Pamela Klein

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The Accidental Gourmand

Pamela Klein
Here was the plan: We’d take our families to the Aloha Concert Jam in Long Beach and spend the day listening to music, then go out to dinner somewhere near Pine Street. It would be a long day, with no nap for my 5-year-old and much too much sun, but......

Wide Caribbean Sea

Pamela Klein
When I arrive on most West Indian islands, I am empty. I want it to be that way, for the land fills me up with its heat, its emerald pools, its orchids. I arrive on the tangled terrain of Dominica, however, in a different state entirely. I am led here,......
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Cantos del Corazón

Pamela Klein
HUAYUCALTIA Destinos (Huayucaltia Records) The first time I listened to Destinos, I turned it up so loud that my neighbors actually asked me to turn it up higher. I'd waited impatiently for over two years, and I had to hear it the way it was meant to be heard, as......
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Pann’s

Pamela Klein
Who the heck builds a restaurant on a little island in the middle of an intersection, the intersection being Centinela, La Tijera and La Cienega, with Inglewood to the east, LAX to the west, and Fox Hills still full of skunks, rabbits and gophers? It is 1958; the hamburger, Sputnik,......

The Old Man and the Marlin

Pamela Klein
Ernest Hemingway loved Cuba — he loved her sultry nights, her bloody bullfights, and her magnificent blue marlins (Santiago’s "noble" and "able" opponents in The Old Man and the Sea). Hemingway also loved Cubans, and they loved him. After his suicide in 1961, fishermen in Cojimar melted down their boats’......
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The Shrine

Pamela Klein
Art by Mike CrivelloIT BEGINS AS A QUIET URGE, BUT ENOUGH of one that I ask the Creole shopkeeper. "Pardon, madame." Yes? she answers with her eyes, pale green like sea grapes. "La toilette?" She shakes her head and turns away, as if such things should not be discussed. The......

Soul Music

Pamela Klein
Illustration by Santiago Uceda If you are a spiritual person, an evening on the British Virgin Island of Tortola can be filled with signs. You needn’t look hard for them. They come to you as in a dream. It is a peaceful, gentle place, perhaps the safest island in the......