think something bad, evil, deadly, horrific and life-as-we-know-it-altering would ever happen to us? . . . Patti Dalby and ex-boyfriend C. Brooks Brann entered a Newport Beach courtroom to fight for custody of a 125-pound, black-and-tan rottweiler named Guinness. …
Isn't it convenient the way things work out? There's damn little interesting music going on this week—I will admit that Billy Idol is a guilty pleasure, but not guilty enough to make me go see him at the House of Blues on Wednesday and Thursday—and you're probably too busy shopping and caroling to go to …
Media hype over the recent release of the first survey of political and social values in socialist Vietnam ignored evidence of overwhelming opposition to homosexuality and what the government there views as other “social evils.” Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register headlines noted that Vietnamese like their government, army and parliament just fine—results that …
In playwright (and OC Weekly critic) Joel Beers' heavily fictionalized and densely intelligent new play, Prophets Profit and William Blake, Blake is commissioned by entrepreneur George Hayley to create illustrations for a mass-produced version of the Bible under the condition that he not talk politics and keep his “visions to himself.” Those who know Blake …
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Photo by Ken Howard/SCRSouth Coast Repertory has a history of cultivating new playwrights. A few of them fall, anonymous, by the wayside. But many, such as Amy Freed, evolve into masters of the craft. Based on her first major play, Nostalgia, it's a safe bet that English playwright Lucinda Coxon will follow Freed into dramaturgical …
Shallow Hal is your mother's Farrelly Brothers movie, an old-fashioned romantic comedy bearing the message that your parents, assuming they were up to the job, drilled into you: handsome is as handsome does; beauty is skin-deep; it's character, not packaging, that matters. Except that the movie also makes much of one stupendously fat woman and …