#MeToo is going too far for some veteran feminists

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March 1, 2018 · Posted in Commentary · Comment 

 

Shirley Jonas atop the Whitney Museum of American Art on Gansevoort St. Photo by Mary Reinholz

BY MARY REINHOLZ

Longtime West Village resident Shirley Jonas is a woman of a certain age, a former freelance television producer for outfits like Fox Broadcasting. She also spent 15 years working on staff at another national news division.

She now supports #MeToo, the new feminist movement which has spurred a tsunami-like wave of working women calling out bosses for sexual misconduct, many apparently after reading exposes in The New York Times and The New Yorker about alleged assaults by now-disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

“It’s about time,” Jonas said during a lunch Saturday at the Bus Stop Cafe on Hudson St.

Accusations of sexual harassment have swiftly ended the careers of famous men in media, government and entertainment, among them decades-long television hosts like Bill O’Reilly, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. The latter’s persona as a genial Southern gent interviewing people on CBS and PBS stands in sharp contrast to complaints last year that he greeted female staffers in his bathrobe, made unwanted advances and pranced around naked. Read more

Dunga Brook Diary: Mother’s Day, 2011

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March 1, 2018 · Posted in Commentary · Comment 

 

The barn

I arrived in Los Angeles in 1986, a small-town, young woman with nothing but the desire to see what I could do in the big, bad city.  And I did plenty. Dead-end temp jobs to a career in fashion. Five-figure income to six. Fly-by-night boyfriends to single mother of a son who is now on his way to graduating high school and, very soon, off to college. Read more

STEPPING BACK IN TIME AT RAE’S DINER

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March 1, 2018 · Posted in Commentary · Comment 

 

Photos by Barry Stein

 

By Bob Vickrey

You’ve driven by it numerous times on Pico Boulevard, but like most Westsiders, you’ve probably never considered stopping for a meal at this old-fashioned diner.

Rae’s Restaurant has been around since the days when you could actually find a parking spot in Santa Monica. Rae’s turns 60 this year, and is still plugging along for those locals who don’t mind a little grit and authenticity with their meals.

As our monthly lunch group entered the restaurant, we were convinced Rae’s must have been where they shot the movie “Time Stood Still.” The modest menu prices also underscored the apparent time-warp that occurred here in 1958. Read more

Yippies vs. Zippies: New Rubin book reveals ’70s counterculture feud

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March 1, 2018 · Posted in Commentary · Comment 

BY MARY REINHOLZ

The late Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, a onetime West Villager who morphed into an investment banker and died in 1994 after getting struck by a car jaywalking in Westwood, California, comes back to flamboyant afterlife in Pat Thomas’s coffee-table book biography, “Did It!”

Published last year, Thomas’s book offers plenty of photographs of varied gurus and goblins of the counterculture, and sheds light on little-known internecine conflicts among the young politicized hippies who came under scrutiny by federal agents and undercover police for their opposition to the Vietnam War.

The cover of Pat Thomas’s new coffee-table book on Jerry Rubin.

The hefty tome, subtitled, “From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary,” recounts how a younger radical group known as the Zippies surfaced before the 1972 Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Miami. The Zippies engaged in fierce feuding with Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, Rubin’s more-famous fellow Yippie prankster and rival. Rubin reportedly regarded the Zippies’ founder, the late Tom Forcade — who ran the Underground Press Syndicate and started High Times magazine — as a provocateur and cop. Read more