Fame and Freedom, Freedom and Fame

Can you feel me?

Feb 17, 2025

I discovered fame at a very early age. Not that I had it, although in some ways I did. I saw it on television at home at my house on North Venice Boulevard in Venice Beach, California.

In the words of the great Debbie Allen, “You’ve got big dreams? You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying … in sweat.”

For many of us, fame meant freedom. It meant the ability to transcend our class. To create our own identity and embody our truth. To succeed against all odds. At least, that’s what it meant to me.

I was “shy”. Except I wasn’t. As

Antoinette Cooper

says… I was afraid but I couldn’t be.

So, I practiced my tricks in private. These photos are a rare glimpse into my secret life where I spun and glided like the grown up skaters I saw on the boardwalk. So confident and beautiful and strong. But I was too “shy” so I put on my skates and went next door to the parking garage of an apartment building that had the smoothest cement and I practiced with my headphones on.

I was born in that house. A funky two bedroom with the refrigerator on the back porch because the kitchen was so small. But it had a large backyard with a giant apricot tree. My brother and I could climb over the back fence and wander what was then a giant field that filled with blue flowers in spring. I could stand there and gaze out across S. Venice Blvd. to the neighborhood in the distance. I was allowed to walk as far as the convenience store on the corner of Pacific to buy treats sometimes, but not allowed to cross Pacific. I loved the beach. It’s my first memory. And we’d go to Linnie Park and play on the swing set and feed the ducks on the canal.

Ants were always a problem and had to be guarded against vigilantly else they take over. And there were morning glories. Lots and lots of morning glories. They were everywhere. Climbing the chain link fences in between the four houses that shared the lot. I had them tattooed on my arm many years later, for protection.

Venice is not Marina del Rey

…. was a popular bumper sticker once upon a time. They were trying to drain the wetland to build more condos. “I brake for ducks” was the other one. Venice was a community then. It had an identity that it adamantly proclaimed and represented.

My Venice is long gone as is my Los Angeles. I glimpsed the end of the 70’s and lived fully in the 80’s. I watched them build Malibu over the decades traveling up and down PCH going to Ojai and back. My Ojai is long gone too. As is Temescal Canyon now very literally, which was our favorite beach one summer in high school because it was often empty.

I’d “borrow” my father’s manual pick up truck and drive us there even though I didn’t have a license and had a tendency to stall in first.

My father had long since transcended his working class, Puerto Rican, hippie identity and was operating in the brave new world of 1980’s white passing lawyer and real estate investor. I felt like Jiminy Cricket and was obsessed with becoming a real person, with not getting caught in the con. I was fascinated by Pinocchio and the Velveteen Rabbit. I felt like the daughter of the yakuza and collected Elektra Assassin. I wanted to escape.

I’d inherited the Ortega teeth which made me insecure about my big smile. The Ortegas were from Cuba on my great-grandmother’s side. I know about the Ortegas because my mother has their teeth too. People said I should be a model and I wanted to act, but those teeth were a problem. I got them fixed in my late twenties which was quite the ordeal.

This is not what I had intended to write, but it makes sense. I am writing about Fear and a Facelift and this is where it comes from.