Nancy Rommelmann

The Runaways: Amanda and Stephanie

Surviving With Two Runaway Daughters

Nancy Rommelmann
“For People magazine,” says Barry Lopez, watching as a photographer arranges a group of women before the Eugene, Oregon, condominiums in which Lopez lives with his wife, Debra Gwartney. She stands at the group’s center, a Maypole around which the blond braids and long limbs of her four daughters wind......
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The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, a.k.a. JT LeRoy

Nancy Rommelmann
You're on the brink of adolescence, chubby, frizzy-haired, self-conscious to the point of social paralysis. What if you could be someone else? Maybe the cute blonde in your class, the one who, when you stare at her across the room, seems effortlessly adorable? What if, through cunning, you could convince......
“If you are disappointed that I am 15 years older and a female

The Life and Death of JT LeRoy

Nancy Rommelmann
1980: He is born on Halloween, in West Virginia. His early life is marked by physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his lot-lizard (i.e., truck-stop hooker) mother, Sarah. JT, who experiences gender-identity issues, himself turns to prostitution and drug use. He winds up homeless and drug-addicted in San......
(Photo by Greg Martin)

William Langewiesche on The Atomic Bazaar and Facing our Worst Fear

Nancy Rommelmann
“Chevron apparently wrote an extremely pissed-off letter,” says William Langewiesche, thumbing through the June issue of Vanity Fair, where the month before he published a story about the oil industry’s ecological decimation of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We’re at a newsstand on a warm evening in Portland, and when he realizes......

Lives of the Carnies

Nancy Rommelmann
Photos by Virigina Lee HunterIt’s been raining for three days in Indio, a hard spring rain that’s turned the beige concrete houses on one side of Arabia Street the color of a pork chop left too long on the counter. On the other side is the Arabian-themed Riverside County Fairgrounds......

Brown Dirt Cowboys

Nancy Rommelmann
Photos by Slobodan Dimitrov Jorge carries a cow-size bundle of eucalyptus branches on his back. He is an anachronistic figure as he moves down a popular actor’s private drive, past the teal-and-chestnut guesthouse, around the fountain with bathing nymph, and into the shaded walkway, where his boss’s white GMC pickup......
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Satan’s Whiskers and Maiden’s Prayers

Nancy Rommelmann
Photo by Anne Fishbein So a guy walks into a bar. He looks at the dame in the corner, the one giving him the big eye; he’ll deal with that later. Right now, he’s got business with the bartender. “The usual, Joe,” he says. In a moment, standing on the......
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Dog Day Afternoon

Nancy Rommelmann
Photo by Anne Fishbein When I moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn, the man I’d moved here for affixed a button to his cap that read, “We don’t care how they do it in New York.” What I missed most about my hometown were the constant elbow-rubbing and small-talking one......
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Good Grub

Nancy Rommelmann
Photo by Anne Fishbein The blocks between Cahuenga and Highland, Melrose and Santa Monica, are where much of moviemaking magic happens, if you consider the magic to be invisible necessities such as digitizing and dubbing, editing and accounting. It’s not glamorous work, and neither is the area — blocks of......
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Sex, Death and Hard Beauty

Nancy Rommelmann
The book jacket of Kevin Patterson's first short-fiction collection, Country of Cold, Stories of Sex and Death, claims it's about "the lives of vibrant young men and women raised in rural Canada." But this is a bit of editorial embroidery, as Patterson's characters — a loosely knit group of high......