Erin Aubry Kaplan

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Staged Comebacks

Erin Aubry Kaplan
Photo by Anne Fishbein Director L. Kenneth Richardson is holding court. It matters little that his throne of the moment is the concrete stoop of a modest Southwest L.A. church, where he has taken a rehearsal break, or that his assembled audience numbers only one reporter, or that Richardson himself......
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Where Gumshoes Fear to Tread

Erin Aubry Kaplan
One of the few bits of good news for black people to emerge out of the deeply regressive 1990s was Walter Mosley. Amid all the public discourse about dismantling affirmative action and moving on from being black to being something else, Mosley was writing smart, graceful but angry detective novels......

Perrodin Unbound

Erin Aubry Kaplan
Photo by Ted Soqui The last time the media took the political temperature of Compton was way back in June, after machine-boss Mayor Omar Bradley was bested by challenger Eric Perrodin in a runoff that turned out to be about the most contentious election in the history of a town......
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Working on the Fringe: A Local Runt Wows the Scots

Erin Aubry Kaplan
Actor Michael Phillip Edwards figured the greatest thing he would do this summer would be getting himself to Scotland to perform his one-man show in Edinburgh’s massive and renowned Festival Fringe. Edwards‘ show, Runt, had a slot there and the backing of a producer here, but the actor had to......

Waiving the Flag

Erin Aubry Kaplan
Photo by Ted Soqui Words have felt useless to me for the last couple of weeks, which is not a good place for a writer to be. Besides the fact that since September 11 a semi-permanent horror has drained me of a certain self-absorption required of the craft, there truly......

Fire & Ice

Erin Aubry Kaplan
Like a lot of women of my age, fashion sense, marital status and middling economic strata, I have conflicted feelings about Lancome. Ambivalence about makeup is rampant among my sex for all sorts of reasons -- why a nude or natural “look” has nothing to do with a nude or......

A Famed Reformer Resigns

Erin Aubry Kaplan
Arturo Ybarra said the appearance of George McKenna III in Watts was like manna from the headquarters of Los Angeles Unified School District, a place hardly known for dispensing providence to his neighborhood. For years, Ybarra and his group, Parents and Students Organized, had been toiling to get the district‘s......

No More Omar

Erin Aubry Kaplan
Photo by Ted Soqui In anything-goes Compton politics, the fantastic has happened again: Mayor Omar Bradley has been defeated. Not only that, he was defeated by an opponent with virtually no name recognition in a place that doesn’t suffer anonymity. Everybody thought Eric Perrodin was a long shot, even the......

Whose Children Do We Cherish?

Erin Aubry Kaplan
Photo by Anne Fishbein Politics virtually demands doublespeak and euphemizing, and no cause has lately suffered more from the effects of slippery language than the reform of public education. Let’s start there: Public education really means inner-city schools, which in turn really means students who are black, Latino, poor, or......

Elective Memory

Erin Aubry Kaplan
The biggest surprise of last week‘s primary election in Compton was not the fact that its uncharacteristically low-lying mayor, Omar Bradley, showed up, or that he was forced into a runoff with a political neophyte whom he outspent by some hundred thousand dollars, or even that everybody pretty much behaved......