leftovers

At work, I had my Marketing Committee/Restaurant Meeting with Cirque du Soleil today, and I thought it was a huge success! The whole table in the conference room was full, and lots of the restaurant operators showed up. The people from Cirque had a lot of information, and seemed really excited to be part of Hollywood and to work with all the existing businesses in the district. I got some really sad news in the afternoon, I learned through facebook that a good friend of mine had passed away. Heather Mercer, from the band Three Chord Whore, who we had played many shows with and had stayed at her and Shantell's house several times up in Bakersfield, is gone. I didn't really get any more information than that, just that something happened over the weekend, it didn't sound good. I was so sad. I had to tell Amy right away, which I felt horrible doing through IM, but I wanted her to know right away. Heather was such a great person, I liked her from the minute we met, which ...

This morning was Tristan's funeral. It was at a catholic church, St. Pauls, down on Washington and Bronson. I picked up Marc and James to go with me, and we met Ben and his parents who were already there when we arrived. Ben told us he had gotten the wrong information to us, and that the service started at 10:30, not 9:30, so we had an hour to waste. First though, James and I did go into the church because they were having the viewing. I was sort of surprised that it was an open casket as those seem to be rare these days. Marc and Ben are both Jewish, and Marc said they don't really do that so neither one of them wanted to go see him, but I still remember going to my first open casket funeral for my great uncle Ted when I was very young. We all went to Starbucks to hang out for awhile before going back to the church. We sat sort of far back and we were definitely a distinct group and I wonder if the family wondered who we all were. Regrettably, I never really got to kno...

This morning I got up at 3am and then my team and I headed out to do our second day of homeless surveys. This time, I wanted to get down to the southern half of our area, which included a lot of the Media District BID area. The first people we came across were in a parking lot on Vine Street, and out of the three of them, only two wanted to participate. The third, a lady, was very upset with us for waking her up and she even told the other two people not to talk to us, and that the questions on the survey were "none of our business." Then we proceeded to Santa Monica Blvd. and throughout the entire BID area, we actually only found one homeless person and it was a guy I've known for a long time, named Lewis. I've had many run-in's with Lewis through my job, as at one point I was asked to circulate a petition to ask Lewis to 'stay away' from the businesses in the BID as he was known for harassing people. However, I had talked to him a couple times when...

This morning I talked to quite a few people who had heard about Tristan passing away, as Ben and I had spread the news on Facebook. Ben made plans for a memorial at C Frenz next Tuesday at Karaoke night, as he and Tristan went there to sing often. Ben had invited me to join them before and I never got around to it, which of course I regret horribly now. We had a board meeting at 3pm today at Red Studios and only half the board showed up, or rather one person more than half, which is what we need for a quorum, so we were able to have the meeting but it went rather quickly. After the meeting, I went to Smart and Final because I had to get refreshments for the LAPD Townhall Meeting. Usually, I host a Business Watch meeting every month with our LAPD senior lead officers, but they were hosting this Town Hall this month so they asked me to do this instead. The townhall was at Blessed Sacrament, a catholic school on Sunset Blvd. which I have known of for awhile but never been inside. It...

Today was a sad day. While watching TV this evening, my cell phone rang. We had just finished dinner earlier and I had left my phone on the dining table and I didn't feel like getting up to answer it. But then Dylan's phone rang and he saw it was Ben calling so he answered the phone. Ben said that our friend, Tristan, had just passed away; Tristan's aunt had called to let Ben know. I had known Tristan for a couple years or more, having met him through Ben. He was a fellow LA transplant from Kansas - he was from Wichita, and didn't seem to have many fond memories of or any desire to ever move back to our home state. He seemed perfectly happy in LA. He was quite a character, as he was always prone to break out in (very loud!) song, usually one of Tina Turner's, who he idolized. He was opinionated and outspoken, but never pushy or judgmental. My fondest memory of Tristan is from one night when we were hanging out at The Palms in West Hollywood, it was either hi...