My candidate for LA mayor was Austin Beutner. I had already calendared a coffee for friends to meet Austin at the beginning of the year. Sadly, Austin’s daughter died and he understandably ended his campaign. I felt 100 percent that he would have been an excellent mayor and that he could have won. His exit opened space in the race for Nithya Raman and, earlier this year, Spencer Pratt.

I have stayed quiet about the mayor’s race because, frankly, I haven’t wanted fistfights on my Facebook page. But I think I know where I have landed.

Ten days ago, I canvassed the neighborhood around Lineage and wrote about good people living their lives next to a disaster zone. Mayor Bass was in Chicago when the fire started. She was at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, and I don’t fault her for being there. I would have liked to have been there too. What concerns me is what happened afterward. There was chaos and a lack of leadership at the beginning of that disaster, and the vacuum of leadership is still going on. Ask the people living there what is going to happen to their electric bills.

I asked about Nithya. I was told she had walked the neighborhood, without press, and listened to people. I’m not sure everyone she talked with even knew she was running for mayor. She asked questions and heard their answers.

Then there is transit.

In May the D-Line opened to La Cienega, and I have used it several times and am excited about it opening to Westwood next year. I just updated my Metro card to the senior rate, so now my rides cost me less than a dollar. Yes, I have a car. I also love the transit we have, and I know we need transit through the Sepulveda Pass.

So, I am concerned that Fred Rosen, the former Ticketmaster CEO and one of the loudest opponents of the Sepulveda subway, is now supporting Bass and was listed as a co-host of a fundraiser for her last weekend. I don’t know what that means. But when somebody who has spent years fighting a major transit project suddenly becomes politically involved with the mayor, I pay attention because this is how leadership can be one thing and then change. Where Wishy meets Washy. Sigh.

And then there are the animals. For those of you who really know me, you know animal welfare has been one of my concerns for a very long time.

In May I spoke with Nithya about what is happening with our shelters and our animals. I also told her about a conversation I had with Bass on the subject. Bass’s answer was, to say the least, uninspired. I was therefore not surprised when animal advocates got loud about Spencer Pratt, because Pratt leaned hard into animal welfare during his campaign.

I see one of the political problems around animals clearly. Most animal advocates are busy rescuing animals, running nonprofits, raising money and keeping their organizations alive. Nonprofits have limits on political activity. As a result, animals have never developed much political capital in this city. Where is the Democratic club organized around animal welfare? Nowhere.

I told Nithya I wanted to circle back with her campaign about animal welfare, and two weeks ago I did. My friend Jennifer and I had pulled together concerns we were hearing from people in dog and cat rescue and discussed it with Nithya’s staff.

What I found was a campaign staff that understood many of the problems. And Jennifer and I weren’t the only ones talking to them. They had also been meeting with animal advocates throughout the month. Then last night, at East Area Progressive Dem club (EAPD), someone brought up animal welfare directly to Nithya who was there. She talked about what she has learned since the campaign began. She had even gone out with a group to experience TNR firsthand.

That matters to me. Not because somebody checked the correct box on an issues questionnaire. Because she went out and learned.

I don’t expect Nithya Raman to be a hero. I don’t expect any mayor of Los Angeles to be one. I think it is a terrible job in a city whose government is partly designed not to work very well.

But last night I watched Nithya rise to the occasion. She showed up. Bass didn’t, nor did her campaign send someone in her place. Nithya answered questions, talked about what she had learned and, most important to me, I could see that she had actually been out there learning.

And somewhere in there I thought, dang it, I should say where I stand.

Nithya Raman has earned my vote.

And for those of you who are about to tell me I have gone wildly left of left, let me remind you:

Austin Beutner was my first choice. No one would accuse him of being left of left. Anyway, to my fellow Los Angelenos that was my process. Not saying it is right or wrong. Just how I landed.

When I joined a Facebook group in 2019, I did not expect it would change my life. I mean...come on. It’s Facebook. It’s where people vent, celebrate, argue politics, post vacation photos, laugh, cry, and sometimes learn something useful. Life changing? Nah.

Then I joined Parents Supporting Teachers, or PST, and somewhere along the way I realized it wasn’t really a Facebook group anymore.

It had become oxygen.

It was a place where people compared notes, challenged assumptions, solved problems, and showed up for one another. When thousands of people decide they care about the same thing and are willing to do a little work, something changes. It stops being social media and starts becoming a community. Now, in the summer of 2026, I need that oxygen more than ever.

PST started with a simple idea. In December 2018, one LAUSD parent and one LAUSD teacher, both with children at their neighborhood public school, decided there should be a place where parents and teachers could share information during the first UTLA strike in more than thirty years.

There was no grand strategy, no nonprofit, no political organization. Just a Facebook group. They thought maybe a few families from their school would join.

Instead, parents told parents. Teachers told teachers. The group spread across Los Angeles. By January it had grown to roughly 20,000 members. Today there are 30,000. No one had any idea what that little Facebook group would come to mean to us.

I joined PST thinking I was going to stay informed about the strike. At the time, my son was finishing high school. I had spent years fundraising and advocating for programs at each of his LAUSD schools, and outside of education I was becoming more involved in environmental and civic issues during the first Trump administration. I had no idea that PST would become the place where I would spend the next seven years learning how to read school budgets, connecting with parents across a 710 square mile district, and watching one of the most significant education funding controversies in California unfold.

In 2022, California voters approved Proposition 28. Nearly 70% in LA County and 65% percent of us statewide, voted yes because we wanted additional arts education in every public school. More music. More dance. More theater. More visual arts. More opportunity for kids. It was a simple promise.

Because my son had already graduated, I did not have a ground level perspective on how Proposition 28 was affecting local schools. I was curious, but I was spending most of my time following LAUSD board meetings with my friend Manuel Urrutia. We were unpacking statements made at board meetings that did not match presentation slides, did not sync up with reports sent to Sacramento, and did not match what was happening at schools. Believe me, that took up a lot of bandwidth.

At the same time, I watched conversations unfold in PST. Sometimes I would add a thought or suggest something that might help. Then, in 2023, I saw a mom I knew ask a simple question about Proposition 28.

“Is anyone seeing more art at their kid’s school?”

Looking back, that was the inciting incident. The trip wire. The lighting of the fuse. Ground zero. One mom asking one question about one school in the San Fernando Valley.

A couple of us suggested she reach out to Manuel. Together they pulled up her school’s budget, and there it was. A line of money for arts instruction called TSP - Itinerant Art Teachers Support had been replaced by Proposition 28 funds.

Replaced, not supplemented.

Exactly the opposite of what the law required.

The PST administrators had questions, and some of us with loud voices wanted answers. Together we created simple, step-by-step instructions so parents could check the budgets for their own schools. We told people to become “budget hawks.”

Within days, PST members began reporting back from San Pedro to Northridge, Woodland Hills to South Gate, and Westchester to Boyle Heights.

The same pattern appeared again and again across the vastness of LAUSD. The district had replaced existing arts funding with Proposition 28 dollars instead of adding to it.

That mattered because Proposition 28 was never written to replace funding. It was written to increase it. If your child had three hours of dance each week before Proposition 28, the point was not to keep them at three hours with a different funding source. The point was to give them more instruction, more opportunity, and more art. That is why seven million Californians voted yes.

Meanwhile, next door to LAUSD was our better-behaved sibling. The contrast with Long Beach Unified could not have been clearer. Long Beach used Proposition 28 to expand arts instruction across its schools by hiring additional teachers and adding programs. Students received more instruction.

Los Angeles chose the different path.

Eventually, Austin Beutner, the author of Proposition 28, and parents filed a lawsuit which documents how LAUSD replaced existing arts funding with Proposition 28 dollars instead of expanding arts education as voters intended. Internal district documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times acknowledged that Proposition 28 money was used to replace funding for 167 of the district’s 227 elementary arts teachers. That practice is now being challenged in court.

Last fall, when LAUSD asked the court to dismiss the case, the judge rejected the district’s central legal argument that compliance could be measured districtwide rather than school by school. Referring to the language of Proposition 28, he said:

“The statute says the schools get the money... I think you lose on that.”

Now, four years after Proposition 28 passed, too many Los Angeles students are still waiting for the expanded arts education voters promised them, and LAUSD has a “get-out-of- jail” card in the California Legislature through AB 2440.

Instead of correcting course while this litigation is pending, AB 2440 would change the rules that are at the center of the lawsuit. In my view, that is exactly the wrong approach.

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times published Howard Blume’s story on the growing debate over AB 2440. I was honored to sign a letter to Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (AD66), the author of AB 2440, alongside Austin Beutner, the author of Proposition 28, as well as fellow education advocates Nicolle Fefferman, Hans Johnson, and Vicky Martinez.

This legislation should not move forward as written.

At its core, this is about more than arts education. It is about whether the Legislature should rewrite a voter approved initiative after the fact or whether the promises made to California voters should be honored.

The PST community continues to stay engaged on Proposition 28, and many of us still find ourselves shaking our heads. The LAUSD Board has never voted to resolve this issue.

District leadership is trying to use the Legislature to get a “get out of jail” card instead of doing the right thing.

Parents in Los Angeles are still fundraising for arts while families in Long Beach received the additional instruction Proposition 28 promised.

And somewhere along the way, California’s education leadership allowed this to continue.

So, what happens when you are faced with so many mindboggling wrongs that they take the air out of the room? You go looking for oxygen, where people are talking truth, asking questions, and figuring out solutions to real problems. In the summer of 2026, when I can get depressed by what is coming out of Washington, D.C., and filtering across our country, I need to know there are still people fighting righteous fights and generating their own oxygen. That gives me hope.

I joined PST in 2019 thinking it would help me keep up with a teachers strike. I had no idea it would change my life. But, pulling out wider, I don’t think this story is really about Facebook, Proposition 28, or even LAUSD. It’s about what happens when ordinary people decide to pay attention. None of us set out to become experts in school finance or education law. We simply cared enough to ask questions, compare notes, and keep going when the answers didn’t make sense. That’s what communities do for each other. They create oxygen. Go find your oxygen makers. They just might change your life.

On Father’s Day I woke up with swollen glands and a distinctive metallic taste in my mouth. The cause was hard to ignore. For days, a massive fire at the Lineage cold-storage facility in Boyle Heights had been sending smoke across Los Angeles County. Meteorologists reported that contaminants from the fire had spread far beyond the Eastside. As my husband left for a Father’s Day hike in the San Gabriel Mountains, he drove past the blaze near the 10 Freeway and described it as apocalyptical. The fire had become the defining local story of the week in a city already consumed with hosting FIFA World Cup events.

Yet late Sunday evening, another story displaced it from the headlines: the resignation of Alberto Carvalho as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

I knew something unusual had happened before I even saw the news. My phone had been lighting up with texts for about thirty minutes. I had spent the day researching a novel I’m writing that spans 150 years of Los Angeles history, and by 10:30 p.m. I was too tired to get up and retrieve the phone from its charger across the room. When I finally checked the messages, the pieces fell into place. As both a researcher of Los Angeles history and a public-school advocate, I could not help noticing how these two seemingly unrelated stories were both toxic messes. Which then left me with one question: Who bears the cost of decisions made elsewhere?

Boyle Heights and the Eastside have been answering that question for generations.

Originally one of Los Angeles’ great immigrant neighborhoods, Boyle Heights became a place where Irish, Jewish, Mexican, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Black, and countless other families lived side by side when much of the city remained segregated. Communities excluded elsewhere built institutions of their own. Jewish physicians denied opportunities at established hospitals helped create what became Kaspare Cohn Hospital and later Cedars of Lebanon, part of the foundation of today’s Cedars-Sinai. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, many Japanese families moved south to Los Angeles and settled in and around Boyle Heights, while African American families arriving during the Great Migration joined a community already shaped by immigrants and working people. It was not a utopia. Discrimination remained a fact of life throughout Los Angeles. But Boyle Heights became one of the most diverse neighborhoods in America, a place where children shared the same schools, parks, and streets.

An Evergreen Playground photograph captures that reality better than any statistic ever could. I first encountered that history in 2019 while meeting with parents and teachers at Evergreen Playground. Hanging in the recreation center was a photograph from 1935. Mexican, Japanese, Black, and white children sat shoulder to shoulder in the easy disorder of childhood. No one in the image appears conscious of making history, yet that is what the camera captured. The photograph preserved not a famous event, but something rare. An ordinary afternoon showing what Boyle Heights kids looked like when immigrant and working-class families shared the same schools, parks, and streets.

That history also helps explain why the Eastside matters so much to LAUSD.

LAUSD is one of the most immigrant-rooted school systems in America. About sixteen percent of students are currently classified as English Learners, while many more are the children of immigrant families. The district serves communities shaped by generations of migration from Mexico, Central America, Armenia, Korea, the Philippines, China, Japan, the Middle East, and dozens of other places.

When Alberto Carvalho arrived in Los Angeles, many families and my advocate colleagues were encouraged by his own immigrant story. According to his public biography, he arrived from Portugal as a teenager and spent time as an undocumented immigrant before becoming one of the most prominent education leaders in the country. Many believed that background would give him a unique understanding of the students and families who make up LAUSD.

Unfortunately, Carvalho’s tenure from December 2022 through June 2026 became marked by recurring controversies involving transparency, communication, and public trust. From the district’s response to the ransomware attack, to questions and a lawsuit surrounding Prop 28 implementation, Primary Promise, i-Ready, budget transparency, wildfire decision-making, and ultimately the failed Ed/AllHere AI initiative, many parents, educators, and community advocates found themselves seeking answers that were incomplete, delayed, or difficult to reconcile with publicly available facts. While the federal investigation and his resignation drew the greatest attention, for many LAUSD observers they represented the culmination of concerns that had been building for years.

The timing was also striking. One of the most controversial superintendents in modern district history resigned the day before summer school was set to begin, while toxic smoke drifted from Boyle Heights across Los Angeles County.

The Eastside is one of the places where LAUSD is not an abstraction. Summer school is not simple remediation. It provides meals, childcare, newcomer support, language services, arts programs, and safe places for children while parents work. A significant share of LAUSD’s summer school campuses serve Eastside communities. When district leadership falters, the consequences are not theoretical. They are felt immediately by tens of thousands of families in Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, El Sereno, East Los Angeles, and surrounding neighborhoods.

For generations, the Eastside has paid an environmental price for the prosperity of Los Angeles.

In 2012, former LAUSD board member Bennett Kayser noticed something unusual while visiting a school near Vernon. Water running along the street shimmered in a way that caught the attention of this former science teacher. He asked questions with the district, triggering investigations that helped expose the scale of contamination associated with the Exide battery recycling plant. For decades, lead and arsenic had settled across Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Maywood, Bell, Commerce, and Huntington Park. After years of community organizing and government action, Exide closed in 2015, and the site became one of the largest environmental cleanup projects in California history.

Yet even that story carried its own lesson. In the next election, Kayser was defeated in a campaign flooded with outside charter school and privatizer money, it was especially ugly with commercials pointing out Bennet’s hand tremor. I found it vile. His successor, Ref Rodriguez, would later resign after pleading guilty in a campaign finance case connected to his election. The Eastside lost both an advocate and, for a year, basic representation while the board seat sat empty after Rodriguez’s resignation.

Sadly, the pattern did not end there. In 2020, KIPP sought to build a charter school campus on the site of a former smelting plant in Cudahy. Community members pushed back, raising concerns about contamination and environmental health of the neighborhood. Around the same period, another Cudahy school endured the fallout from a major jet-fuel dumping incident over a campus built on land that had once been a dump. Again and again, industries, infrastructure, and institutions that benefit the broader city have left their burdens on Eastside neighborhoods.

When I pointed out KIPP and the toxic dirt of the smelter land to friends on the Westside, I got crickets.

So, here is what is also true, Boyle Heights has a long history of fighting back. It will ask difficult questions about the Lineage fire. It will demand answers. What concerns me is not only the smoke hanging over the Eastside, but the metallic taste that reached neighborhoods far beyond East LA. Are we who live farther away outside Boyle Heights simply going to wait for institutions and leaders to sort this toxic mess out for us?

That would be a mistake.

Because Los Angeles history suggests that power often bends toward money, institutions often protect themselves, and when accountability finally arrives, the people responsible sometimes leave while the consequences remain. The Eastside knows this history well. On Father’s Day, breathing smoke from Boyle Heights and reading a resignation statement from downtown Los Angeles, I was reminded that the cost of those decisions rarely falls on the people who make them.

And that fact should leave a bad taste in your mouth.

I am working on my book RanchoLand, which I joke with friends is part Gone With the Wind and part Seinfeld. What I mean is that it covers a long arc of Los Angeles history while also being, in many ways, a story about nothing. It is not about the famous names who shaped the city. It is about ordinary people living ordinary lives while Los Angeles expands around them. The land changes. The economy changes. The social landscape shifts. History happens in the background while people go to work, raise families, fall in love, grieve, and carry on. Finding importance in the margins is the history I am trying to write.

On Sunday I experienced one of those moments.

As a member of the Education Committee in the East Area Progressive Dem Club (EAPD), I attended our annual Thank a Teacher event, organized by our president, Hans Johnson. This year we honored two admired educators, Dave Metz and Doushellg Esparza, for standing up for students and public school professionals during a year of attacks on Angelenos’ constitutional rights and dignity. Both have championed the freedom to learn and respect for diversity through their work in schools and in the community.

We gathered on a beautiful patio tucked into a corner of Frogtown near the Los Angeles River in Elysian Valley. (For those unfamiliar with the neighborhood, here’s a nice overview of Frogtown and how it fits into the larger Los Angeles Landscape.) There were perhaps forty people there, representing different ages, backgrounds, and experiences, all coming together for a simple purpose: to tell two educators, “We see you.”

Among them were newly re-elected school board member Rocio Rivas and State Senate candidate Sara Hernandez. They were there not as speakers or VIPs, but as members of the community gathered to celebrate educators.

As I listened to Dave and Doushellg speak beneath the shade sails overhead, I was reminded why these moments matter. Perhaps now more than ever.

There we were celebrating teachers who had stood up to bullies in the shadow of land that was once part of Rancho Los Feliz, near the old road that connected the pueblo to the surrounding ranchos and, eventually, to the city that grew around them. Beside us flowed a river that could be gentle in summer and violent in winter, nourishing and dangerous at the same time. Around us sat people sharing stories marked not by fame or power, but by courage, humility, and service.

For a few hours, surrounded by teachers, parents, advocates, and neighbors, I felt the same thing I am trying to capture in RanchoLand: that history is often found not in the headlines but in the small gatherings, the quiet acts of decency, and the people who choose to do the right thing when no one is paying attention.

I left feeling full in the best possible way.

Some of us, how do I say this in a nice voice, oh, forget it, are fucking depressed when we look at the mess our country is in.

Foolish decisions. Public money flowing in directions that smell rotten. Ordinary Americans just trying to pay rent, buy groceries, put gas in the car, keep their families safe, and live their lives while the ground keeps shifting under them. Data centers land in communities. Pollution protections get rolled back. Prices go up. The noise gets louder. Etc etc.

It can feel like there is a war on America by Americans.

So yes, people are worried. Some are numb. Some are furious. Some are depressed.

And then, because I am apparently built this way, I had a moment while researching Neptune.

I am a wife, parent, activist, writer, and astrologer. Every now and then all of those identities walk into the same room. That happened when I was researching the upcoming Neptune retrograde in Aries and I looked back at the last time Neptune retrograded through these same early degrees.

That was summer and fall of 1862.

And weird enough, my research made me feel hopeful. Perhaps you may have the same takeaway.

Next month on July 7 Neptune retrogrades from 4 degrees to 1 degree of Aries. This is the first Neptune retrograde entirely in Aries since the 1860s.

Looking back to the 19^th century, we see some remarkable stories during that first Neptune Retrograde in Aries where Neptune traveled roughly the same degrees we will be covering in our cycle. I found stories worth our attention because the themes from then could be lenses to now.

I will bring you four people who were doing some heavy lifts during July 7 – December 13, 1862.

Abraham Lincoln was shifting the focus of the war. It stopped being primarily a fight over preserving the Union and started to become a fight over slavery itself. Two weeks into the retrograde Lincoln signs an Act that moves federal policy further against slavery and then he presents a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. It was not public yet. September was the battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history. Confederate General Lee was stopped. A week later Lincoln issues publicly the Preliminary Proclamation. Now the purpose of the Civil War had changed, along with the future meaning of freedom itself. Can you feel the Neptune retro in Aries? Lincoln was 53

Mathew Brady In October 1862, Mathew Brady’s team photographed the dead at Antietam and exhibited the images in New York under the title The Dead of Antietam. People had never seen war like that before. The New York Times famously observed that Brady had brought “the terrible reality and earnestness of war” home to the public. The war was already eighteen months old by this point, yet Americans were seeing its human cost in a completely new way. Can you feel Neptune retrograde in Aries? Brady was 38.

Clara Barton In 1862, Clara Barton, an unmarried schoolteacher with some nursing experience, was becoming known as the “Angel of the Battlefield.”

That summer and fall of 1862, she collected supplies, organized donations, lobbied officials, traveled to battlefields, and provided direct aid to wounded soldiers.

During Neptune’s first retrograde in Aries, Clara Barton was not waiting for permission. Religious and independent, she stepped into a role that did not yet exist. She organized supplies, traveled to battlefields, cared for the wounded, and created a model of civilian action that would lead into the American Red Cross. Barton wasn’t just responding to events. She was redefining who was allowed to participate in them.

Clara wasn’t a general. She wasn’t an elected official. Yet she became influential because she saw a need and acted. Can you see Neptune retrograde in Aries? Clara was 40.

Claude Monet In 1862, Claude Monet was at a small art studio painting, talking, and bonding with other young artists. Specifically, Monet met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille after enrolling in Charles Gleyre’s studio in Paris.

During the July–December 1862 window, these young artists were still trying to figure out art. The official French art world was dominated by the Salon: Big history paintings, classical subjects, mythology, and academic rules. I would argue big boring.

The future Impressionists were beginning to ask a revolutionary question:

What if we painted what we actually see?

The official launch of the Impressionist movement would not happen for another ten years. But can you feel Neptune retrograde in early Aries? Monet was 21. Renoir was 21. Degas was 28. Berthe Morisot was 21. Pissarro was 32. Cézanne was 23.

Their question was no less revolutionary than Galileo asking, What if the Earth moves? Or Lincoln asking, What if the Union cannot survive with slavery? Or Clara Barton asking, What if ordinary citizens help directly? Or Mathew Brady asking, What if people actually see the battlefield?

Each, in their own way, was challenging the accepted reality of the time.

Telegraph / Information Networks

Also beeping through wires during this period was the telegraph, transforming communication across countries and the world. Information moved faster than institutions were accustomed to handling.

Sound familiar?

The Parallel

What fascinates me about the 1862 Neptune retrograde is that it wasn’t only about the Civil War. It was about a revolution in how people experienced reality.

Lincoln was redefining the purpose of the war around slavery and emancipation. Mathew Brady was changing how Americans saw war by bringing battlefield photographs into public view. Clara Barton was creating a new model of civilian participation and care. The telegraph was moving information faster than institutions were accustomed to handling. And in a Paris art studio, a 21-year-old Claude Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille began questioning the rules of the Academy.

None of these stories were finished in 1862. They were seeds. The first Impressionist exhibition, The Red Cross, the end of the war were off in the future. Yet the foundations were being laid in 1862.

Today we are facing our own revolution in information and perception. Social media, AI, smartphones, citizen journalism, and changing technologies are transforming how we create, distribute, and experience reality. Brady’s photographs did not create the Civil War, but they changed how people understood it. Photography forced artists to ask the meaning of painting. AI may force us to ask a similar question about writing, art, creativity, and even expertise itself.

The question for us may not be what happens during this Neptune retrograde. The better question may be: What seeds are being planted now that we will only recognize in hindsight?

On a personal level, for you astro literate folks, look at where 1–4 degrees of Aries falls in your chart. Which house does it occupy? What planets does it contact? Neptune will no doubt be talking to you through that house and those aspects. Just saying, as someone who has transiting Neptune sitting on her Ascendant during this retrograde. 😉

For the rest of you, let’s take a moment, consider that a lot may be going on behind the scene that could benefit all of us in this crazy moment in USA history and perhaps there will be something bright and good down the road. Just perhaps.

As many of you know, I’ve spent a long-time paying attention to public education in Los Angeles. Not just as a parent, but as someone who watched decisions get made, who gets listened to, and who gets ignored.

A lot of how I evaluate candidates comes through that lens.

Over the years I’ve watched LAUSD families deal with overcrowded classrooms, budget chaos, school closure threats, superintendent turnover, big outside money flood school board races, and district leadership that too often communicates at communities instead of with them. I’ve also watched teachers and parents be the glue that holds schools together in the face of a sloppy district.

That’s one of the reasons PST, Parents Supporting Teachers, mattered so much to me.

PST started during the 2019 UTLA strike as a way for parents and teachers across Los Angeles to share real-time information with each other instead of relying on rumors and district spin. Parents in San Pedro, Koreatown, the Valley, the Eastside, and the Harbor area quickly realized they were seeing the same patterns play out in different ways.

And then Covid hit.

The PST community became a place where people tried to make sense of school shutdowns, heat days, hacked student data, calendar chaos, staffing shortages, budget insanity, and district dysfunction. Sometimes the conversations were messy. Sometimes people argued. But there was finally a space where parents and educators could compare notes without a manufactured PR filter sitting on top of everything.

That distinction matters to me. Big time.

Because Los Angeles has a whole ecosystem of polished “parent advocacy” groups that suddenly appear with branding, consultants, funding, media access, and carefully packaged narratives about “kids first” reform. A lot of them are backed by people with privatization agendas and enormous money behind them. There’s usually a press strategy before there’s even a community.

PST is the opposite. No dues. No nonprofit machine. No billionaire funding stream. Just people trying to understand what was happening in the second-largest school district in the country and how to push back when leadership failed communities.

Such was the case when Prop 28 arrived.

In 2022, California voters passed Proposition 28 with nearly 60% support. The promise was simple: Additional arts instruction for students in California public schools. Additional funding. Additional arts education. Very straightforward.

But many parents in Los Angeles began asking on PST why they were not seeing art expansion at their schools. The deeper PST members investigated Prop 28 spending, the stranger things became.

Parents requested information. Advocates asked questions publicly. The district failed to provide clear answers. Eventually, two friends of mine dug into the budget and uncovered what appeared to be a shell game involving Prop 28 funds.

That issue has now moved into active litigation, and a judge has already indicated that plaintiffs raised credible claims the district may be violating the law.

What made this especially personal for me was seeing schools like West Hollywood Elementary, Gardner Street, and Rosewood lacking meaningful additional arts instruction despite what voters were promised. At a certain point, this stops being a policy debate and becomes a basic governance question:

Can the public trust institutions to carry out the mandates voters approved?

Because West Hollywood Elementary sits in a community represented by West Hollywood Mayor John Erickson, I contacted him about what was happening to WeHo families.

To his credit, he immediately engaged.

He contacted the superintendent’s office and demanded answers regarding how Prop 28 funds were being handled and why schools appeared not to be receiving the expanded arts instruction voters approved. The district’s response was so evasive that the correspondence itself is now part of the lawsuit record.

Too often elected officials avoid uncomfortable institutional conflicts because they fear alienating allies or stakeholders. Erickson did not do that here. He listened, engaged, and asked direct questions.

If I lived west of La Brea, I would be voting for John in State Senate District 24.

I have also spent considerable time discussing these issues with Sara Hernandez, who is running in SD-26.

Sara immediately understood the seriousness of the problem. As a parent with a child in a neighborhood public school, she grasped both the practical and ethical implications of what was happening across more than 1,000 LAUSD schools.

I also had candid conversations with her about charter-school politics and prior backing from organizations like CCSA. Those conversations mattered to me because I care about neighborhood public schools and the destabilization many communities have experienced. After those discussions, I came away understanding that Sara’s alignment and my own around neighborhood public schools are now very much in sync.

I also want to mention Richard Barrera, who is running for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Colleagues at East Area Progressive Democrats highlighted aspects of Barrera’s record in San Diego that stood out to me. Under his leadership, policies expanded college access for first-generation and immigrant students while also focusing on the adults who make public schools function.

Teacher pay increased. Educator retention remained strong. Public schools were treated as institutions worth investing in rather than slowly hollowing out.

I also spoke directly with Barrera about LAUSD’s transparency problems surrounding both the budget and Prop 28. He understood these were not isolated incidents but symptoms of deeper governance failures within large public systems across California.

As for the broader Superintendent race, I also have no issue with Nichelle Henderson. If she and Barrera emerged from the primary, I would feel reasonably optimistic about the direction of education policy in California.

The other candidates concern me.

There is a growing Silicon Valley ideology moving into public education policy circles, and I think many Californians underestimate how aggressive technology interests are becoming around governance, curriculum structures, data systems, and institutional priorities. That deserves far more scrutiny than it currently gets.

As for my own LAUSD school board member — sigh. I have become increasingly disappointed by Nick Melvoin.

On Prop 28, budget transparency, and broader district accountability issues, he has felt largely rudderless. At a time when parents and advocates were raising serious concerns, I saw little meaningful urgency. I also remain concerned by his continued alignment with charter interests, including support for charter renewals even when schools have longstanding performance concerns.

At this point, while I am not formally endorsing anyone in the Board District 4 race, I am actively looking at alternatives.

Some people experience politics primarily through national partisan identity.

I experience it through institutions.

Do public agencies tell the truth?

Do elected officials ask difficult questions?

Do systems operate transparently?

Do public dollars reach the communities voters intended them to reach?

Are neighborhood public schools treated as civic goods worth protecting rather than market opportunities?

Those questions shape both my politics and my vote.

I also have lenses around climate and animal welfare, which I may write about separately later. But for now, these are my thoughts through the education lens.

Uranus has moved into Gemini for the first time since the 1940s, and even if you don’t follow astrology, you may notice it as a change in the mental landscape. Ideas come in faster, questions feel more immediate, and there is a sense that things are beginning to move in a different way. It’s not fully formed yet, and it doesn’t need to be, but there is a spark. Uranus tends to enter with a jolt, and this one is no exception.

But this is not really about Uranus. This is about you.

This shift is happening in the middle of the Treasure Mapping window, which makes it more interesting. We are in the part of the cycle where intention starts to meet movement. Do you know what you want? Are you willing to engage with it?

If you have already “finished” your map, you may suddenly feel the urge to add an affirmation or an image. I would trust that. If you are still working on it, this is the part where you pay attention. If you haven’t started yet, there is still time. You just need to have your map done before May 1.

This isn’t about catching up or doing it perfectly. It’s about stepping into what is already moving and seeing where it leads.

What has stood out to me this year is that the real question isn’t just what you want, but whether you are willing to want something again. That sounds simple, but it isn’t. It asks you to move past disappointment, past practicality, and past the quieter ways we talk ourselves out of things that once mattered. It asks you to take your own desire seriously again, even if you don’t yet know how it will unfold.

You don’t need the full picture right now. You only need to recognize what is showing up and be willing to engage with it.

Are you willing to want something again?

If you want a clear walkthrough of the process, I did a conversation with Astrology Hub that covers it all

It is a subtle question, but it has a big punch, and I have been thinking about it a lot over the last couple of weeks. It came up in conversations about Treasure Mapping, which is something I have been doing with friends for years. A Treasure Map is a vision board done at a very specific time of year, and that part matters, because the timing is now. But after thirty years of making maps and countless discussions, I have become more and more aware that sometimes people stop wanting things.

Maybe it is age, maybe it is frustration, or maybe it is just a quiet feeling of “why bother.” Sometimes we stop wanting things not because they are impossible or wrong, but because at some point they did not work, or they almost happened, or we convinced ourselves to be ‘realistic’. So, we adjust, we scale back, we get practical, and over time the wanting part just goes quiet.

Every year when I sit down to make a map, that is the moment that always gets me. It is not only about what do I want, but whether I am willing to want again. Because wanting something requires a kind of courage. It means you are willing to risk being disappointed and willing to admit that something still matters.

This year, that question feels louder. There is a lot shifting right now, and you may feel it even if you do not follow astrology. Things are moving, decisions are getting made, and the pace is picking up in a way that is hard to ignore. By the end of the month, it will be even more charged. Which makes this a potent and very real moment to ask yourself what you want next. Not what makes sense, not what looks good, and not what someone else would approve. This is about you and what you want.

If you decide to work with that, there is a simple way to do it. Once a year, at the beginning of the zodiac, those of us who lean into cycles make a Treasure Map. I learned this practice from astrologer Buz Myers 30 years ago this month. In 1989, my friend Margaret Wendt, a journalist and student of Buz, introduced me to his lectures. In 1996, Buz announced that this was the year to make Treasure Maps. Intrigued, I asked Margaret and our friend Ann to do it, and we made our first maps.

The maps, which are collages and what are now called vision boards, were something Buz was doing well before that term was common. They are a way of putting those wants into form through images, words, and fragments of thought, things that do not always make sense in the moment.

Some of them land fast. That first year brought in many results. Some take time, and I remember one year a map had big manifestations in month eleven. I showed much hope and patience that year 😉. Some take even longer, and then you look back at a map from years earlier and a bell goes off and you think, “Ah, now I get it.”

I have two recent talks available if you are curious about the process. One is a conversation with Astrology Hub that gives a clear overview and is free. It currently has over 50k views which I think speaks to the feeling of change people are tapping. Just sayin’. The other is a bit longer presentation I did through the Philosophical Research Society that goes deeper into example Treasure Maps from the last year, and they are very impressive. Both videos are good, and if watch the free one and feel you want a bit more astrology, I do recommend the PRS talk.

You can make your map any time after April 17 but before May 1. Most people will sit down and do it in a couple of days once they start. Or you can just sit with the question and see what comes up. You know the question:

Are you willing to want something again?

I stopped at a 7-11 and did not get a Slurpee. I got a moment that didn’t feel random.

It was the feeling that this place, which is ordinary, dare I say common, by all measures, was holding something else.

And for some reason, Aaron Copland came to mind. Well, truthfully, it wasn’t “some” reason. It was by design.

Yesterday I was on my walk, listening to a podcast, the volume a little higher than usual because of traffic and the occasional ambulance heading toward Cedars-Sinai. I was heading east, having just come along the southern edge of Pan Pacific Park. As I approached the corner of Gardner Avenue, I heard music slip into my podcast.

I stopped. The music was familiar. Just a few bars, but I knew it right away. Aaron Copland.

I love Copland. In the same way a mother can hear her child’s voice in a crowded room, I can hear Copland even on a noisy street. I took out my earpieces and listened. It was unmistakable: Fanfare for the Common Man.

I love the piece. When I need something bigger than myself, I play it. I looked around, expecting a car to be blasting it loud enough to cut through the afternoon traffic, but no car was responsible. It was coming from 7-11.

This should not have been a surprise. Many 7-11s and other convenience stores have been blasting classical music into their parking lots for years. The idea, along with similar practices by some transit authorities, is that classical music deters loitering. I once sat at a stoplight in Hollywood while some kind of German opera blasted from a convenience store, and that green light did not come fast enough.

There is also controversy around this practice, whether it functions as a form of targeting along lines of race and class. I think about the musicians who began as children with endless violin, cello, and flute lessons, who eventually make it to the LA Phil, and then walk into a 7-11 and hear one of their most beloved pieces used this way. For those who love classical music, it must create a kind of cognitive dissonance. Standing there, hearing Copland, I felt it too.

Last month, driving through Monument Valley in Arizona, my husband and I played Copland—El Salón México, Fanfare for the Common Man, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring. He is the composer of North America.

In the 1930s, after spending time in Mexico, Copland wrote El Salón México, built from Mexican folk melodies. Rodeocame after Agnes de Mille asked him to write for a ballet about a cowgirl. Appalachian Spring, with Martha Graham, tells the story of a young American couple on the prairie. These pieces are cinematic, wide in perspective, and big. But of all of them, Fanfare for the Common Man may be the boldest.

In 1942, as the United States entered World War II, Cincinnati Symphony conductor Eugene Goossens commissioned short fanfares from American composers to open concerts. He wanted to honor people contributing to the war effort and suggested titles like Fanfare for Soldiers and Fanfare for Heroes. Copland chose something else: Fanfare for the Common Man.

Factory workers, soldiers, laborers, everyday citizens—everyone was part of the effort. It was American idealism; written by the son of immigrants whose family came from Lithuania.

That music was playing while I stood there looking at a young man, unshaven, shirtless, with unkempt hair and dirty pants, waiting for someone to give him something—food, money, I couldn’t tell. Another man was asleep at the edge of the line, his body carefully aligned in the thinning shade of the billboard poles, where a sinister figure holding a needle from a television show loomed above.

This is Aaron Copland’s fanfare in 2026.

Is a ballet being commissioned for this scene on the corner of Gardner and Third? In the land that was once Mexico, with its folk dances and rodeos, later American dairy farms that turned into oil wells that fueled a war, and now a park and a 7-11.

All of that history, and all of this present, held in the same frame. Aaron Copland’s 7-11.

Here is the music: Fanfare for the Common Man, El Salón México, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring.

Sometimes it’s big. Or maybe it is small. A moment, a comment, a connection that lands and never really leaves.

The humans in our schools impact our kids.

Never forget it.

Nearly twenty years ago, when my journey with LAUSD began, my son Jack was in Kindergarten (2006-07). When the kids went to the library, Jack was checking out his book and saw a photo behind the desk of Mia Louise, the librarian. It was a navy pilot standing in front of his jet.

Jack got very excited and asked her about it. She said, “That’s my nephew Victor.” Jack never forgot it. Every time he saw her, he asked about Victor.

Now as an adult, Jack still keeps track of Mia and her nephew.

This week, Captain Victor Glover went into space with the crew of Artemis.

We watched, and I will tell you, we were misty.

God speed Victor, Reid Wiseman, Christina Hammock Koch, and Jeremy Hansen.

The kids are watching.

Creating a Treasure Map for the Aries New Moon

The Aries New Moon marks the beginning of the zodiac year. Astrologically speaking, it is the moment when the sky says, “Okay… what are we doing next?”

The Aries new moon (only one per year) is when we create what is called a Treasure Map. Think vision board, but with a little more intention behind it and better timing.

People who make these maps often find that many of the images they choose end up unfolding in unexpected ways over the following year in their lives in a meaningful manner.

On March 26 I’ll be at the Philosophical Research Society talking about the Aries New Moon and guiding everyone through the process of creating their own Treasure Map. We’ll talk about why this new moon is used for goal setting and how to put together a map that actually reflects what you want to move toward this year.

You do not need to know astrology to attend. Many people who come to this workshop want a chance to pause, think about their goals, and create something that reminds them where they are headed.

You can attend in person at PRS in Los Angeles or online via Zoom, so even if you are not local you can still join us.

If you have been meaning to think about what you want next but have not quite gotten around to it yet, this is a pretty good opportunity.

By the end of the evening, you will walk away excited about the new year that has probably already begun talking to you.

Looking forward to seeing you.

If you would like to join us, reserve your spot here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/creating-a-treasure-map-for-the-aries-new-moon-with-tracy-abbott-cook-tickets-1983181194338?aff=oddtdtcreator

This testimony on ICE was given on the day Uranus stationed direct in Taurus.

That matters.

When Uranus stations, what has been stalled begins to move. What has been normalized becomes visible. What we have been trained not to see shows itself.

Since 2018 Uranus in Taurus has been shaking the ground beneath bodies, borders, land, and the systems that claim authority over them On this final station day, Aliya Rahman, a disabled Bangladeshi American from Minneapolis, testified before Congress about being assaulted by ICE while on her way to a medical appointment. This was not commentary or analysis. It was a person describing what happened to her body.

No GOP member of the Senate or Republican member of Congress showed up to hear it.

Uranus is now moving toward a trine with Pluto in Aquarius, an aspect associated with structural revolution. Systems reveal themselves through pressure. What cannot be justified cracks. What has been hidden is exposed.

Over the next two years, Uranus and Pluto repeat this trine while Saturn steps in to shape what becomes permanent. Neptune dissolves the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we allow.

But astrology does not replace witness.

This is not a political argument. It is a moral one.

If you are overwhelmed, start here. The video is under four minutes. You do not need to agree. You do not need to comment. You need to watch.

Uranus stations so that we stop pretending we did not know. I made this video for you.

Here is the video.

Today I joined my friend Helen, a parent from one of my son’s old schools, along with a group of other parents and neighbors who made a RESIST banner and signs and stood on the bridge over the 10 freeway in midtown LA. Helen posted on social media that she would be joining this informal event cobbled together by friends.

I believe this is what is going to save our nation. Individuals throwing something together and showing up.

I had a schedule packed today with things I needed to accomplish, but there was something so casual and approachable in Helen’s post. “I’m going to be at this bridge during this time on Friday. Come by and join if you can.”

After getting through some big to dos this morning, including getting my foster kitten to a rescue group so it could take part in an adoption fair, I realized I could make it to the bridge for at least an hour. I brought a sign I made months ago. It felt good to use it again.

Image: From Segregation By Design

We were on 6th Avenue, above the 10 freeway. The 10 is part of the transcontinental highway system that starts in Santa Monica and ends in Jacksonville, Florida. When the Santa Monica Freeway was first planned, it was called the Olympic Freeway. The route was originally intended to run farther north, but those neighborhoods were whiter and wealthier. That route was not chosen. Instead, a path was selected that destroyed middle class and wealthy Black neighborhoods like Sugar Hill and Berkeley Square. I encourage you to read about it in Segregation By Design.

I think most of us know how that story ends.

I love driving through the neighborhoods around 6th Avenue. Large Craftsman homes line the streets, beautiful and solid, and then the neighborhood ends abruptly at the freeway. I have spent a lot of time with Los Angeles history, including archival work in the LA Times catalog. There is not much coverage from the 1940s and 1950s about what this freeway would do to Black Los Angeles. This is how it works. Newspapers take sides. Under the Chandler family, the LA Times was not known for concern about non white communities.

Today I stood with Helen and her neighbors above the 10, holding signs, protesting ICE and what is being done to immigrant communities and to American citizens who are going about their lives or exercising their First Amendment rights.

I am writing this because our city has a long history of getting it wrong. Freeway routes. Redlining. Racist policies dressed up as planning decisions. We may be numb. But more to the point, it is time to stop being numb.

People know, deep down, that what is happening is wrong. Not confusing. Not complicated. Wrong.

You do not have to be an activist. You do not have to have a perfect analysis or a sharp talking point. You do not have to win an argument online. We have plenty of pundits making legal arguments. As comedian Josh Johnson said in a recent clip, this is not a legal argument. It is a moral one.

If you have been watching, reading, shaking your head, feeling sick, waiting for someone else to do something, this is your moment. You do not need permission. You do not need to know everything. You need to show up with what you already know in your heart.

Stand on a bridge. Hold a sign. Join your neighbors. Go to a corner. Be seen.

History does not move only because of courts or commentators. It moves because ordinary people decide they are done being silent.

If you feel that pull, listen to it. And do not spend money today. If you must buy something, go to neighborhood small businesses. No corporate stores.

Also if you do not see much reporting from the financial sector about the impact of a national buying strike, remember the LA Times in the 1950s. There was not much reporting on Sugar Hill and Berkeley Square either. Yet here I am today, standing on the source of that wreckage.

This time, it can be us who start breaking things open.

I want to do a shout out on potential great opportunities for you. My pals at Hang Out Do Good, who are always hanging out and doing good have put together a night of cabaret and a silent auction and all the proceeds go to a not-for-profit that is on the correct side of history. One such group, DemocraSHE is the recipient of the largess this year. DemocraSHE nurtures and supports young women in high school as they tap their inner leadership skills. They are doing real work in real time with real leaders-in-the-making. DemocraSHE’s work inspires me and lifts me up when the rest of the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I could not make it to the cabaret this weekend but the silent auction continues through tonight.

My friend Jessica offered a spiffy little write up on all you need to know about this auction and DemocraSHE.

From Jessica:

Wanna treat yourself and do some good in this dark world?

Check out our silent auction benefitting DemocraShe! It closes Monday night so get those bids in now! See link below.

We’ve got luxury vacation homes in Santa Barbara and Big Bear, family photo packages, beauty items, wine, chocolate, show tickets, classes, and loads more, all to benefit empowering diverse high school girls nationwide to become inspiring, transformative leaders!

Click Link

SILENT AUCTION

Last Tuesday I wrote about my unplug from Disney+ and my experience at a protest for the 1st Amendment and the return of Jimmy Kimmel Live! In that piece I explained how I ended up at the protest and why I felt it was important to get off the couch and show up. But what I didn’t know was I would end up in the Kimmel Cold Open and I also didn’t talk about the dust.

On Sunday when I unplugged from Disney I did it with a heavy heart. My husband and I never had Disney family passes. We only went to Disneyland a few times when our son was young. However, we were a Pixar house. My memories are awash with Pixar movies. Nemo was a perfect film. The Hollywood Bowl during Pixar night as the Philharmonic played the music from UP and our son (then 10) with his huge smile as he watched the animated cranky old man lift in the hot air balloon. Or the memory of The WallE soundtrack in our Prius, as we drove through nine states, all to get to Yellowstone and back. These memories are tender. I also have my childhood memory in the 1960s of the giant parking lot in Anaheim and my family and I looking for our car after an exhausting day in Disneyland. All of this is dust in my heart.

Disney started in Los Angeles in Silverlake. One hundred years ago in 1925, Walt and Roy Disney put a few hundred dollars down for a piece of property on Hyperion and Griffith Park Blvd and built Disney Studios. It was there that Steamboat Willie was born. The powerful mouse, which launched an empire, was born on dusty Hyperion Avenue.

On Monday I stood on Hollywood Boulevard. Our little group of warriors was small. Only a few of us had signs. Mine didn’t have swear words which may have made it friendlier to a wall of photographers. It seemed there was more press than protestors. Soon I saw a group of writers gathering off to the side, they were in blue WGA shirts. It was then I felt a new dust emerge. This was personal. l could feel something rising from the sidewalk of stars, through my feet, up my legs, my torso until it landed in my brain which directed me to my congresswoman. I know Congresswoman Friedman from shared Democratic circles and she was the one who put this press conference together. I walked up to her, “Laura, did you know I used to write in Late Night?” She responded, “Wow, I had no idea.” I said, “I wrote on Letterman and then Leno. I was the first female staff writer, on fifty-year history of The Tonight Show.”

Bam! I coughed up dust. The quiet dust. The dust that has a tinge of something that is harder to communicate.

I started writing late night TV in the early 90s on a Friday night show called USA Up All Night hosted by comic Rhonda Shear. This show, on the USA channel, played a movie (often low budget) and a comic would say something snappy and then introduce each segment of the film. The companion Up All Night on Saturdays was hosted by comic Gilbert Gottfried. My friend Kac Young, who has a keen sense of humor, produced Up All Night with Rhonda and she hired me to write the snappy material. Kac offered me the job when I left the production jobs that kept me employed for ten years. In 1991, after a decade of grinding out production work, I wanted to take a leap. This moment was a long-time coming, I was ready to write.

When I graduated college in 1980, I knew I wanted to work in the entertainment business. My roommate Lissa Kapstrom got a job that summer on a TV show. Lissa, who later became a successful sitcom writer, started out as a set designer on Fridays which was ABC’s answer to SNL and aired on Friday late night. I immediately moved into a spare bedroom in Lissa’s family house for three months as I looked for my first job. In October I got my break. I was hired as a receptionist for “That’s Incredible!” We all start somewhere and my entree in TV production was answering phones for a show filled with stories as diverse as a doctor who blew up kidney stones with tiny bits of explosives, a person who ate a plane and people who died after spontaneous human combustion. Just the kind of stuff that made a person say, “That’s Incredible!” Every morning after our show aired the phone would ring off the hook with viewers who had the same thing happen to them as depicted in our show. Or a family member who needed to talk to a doctor we featured, or they had an idea for a story that they wanted us to produce. I was the person who had to navigate the circus of callers. However, what I enjoyed the most was how our phone number was one digit off from the gas company. I had to help (often elderly) folk who were about to get their gas turned off and get them to the right division of Southern California Gas. From 1980 until 1990 I did a lot of production jobs. I worked on many shows and companies from PAing, ADing, Stage Managing and a stint in television development. But what I really wanted to do was write.

The entertainment industry was then a very muscular male dominated business. I know it has improved but back then women in production were primarily in the silo of jobs that were deemed acceptable work for women by the Hollywood power. Writing and directing did not have a plethora of women. Then around 1989 I began to see women, usually a few years younger than me, starting to get writing jobs. I could feel something was changing. I was 32, which could be considered ‘old’ to launch a TV writing career, but I didn’t care. I decided to jump and hoped a net would find me. Luckily, my friends had the lattice I needed. Kac was the first and I am grateful how she said, “You can do this.” Then other pals, including my friends in NYC, Donna and Deborah hired me to write for VH1 which I did from Los Angeles. After a year I decided it was time to go for Late Night with David Letterman which aired at twelve thirty following The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I loved Late Night and all its irreverence. I was a fan of Dave, and I put together my late-night packet filled with sample writing. My friend Ann Slichter had a friend on the show and Pat Lee, another producer whom I had worked for, also had friends on the show. I got a manager suggested by Ann and Pat and everyone put in a word for me. I had friends who supported me emotionally like producer Margaret Wendt who said, “Do it now” and my comedy writer friend and sage, Mark Evanier who looked over my material and also said, “Do it now” and my colleague from my development days Mark Fetterman who sensed something and said, “Are you up to something?” and I said, “I think it is time for me to go to NY.” And with that, I moved to NY, stayed on Donna’s couch and a few months later I was hired. Great! I was in. One small problem, this was 1992 and I joined the show the month before Johnny Carson left The Tonight Show.

When NBC chose to replace Carson with Jay Leno and not Dave Letterman, it was equivalent of the Confederate Captain George James shooting the first bullet on Ft Sumter. The Late-Night Civil War had begun. It was a tense time to be in late night TV. I lasted on Letterman for less than a year when the head writer, who hired me was replaced and some of us were let go. It was painful for me; I had gotten material on the show and was starting to get my sea legs with opening bits and now I was out. I licked my wounds and I returned to Los Angeles and applied to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It made sense for me to make this move especially given I was the only person in college who had a poster in my dorm of Johnny Carson. I grew up with The Tonight Show. I felt safe in a world where a comic could make fun of power especially politicians. Again, gal friends connected to the show put in a good word for me and so I was hired in 1993. By this point the late-night wars were in full force. I was confused, am I Union or am I Confederate? Who cares. The battles were fierce.

I was hired to join the desk bit writers, Joe Medeiros and Mike Colasuonno. The three of us did the material that happened after the monologue. Small town news where we highlighted crazy headlines, a funny prop piece or we did the bits where Jay went up into the audience.

We also did remote pieces. About six months after I was hired, Ross Perot who had run for President in 1992 was scheduled to be on the show. I remember executive producer Debbie Vickers walking down to Joe’s room where I was and she said, “Ross Perot is coming in next week talking about this crazy thing called NAFTA. No one knows what it is about. Don’t you think that would be a funny bit for a man-on-the-street?” We both said yes, then we went to Jay, who was game on but the only night we could shoot it, neither Joe or Mike were available. They both had events at their kids’ schools. I was unmarried, no kids and was now, by default the bit writer who would take the lead. Jimmy Brogan one of Jay’s closest friends and solid monologue writer would also be with us. The producer asked me, “Where do you want to shoot this, Tracy?” I said, “Melrose & Gardner. That will be the right demo.” This was a neighborhood near my house. Melrose was packed with trendy shops and restaurants and loaded with a lot of people including punk. I figured it was rife with possibilities.

A few nights later we all arrived, the crew, Jay, Jimmy and me on the corner next to Johnny Rocket Burgers. I worked with the field PAs, who would grab people off the street, bring them to me and I would ask questions and prep them so they were confident to talk to Jay. Jay enjoyed our choices and Jimmy and I would offer up a few one-liners for Jay, “Is NAFTA the band that opened up for UB40?” We got pretty good answers, but we did not have the closer. The one where we feel, “Now we have the bit” we kept working the crowd until finally the PA said, “We got him.” They brought me a guy with a mohawk, face piercings, tattoos and a lot of black leather. I asked him about NAFTA and our punk man-on-the street knew everything. “Yeah, it is union busting, NAFTA will be bad for the country” Punks know a lot. He was amazing. Jay was great with him. We called it a night and the next day I took the lead on editing with a lot of Joe’s input and we aired it the following week. The audience loved it; Ross Perot took a copy of the bit which he showed to everyone he met as he tried to stop congress from passing the bill. This, “What is NAFTA?” fleshed out, “JayWalking” which became the most popular franchise of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. For the record, NAFTA passed congress as one of Bill Clinton’s pivotal works in his first year as president. Unfortunately, NAFTA is often cited as a key in the Democratic Party’s shift away from its working-class roots, which one could argue help lay the ground for many GOP wins including the last one in 2024.

But in 1994, Donald Trump was still selling real estate, and I was slogging it out in the late-night battle ground. “What were the ratings last night?” Is something every single person in late night television asks. Survival can depend on those numbers. It is hard on the soul. I kept my head down and did the work with Mike and Joe. There is no record of Steve Allen or Jack Paar having women staff writers. Johnny never had any, so we believe I was the first woman hired in The Tonight Show history and I was at the time the only woman to work for both Dave and Jay. All those firsts are great, but the truth was I needed a break. I needed to do something else; I needed air to write spec dramadies. I also knew I needed space on a personal level. I felt there was one marriage in me, I had no idea where that person was, but I knew I needed to be out of stress and ‘soldier’ mode to find my guy. I told Debbie and Jay I was going to leave but I said if the show ever needed remotes and they didn’t want to send staffers; I would be up for it. Doing a remote now and then would pay some bills and not be a grind. And so it was that I ended up in Houston with Bob Costas at the final NBA championship and Helena with the Governor comparing Montana to California as to who has the biggest kooks. Then in the spring of 1996, the most important bit of all landed from Debbie and Jay. A young man, Adam Bloom, wrote to the show and said that he and four of his friends were spending the summer going to baseball games at every park across the country. Debbie said, “Tracy, we’ll send you to cover it”. At that point I had only been to one baseball game in my life. But now that summer I was in a Winnebago with five guys more than ten years younger than me bumping along highways across the country to all the major league parks. One of those guys, Charlie Cook is now my husband.

This is the dust of my bones. And it is the dust I don’t talk about because for all the pride I have in my late night history, there is a wee bit of a wistfulness in this dust. A smidge of sadness of what I never did with my credits.

After the Winnebago trip, the Tonight Show hired more bit writers, and I am happy to say several were women and they didn’t need me any longer to go on the road. While my goal and desire was to get staffed on a dramedy, I had to focus on making money and I dropped my writing aspiration and instead focused on my tried and true. I wrote small award shows, variety shows, clip shows, wrap-around shows and consulted on a talk show in Nashville. I was also busy building a life with Charlie. Soon we were engaged and my Nashville colleagues sent me engagement gifts. When Charlie and I got married in 1999, I sent key rings to Jay, Debbie and Joe telling them thanks for changing my life. I felt loved in my small circles. Our son was born in July of 2001 and two months later 9/11 rocked the world and my love of the small deepened. The world was big and scary. Small was cozy.

When my son was four, my father died, and I had to leave a show and focus on a funeral and my dad’s billboard company. I could have tried to relaunch a new place for me in writers’ rooms after my son started kindergarten, but the world’s economy had crashed, and I could feel my producing and writing skills needed in the real man-on-the-street of public-school-land. I found comfort as the funny mom in PTA meetings. I also got a lot of stuff done at all his schools because once you produce TV you can rise to the occasion of filling school needs. That was my life until the 2016 election of Donald Trump. It was twenty years since I put my war fatigues away when I left the late-night battlefield. It was now time for me to guerrilla my way and protect what I valued in our country, especially the environment and public education. I also did all I could to get The House and The Senate blue. This last part was mixed results and in November 2024 Trump was elected for a second term. I went into a deep cocoon. No news. The country wants this dude, not my problem. I watched fiction, took care of my elderly mother in a skilled nursing home who then died at the beginning of 2025. I kept my focus local. I took care of my city where I could. I amplify a law, Prop 28 that states our schools should have more art instruction and yet LAUSD continues to defy the law. I foster kittens. I helped a community in the January fires, spiked with hurricane force santa ana winds juiced by climate change. I have given voice to a student and her mother who were sent to Guatemala for no just cause. The mom died last week because she had no access to her medication. This is Trump 2.0 on a local level. And then last week Trump’s FCC chair decided to put the federal thumb on the First Amendment and our Right for Free Speech. Whatever sadness or perhaps shame dust I had for not doing more with my late-night credits was now here in front of me as I faced the cameras with my sign, “Get Off The Couch for The First Amendment.” It seemed like the local and the national all came together in a personal way as I stood up for Jimmy Kimmel Live! And I did it while wearing my family pearl necklace. Because I wear pearls to things that are important.

After the press conference, I met two women, both writers and producers. One of them took me to a Fox reporter. The reporter asked me about the move by Disney and I said, “When I was writing jokes about Bush and Clinton, I never feared they would send the FCC on us. We wrote jokes about who is in power. That’s our job. In fact, my mother-in-law thought I was GOP because of my Clinton jokes.” My new friends then asked me to join them for lunch because they wanted to hear more about my background. I told them everything. It was liberating to lay out my whole story. We were together when we heard the news Disney was putting Jimmy back on air the next day. We were thrilled. As I walked home on La Brea, I felt a strength I had not experienced. It was a new comfort that I had with my history. I felt refreshed from the protest and my come to Jesus-ness with my late-night past. I put behind me any sadness or shame around ‘what ifs’ or ‘I should haves’ that were deep in my dusty psyche. I had not failed my late-night pedigree by not coming up with the next greatest dramedy. I live a life that is rich in relationships with all kinds of people and experiences not limited by a TV landscape or claim to fame. I just show up where my dusty heart directs me.

A few days before Disney removed Kimmel I had mentioned to Charlie, that our feng shui would benefit from some zhuzhing. A hot water valve needed to be replaced, our dishwasher just broke, and the corners of our house were thick with dust. Charlie who is not necessarily a believer in my woo-woo -ness (I am long in woo) will sometimes humor me to be a good sport. He said, “Sure”. When I came home from the Kimmel protest, I found Charlie vacuuming the dust off our ceiling. I was in awe. I thought of all the dust the Kimmel thing had stirred up in me on Hollywood Blvd and I thought how it was perfect Charlie was vacuuming it off our ceiling. The air felt fresher.

The next day was Tuesday. I knew I would see Jimmy’s return to broadcast later in the evening and I decided to go scratch my other woo-woo itch and head to an astrology group that meets in Los Feliz every month. The guest speaker was an astrologer Blair Bogen who is versed in the art of clowning and directs a show called Planets, Planets, Planets. She talked about how the clown is the provocateur to the authority. We discussed the astrology of clown/authority and its importance in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a former comedian and of course we discussed Jimmy Kimmel.

The meet up ended, and I was driving home around nine-thirty when my phone chimed with a text. When I got to a red light I read the text. It was from my friend and fellow education activist Nicolle, “OMG you are on the Kimmel’s Cold Open!” She sent me a screen grab. It was a photo of me, holding my little sign. I was stunned. I was in the opening package that described how the whole world was watching Kimmel which then cut to Jimmy dressed as a monkey and his side kick Guillermo dressed as a banana. Jimmy joked, “I think we better change”. The titles rolled and the show played. The rest is history. The clown punched back. The show was seen by six million people on ABC and another twenty-two million on YouTube. I was the only person featured holding a sign. My friend Lauren said to me the next day, “You represented America for us, Tracy”. I cried.

There were many protestors in Hollywood, Burbank and NY in the week that Disney pulled the show. But somehow, I made the cut. How did it happen? I don’t know. But I am proud to be a part of this moment, in my less than one tenth of a second shot. All I can think of is maybe it was the dust.

Thanks for reading, I know that was long. Tracy Abbott Cook

Yesterday. My Monday Morning.

After unplugging from Disney+ on Sunday, yesterday morning I wrote snail mail to Bob Iger, Dana Walden and the CEOs of Nexstar, Sinclar and Brendan Carr (FCC).

I also went to KTLA (Nexstar affiliate) website looked to see who was advertising and saw it was T-Mobile. I wrote to the CEO in Bellevue Washington. I used part of my friend Jessica Craven’s note to Iger about how it is not too late to do the right thing and that collaborators are always remembered.

I then hopped on the La Brea bus to get to a protest I heard was happening on Hollywood Blvd across the street from the El Capitan, where Jimmy shoots his show. It turned out to be a press conference with Laura Friedman, Ted Lieu, other congress peeps along with union reps and with super local electeds like Hugo (City Council) and County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath (great speech).

It was hotter than hell.

At one point a media helicopter was above us making all kinds of noise and that’s when Brad Sherman said to the reporters that it was a Fox News Helicopter using the freedom of the 1st amendment. Then within seconds…kid you not, the helicopter flew off. I guess Fox didn’t like getting called out.

An hour later I was in the Roosevelt Bar across the street having lunch with fellow activists (who I just met) when we saw the announcement that Kimmel is coming back. I am happy for everyone at Kimmel. I am also happy for our country that Disney heard their brand crashing. All that stock being sold and people unplugging perhaps got to them. Perhaps.

Sinclair has said they will not carry Kimmel and Nexstar said they are still talking to Disney. I do not think we need a hideous large merger of channels. But we’ll see what that all looks like going forward.

Also, this one felt personal, because I was a writer in late night tv both Letterman and Leno. I was the first woman staff writer in the history of the Tonight Show. I said to a reporter yesterday, “When I was working on those shows we did Clinton and Bush jokes all the time. They never tried to cancel us. In fact in 1997 I remember my future mother in law was surprised when I said I was a Democrat, she thought I was a Republican.” Late night writers are often jaundiced about politics since we write jokes about whoever is in power. I guess I read GOP.

Anyway, I have my fears we could be back to a 1st amendment fight again but in the meantime, thank god enough of us got off the couch.

I ended with a foot massage and Sunset Foot Spa. Because you know, this shit is hard work.

On Thursday, my husband Charlie and I joined my friends Emiliana and Hans in MacArthur Park for a unity vigil and reflection of what Los Angeles has been experiencing since June 6 when the ICE storms began hitting our city.

The Gibbous moon rising over the clamshell, the sound bath, the speeches, it all made for a gentle and profound experience. Bearing witness to one young man as he told what he saw and experienced in MacArthur Park when the storm troopers marched through it. I was riveted by the story and his singular fast action of warning people just before ICE arrived. He saved the lives and future of individuals and families.

I was glad we heard his story and other speakers who grew up in the neighborhood and shared reflections how MacArthur Park has always been a part of their lives. Public spaces are vital to communities.

I almost didn’t make it to the vigil. I am thoughtful about what I attend and what I skip because of my innerlandscape. Since Trump 2.0 launched and his assaults, which come in at F4 velocity, I made a decision to always check my capacity before I commit to any event . Capacity meaning; energy, focus and time. Technically, saying yes means setting aside time, figuring out transportation and logistics on how to make it work. That stuff is just the pain-in-the-assness of living in the 21st century. But capacity is the inner landscape in all of us which includes--our psyche. Does my psyche have it in me to 'show up'? The psyche is like a hawk which sees at the macro, a hundred feet up and at the micro, ground level. The psyche knows the enormity of Trumpland and the smallness of my one human body and soul. I treat my psyche as if it was part therapist and part traffic cop, “Can I go?” I always get an answer. I am sure many of you do your own check as you calibrate life in month eight of a four year administration. Some of you may have stopped showing up at events or cut them way back because of exhaustion. I get it.

But having said that please consider showing up at something or creating your own thing and inviting your friends. Small is okay. Tender and beauty can be in a tiny gathering. Yes, check your capacity but still see if you can stretch and find the space in you. Consider your values and what you care about and if you can find a tiny little space in you, move on it.

What got me to this event was Nory Sontay Ramos. A student who was deported on July 3 with her mom with no cause, no due process and no phone call to family. I know all about Nory because I am part of a group with thirty thousand parents, admins, teachers and staff from LAUSD and we talk about everything under the sun impacting our local schools. Nory’s story continues to be front and center in our group along with Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero Cruz a rising senior at Reseda High who was walking the family dog on the morning of August 8 when ICE agents driving down the street looking for anyone with brown skin grabbed Benjamin. No warrant. No cause, no due process just grab. These ICE agents boasted about making $2500 for nabbing the 17 year old and then they cut the leash of his dog who ran down Sepulveda Blvd, a major artery in Los Angeles. Benjamin is now in an adult federal prison with hardened criminals. He is a gentle good student looking forward to graduating this year. His teacher visits him at the prison and reported he has lost twenty pounds and is depressed. Nory and her mother were sent to Guatamala and can’t leave their hiding place due to death threats by gangs. A reporter brought Nory a computer from her teacher so that she can continue to take classes from the school that was a little over a mile from where I stood in MacArthur Park. In an interview Nory told of her fears and her sadness for her and her mother and then she added, “I’m so sad and worried about my cat Max". The cat she got a year ago who has no idea why she and her mom left one morning for a court date and never returned. I am checking with peeps to find out the status on Max. Sigh. Nory and Benjamin’s stories have been steeping in me for two months. What happened to them does not align with my values. On this early evening in the waning days of a summer of exhaustion, I knew I had to show up for this small tender vigil of righteousness.

Find your event. Try and say yes.

Some of you saw the news that LA City Council moved $5 million back into the budget for animal services. And you probably wondered about the move and maybe thought, “Oh, good that fight is over”.

It’s not. The reality is that between now and May 30, there will be opportunity for the city council to chip away at the funds, “50k here, 80K there….” And there will be some people who will say, “Well that is not so bad considering we almost lost the $5 million” The deal is it is a problem. A real problem. $50k here or there could mean the difference of a crate of vaccines purchased or other stuff that has gone up with inflation. Remember this budget for animals has always run at bare bones arguably more than any other department.

So we need to continue to push back on council members and tell them, “Do not take one dollar out of Animal Shelters between now and May 30th.” And we need to get all our friends to do the same thing. By doing this we are creating a political porcupine which makes cutting funds for animal services too hard for council to swallow. That’s the goal. Of course showing people how to find their council member and get their contacts can be tricky and so I wanted to make it easy. I started a blog that has all the resources.

I also have my updated video which I made yesterday (May 1) that explains how they moved the $5 million and why they did it, (hint it was parked in a trial balloon line). So, text your friends, tell them who to call and what to say. Easy.

Now for all of you who canvassed in congressional races or local district elections —I am asking you to canvass for our LA Animals. All you have to do is go to PetCo, or any animal store, or dog park or dog/cat adoption fair and explain to people that we need them to call/email their council member.

I put together my own little kit (map and council member contact sheet) and will be going to the PetCo on LaBrea this weekend. Go to blog and you can put your kit together.

If you could do an hour or two this weekend and the rest of the weekends in any location that is easy for you and again, maybe it is a dog park with your dog, please do. There are 15 districts and I hope we can stir up the troops and make sure every city council member hears from constituents. By doing this we are making any cuts to animal services a political porcupine that is too hard for them to swallow.

Our animals deserve this righteous fight. And I know you guys know how to do it !

Hugs, purrs, licks in solidarity,

Tracy

Of course, in the last five months I was aware of the Trump appointees and the basic stuff happening in Trump2.0 but I was uninterested in doing deep dives and I ignored the rhetoric. My feeling was simple, “America you bought it. He’ll break it. Then you will decide what you want.” As for me, I figured I would get in at some point most likely when the sharp blades of glass by a Trump 2.0 breakage were under my feet. Alas, the glass began piercing my feet last week when I started hearing stories from friends applying for social security. It was not pretty and it is about to get uglier. It is so bad, I am back and instead of writing about it, I made this video. I went from lounge chair to wartime correspondence in a nano second. Yep. It is that bad. There is an action in it for you at the end. I hope you will do it. In the meantime, I will get some bandages for my feet, put on my war boots and do what I gotta do.