For once, his disability was an advantage
Maybe one day, RJ Mitte will just be RJ Mitte. Actor. Talented, funny and handsome.
Maybe one day, he’ll be many other things before he is RJ Mitte, the kid with cerebral palsy.
(Los Angeles Times)
Little Pancho, Big Life
He finally appears, inch by inch, slowly turning his walker into the opened doorway and then looking up at the writer who’d come to meet him. “You gonna make me famous?”
(Inside Tennis Magazine)
Andre Agassi: Portrait of the legend as an older man
The ball. Fuzzy and yellow, pressurized, weighs about two ounces. That’s why we know Andre Agassi, because he could always hit a tennis ball earlier and harder and more accurately than just about anyone. Would we have ever met him otherwise?
(Inside Tennis Magazine)
On the set of ‘Breaking Bad’
Producers tend to be worried, and today a producer is worried about this story.
“You’re not going to write about the flies, are you?”
(Los Angeles Times)
Correa eager to achieve big league dream
LANCASTER, Calif. -- Baseball is often a game about fathers and sons, and there's no exception in the story of Carlos Correa, the Astros' No. 1 Draft pick from two years ago, who arrives at a restaurant with his cell phone pressed to his ear.
"Talking to my dad," Correa said, before he goes back to telling him, in Spanish, about his latest game in the Minor Leagues. (MLB.com)
M.I.A. in Brooklyn
NEW YORK — By train, the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn is five stops from the suits and ties of Lower Manhattan and 14 stops from the tourists of Times Square. Some of the streets are lined with trees and brownstones, others with abandoned buildings and shady convenience stores.
(Los Angeles Times)
An actor catches ‘Big,’ ‘Bad’ breaks
From a distance of 135 yards, the golfer saw his ball vanish into the earth. Then he saw a screaming Aaron Paul, who suddenly appeared from behind a tree after witnessing the hole-in-one, boots leaping, arms flailing, his voice slicing the air: “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
(Los Angeles Times)
Fitness studio puts NBA athletes in a sweat
They often arrived, especially at first, with a certain swagger. Two Lakers, a Boston Celtic, and once an entire pro team from China.
(Los Angeles Times)
Secrets and spies: A conversation with Matt Damon
AND he’s quiet.
Imagine, as an actor, reading that line, over and over.
(Los Angeles Times)
From prison to Hollywood
Every time Luis Moncada blinks, he curses, thanks to the unprintable expletive tattooed onto his eyelids at age 18.
(Los Angeles Times)
The underrated everyman
“My dad just said, You know, the people I admire are just people who contribute to the world in some way, that try to make it better by the time they leave it. Like doctors, scientists, writers… and then he said actors. He was really sweet – he included me in that group.”
(USA Weekend Magazine)
For DMB, the joy is back
“It’s always easier to leave than be left,” Dave Matthews said to the faces staring back at him, some of them wet with tears like his.
(Los Angeles Times)
Stars also rise in the East
New York — Here, the stars arrived with snowflakes on their shoulders.
(Los Angeles Times)
Ryan Seacrest: Far from idle
“This is a town that doesn’t care if you make it or the next guy does. It’s up to you to really manifest the destiny, and so I am driven by the fear of failure.”
(USA Weekend Magazine)
Acting, loving, healing
She thinks of the gel as her husband’s “poem, his legacy.” It comes in a small jar and states its simple purpose on the label: to sooth, repair and soften the appearance of a healing scar.
(Los Angeles Times)
Ashton’s reflection
In 2005 I was assigned to interview Ashton Kutcher for a magazine profile. I submitted the following piece, which was rejected for being “too dark” for that particular publication. I do believe the story has merit, and so I publish it here.
How a joke spawned a TV hit
“I feel like we’re close to something, something that’s right in front of us,” Vince Gilligan says to his room full of writers. “There’s something we still haven’t thought of that would change everything. Let’s open up our minds.”
(Los Angeles Times)
David Duchovny, literarily speaking
“No, I’ll read anybody. I just started reading ‘Bleak House’ yesterday – that sounds pretentious, it’s only 500,000 pages, but I love Dickens.”
(Los Angeles Times)
Rob Lowe laughs it up
“Anybody can have feast and anybody can have famine, but very few people get to have both and very few people get to have both a number of times. But I do feel right now that I’m at one of those really nice … feasts.”
(Los Angeles Times)
Life, death and basketball
This story is about a rock - the rubber kind that gets dribbled, passed around and shot through a hoop. And the flesh-and-bones kind that helps keep a family intact through adversity.
Jamie Glover, a junior guard on the Villa Park girls basketball team, probably could not have been one if it were not for the other.
(Orange County Register)