Welcome to my site, happy to receive you.
I’m originally from LA, but I’ve lived in New York, Paris, Istanbul, Bangkok, and Naples. As someone who has really embraced the world at large, I’ve covered everything from entertainment to psychedelics as a writer. I’ve interviewed artists and entertainers like Danai Gurira, Agnez Mo, Rachel Chavkin, Nate Koch, Yelena Moskovich, drug activists like Ethan Nadelmann, and Indigenous healers, and more. I get around. I love people.
My work has been published in The Irish Examiner, Business Insider, Star 82 Review, Bending Genres, and more. I even landed on the cover of Vogue Italia in September 2020.
A few of my interviews from the People of Color Making a Difference in Psychedelic series were published in Women and Psychedelics: Uncovering Invisible Voices by Synergetic Press.
Currently I’m working on Once Upon a Time on Miracle Mile, Christmas in Naples is a Sport, and 4 Days with Barbara Harris.
Maria—contact me.
Once Upon a Time on Miracle Mile, a Brazilian mother of six Jewish sportstars (think Nina from The Forbidden Dance), took me home one day that became four spectacular years. My mother, Dr. J, a Disney executive villain, accused my father of being a child abuser. Hilarity and horror ensued when my father started acting guilty.
At nine years old, I launched an undercover investigation at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club into what just happened to me. Many years later, I’ll come to reopen these years and question everything I thought I knew.
I spent four days in the Valley of the Sun with the legend before she passed away in August 2018. As an original member of The Second City, she pioneered improv. She inspired the hauntingly beautiful On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, won an Academy Award for her performance in The Apple Tree, which amazed Natalie Wood, and she was nominated for an Academy Award for a stunningly vulnerable scene in Who's Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Awful Things About Me. She starred in Robert Altman’s Nashville and the original Freaky Friday opposite Jodie Foster.
READ: I FOUND BARBARA HARRIS IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN
READ: CONVO WITH BARBARA HARRIS DAY ONE—THE DRIVE TO HOUSTONS STEAKHOUSE, “THE FABULOUS PLACE.”
Interviews: Alison Becker, Janet Coleman, Austin Pendleton, Craig Lucas, Paul Sand, Joy Carlin, William Daniels, Bonnie Daniels, Arthur Kopit, Alex Beck, Ed Asner, Bill Goulding, Frank Farrell, Jerry Schatzberg, Bernie Collins, Estelle Parsons, Jeffrey Sweet, Clifford David.
My father and I disappeared to my cousins when I was thirteen years old. Fifteen years later, I returned…early, because my story didn’t go with Christmas…to find that Christmas had already begun. And in Naples, Christmas is a sport, not a Hallmark holiday. We dine.
A hybrid essay published in Bending Genres.
The year that President Putin invaded Ukraine (the first time), Russians from the former Soviet Union magically appeared in a restaurant called love when my immigration problems forced me to sublet my apartment in Paris, France. In my kitchen the warmest shade of yellow in the glow of a yellow lampshade, I was initiated on a kind of warrior’s path when my lithe and lethal roommate Sonya found out I studied clowning.
“This is very important,” she said.
“Why?”
“You will bring the message to the people in their language.”
I find a family—underground—as my dream of living in Paris comes to an end. See a side of Paris both chic and off-beat in a heartwarming, enchanted, and unexpected alliance made with love.
