SHAYAN ASGHARNIA
ONE DAY, TRAVIS BARKER would like to get on an airplane again. He won’t know when it’s coming, but he has an agreement in place with someone very close to him: They’ll tell him to be ready to go in 24 hours, and Barker will know exactly what for. He’ll pack an overnight bag and get in a car that will take him to an airport, where he’ll board a plane for the first time since 2008, when doing so changed the course of his life.
“There’s a million things that could happen to me,” he says one unseasonably warm afternoon in late March, sitting shirtless in a lounge chair in the backyard of his longtime home in the Calabasas hills outside Los Angeles. “I could die riding my skateboard. I could get in a car accident. I could get shot. Anything could happen. I could have a brain aneurysm and die. So why should I still be afraid of airplanes?”
(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times; photo illustration by Jade Cuevas/Los Angeles Times)
Times travel writer Christopher Reynolds reports that
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Among new additions to the city are the 1,504-room Virgin Hotels Las Vegas and Meow Wolf’s “Omega Mart” multimedia installation.
Reynolds recently visited Las Vegas to see what travelers are experiencing. Though the majority of visitors seemed to follow Nevada’s laws that require face coverings in public, commitment to social distancing was “more hit or miss.”
Deciding to visit the city was “kind of hard, kind of easy,” one visitor told Reynolds. “Because you don’t know how people are going to be. I didn’t think a lot of people would be here. But they are.”
Zack Ruskin April 3, 2021Updated: April 3, 2021, 11:04 am
Frank Sinatra enjoys a cocktail at an event with his daughter, singer Nancy Sinatra, circa 1967. Photo: Earl Leaf
Early in “Hollywood Eden,” Nancy Sinatra arrives at her high school driving a pink 1957 Ford Thunderbird. It’s the first of its kind ever made, and, we learn, a birthday present from her very famous father.
The sweet set of wheels is but one of many delicious details carefully strewn throughout music historian Joel Selvin’s latest work, out Tuesday, April 6, which gives readers a front-row seat to the surf rock craze that ruled Southern California in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
(Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)
Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy. Like Tillstrom, magician’s daughter Shari Lewis was a genius at switching among characters, but as a ventriloquist, she was often a part of the conversation herself, conducted sometimes at breakneck pace. Her technique is astonishing but her writing and characterizations are also first-rate, subtle and unpredictable and full of warmth. (She studied acting with Sanford Meisner.) Lamb Chop is her star creation, quickly changeable, a child and not a child, sweet or saucy, tender or tough as the moment demands; Lewis’ own Bronx roots come through in her. Lewis made her way through local television shows in the 1950s until NBC’s “The Shari Lewis Show” took her national in 1960. In the 1990s, the public television series “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along” proved an Emmy magnet.
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After being sworn in, President Biden calls for unity and takes a series of actions to change federal policies.
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Biden Sets the Tone
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States, assuming office amid several crises after routing a predecessor who fought to stay in power, and clearing the way for a beleaguered nation to turn the page on one of the most divisive chapters in its political history.
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