in Featured, People & Personalities, SoCal Trends

A Year in LA: How to Stay Alive in the Biz—Five Survival Tips To Make Things Happen^Featured

September 16, 2020

Once upon a time, I was that girl: I picked up everything and moved to LA to pursue a career in acting. To offer a little back-story, I had a tumultuous breakup with my teenage love and ran to Chicago after college three years prior. After a few years in the city, I was burnt out—holding down a restaurant job and temping to make ends meet. I was garnering theatre gigs consistently—I just wasn’t getting paid. Unfortunately, that is the reality in the theatre world and I thought the time was right to make my move to LA. I had a deep, gnawing pit in my stomach that LA was beckoning me and I couldn’t let it go. It was 1998—I was 25, doe eyed, and full of ambition. It was then or never. LA was a different place than it is now. The Internet was only about to boom, the bag phone was being replaced by a first generation flip phone (that resembled a miniature tank), and social media didn’t exist. There was no such thing as You Tube, bloggers, Twitter, or Facebook. The oversaturated business of reality TV had not yet happened. The creation of the Internet has made auditions more accessible…

in People & Personalities, Things To Do

National Geographic’s MARS

November 26, 2018

National Geographic’s MARS Series and NASA’s Insight Probe Landing By Kimberly Schmidt Just several hours ago, NASA InSight Spacecraft successfully landed on Mars to collect data to further assess the reality of life-sustaining properties. This makes National Geographic’s miniseries MARS not only entertaining but informative, relevant, and thoroughly exciting. As MARS Season Two continues to unfold, this scripted and documentary footage hybrid, executive produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, bares the day-to-day lives of the first pioneers to settle on the red planet. During a panel discussion with the show’s Big Thinkers, Stephen Petranek, Antonia Juhasz, and Casey Dreier, we talked about the new season’s themes and the current social commentary regarding our future as an interplanetary species. According to Stephen Petranek author of How We’ll Live On Mars for which the series is based, we must become an interplanetary species to avoid extinction. The misconception of pursuing life on Mars is that we ought to fix Earth instead of seeking life elsewhere but realistically both actions must occur. “By terraforming Mars and making it more like Earth we will actually learn how to control things on Earth that seem uncontrollable at this point as far…

in People & Personalities

Camila Alves on the Red Carpet

January 26, 2015

Honoring the Honorable

November 19, 2014

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Air Force veteran Warren Weinstein enjoys Monday mornings at the West Hills Wendy’s fast food restaurant where, for more than a decade, a group of about 75 Southern California veterans calling themselves Wings Over Wendy’s has been meeting to swap war stories and camaraderie. “I’m in awe of some of these gentlemen,” Weinstein says. “They’re in their 90’s, and being a pilot, particularly a B-17 and B-29 pilot, I was talking to some of these men who were on the actual missions over Germany, Ploiesti, the oil fields of Romania, some of the famous raids of WWII. These men have stories to tell.” Westlake Village resident 85-year-old Weinstein was a rescue pilot in the service from 1950-1953 and had his own adventures. His 10-member crew was in charge of going to crash sites to determine if there were survivors. If so, with a para-rescue jump team, they would get them flown safely to a hospital. On a good day, he was able to save lives at a crash. On one of his adventures in the jungles of Brazil, although there were no survivors, Weinstein recalls recovering $2 million dollars in diamonds on a crashed flight. Weinstein says no one will…