"The Great Experiment"

I'm moving a brown wicker chair across the country I'm not certain I'll have room for, but its a chair like one my friend Dave used to have in the "Clinic" in his backyard in Venice.

Dave and I became friends in New York when we worked together at kirshenbaum bond & partners and LIME. He and I and another friend Jodi were having what he'd call a ‘big boozy lunch’ in New York a couple days after September 11, when we all stated were moving to California. In Dave's case it was being closer to his family and his roots; in my case I was probably what Joan Didion would call a “golden dreamer of the golden land.” When I moved to San Francisco three years later, Dave was already in his second home in Venice. He mailed me a CD of his California Mix which simply said "Welcome".

When I first visited him for an extended long weekend in Venice over Thanksgiving when everything felt like it was falling apart in San Francisco, he had me watch "Dogtown and Z Boys" followed by “Riding Giants”, breakfast at Paradise Cove, visit the Center of Self Realization in the Palisades, and of course say goodbye to the sun at the Venice Beach drum circle. “California is the great experiment” he said to me at the time, as I was taking it all in. More than simply a big brother, he was like an Ambassador to California to me.

When I moved from Northern California down to San Clemente a couple months later, Dave of course had plenty to say about that too. “It seems very transitional” was one of the first things he said to me when he walked in my house. He was on a mission to make sure I had a toe ring 'like all the hotties in the OC', told me I should aspire to being one of the 'Housewives of Orange County", and commented on the "subversive subcultures of San Clemente" (which I hadn't observed at all), noting the "undercurrent of tension between the surfers, marines, mexicans and ‘geris’."

Dave’s Venice casa and his guest bedroom with camouflage comforter and amazing books and items from his travels became my second home over many weekends. I loved coming up from my sleepy beach town for Venice weekends and we'd would often go on “Journeys” (yoga classes), see family and friends Virginia, Don, Owen, Conn and Marlen, and typically enjoy some of Dave’s fine tequila while "reanimating" in the Clinic. We'd often go on walks around Venice and sometimes browse the shops on Abbott Kinney and he would note (while humming the Little House on the Prairie theme song) that I was like Laura Ingalls Wilder "coming in from the prairie for some bolts of calico"....as he felt that my time in the OC had an expiration date. There was no who made me laugh more, or who was more of a high beam on the road, than Dave.

Dave was a brand strategist - advising brands and companies what to do, next year, 5 years down the road, 10 years - What's next?? He was known as a "big idea guy" but beyond that, both a cultural observer and debunker, a truly original thinker, and like many creative types, could be impatient, bored with complacency, challenged the norm, and often radical in what he said. He would both see it - and say it. In one of my favorite books, "A Prayer for Owen Meany", the author describes Owen as speaking words of truth that were so simple but profound, sometimes jarring and outrageous, that dropped like pebbles in still water, rippling out, and no one could really say anything after them. Dave had that effect too. More often than not, they had to do with change, and a big, uncomfortable push out into the unknown. While he did have a Che Guevera coffee mug and other camo artifacts, when he said "Are you ready for the Revolution?" his statement was not necessary literal. He'd often make us laugh, though pause, when he would clap his hands impatiently about something and say "We're going to the future people, are you coming??"

Of course none of us were prepared for the revolution at all, when Dave left us suddenly for a better place far too soon, and we were left behind trying to figure out how to go it alone, without him.

When I recently decided to relocate back to the East Coast, back to what Dave called “The Colonies”, I had been thinking constantly about what he would say about that. I am not sure but I think he’d eventually say something like “Oh Laura, well you’re kindof Colonial....” And I’m sure I’d laugh but somehow know that it would be alright, because Dave thought it would be.

"Time to reanimate."