Deborah Vankin

Photo by Virginia Lee Hunter I wore a little black dress to the riot. And heels. That’s what I was wearing, at least, when a broad and pasty cop in full riot gear pushed me onto train tracks and slammed my right leg with a nightstick after the now-infamous Rage......

Photo by Elliott ShaffnerIt's a rainy Wednesday afternoon, and as Laurie David zips around the curvy, lush back streets of her Pacific Palisades neighborhood, she hopscotches between topics: from the ongoing fuel-economy/SUV debate to how she hooked up with her husband, Curb Your Enthusiasm creator and star Larry David, then......

I first met Fred Rochlin when I was sent to interview him a week before the 1999 staging of his autobiographical one-man show, Old Man in a Baseball Cap. The monologue was adapted from his “military memoir” about serving as a U.S. Army Air Corps navigator. I fired questions at......

It would be easy to classify Tracy Young as another of L.A.‘s myriad “writer-performer-directors,” since she’s won numerous awards and her work spans all three disciplines. But when we meet at the Griffith Observatory on a chilly Wednesday afternoon, it quickly becomes clear that she is, above all else, a......

David Freeman is the first to arrive. Wearing a blue blazer and brown fedora, the writer hunches over a rickety table in the far northeast corner of the Farmers Market, stirring his coffee with a metal spoon, the significance of which I‘ll soon learn. No one remembers how, exactly, Freeman’s......

“In this period of high anxiety, the letters may well contribute to the stress in the newsroom.” (Miami Herald) “This is a letter I have worked very hard not to have to write . . . It is a letter that brings news you will not be pleased to receive.”......