If you live in Los Angeles long enough, the language of the billboards — the competition for space and the meaning behind them — all becomes clear. And these days, the signs are all about movies, fall-schedule TV shows, and fashion. Sorry, but it seems the music industry has no clout anymore.

On weekend nights, the Strip is packed. But at six in the morning, you can lie down in the street and stare up at the billboards–nobody would notice except the vampires heading home.

You would be able to see how Jay Leno’s billboard is in two separate places on the West Hollywood Strip. No one seems to be watching the show on NBC, though.

Meanwhile, the original British version of The Office is a show unknown to most Americans. It airs on the Cartoon Network during their time period known as Adult Swim, which is their programming for grown-ups. The reference to Adult Swim is down in the right hand corner and hard to see. This is an insider reference for hip people in-the-know about both the original Office series as well as Adult Swim.

This iPod ad occupies what is probably the most famous billboard spot on the strip. For years it was a six-storey tall Marlboro ad, on the first curve as you head west on the Strip towards Beverly Hills, just past Laurel Canyon. Because of the curve, the billboard seems to appear straight in front of you. It’s also right next to the mythic Chateau Marmont, the oldest and most famous hotel on the Strip.

The sign for Chateau Marmont was big and prominent in the 1930s, when the Chateau was built. Looking east on the Strip, it’s now dwarfed by a billboard for Gucci. Currently, the Los Angeles City Council is studying a proposal to ban signs that cover entire sides of buildings.

This billboard is also on the eastern end of the Strip, and for as long as I can remember, it’s been a Calvin Klein underwear ad. Of course, not everything on the Strip uses sex to sell.

For example, this big ad for Banana Republic seems hip, but squeaky clean.

And the enormous movie billboards aren’t nearly as sexy either, even when they feature heartthrobs like Matt Damon, in The Informant, or George Clooney, in Up in the Air.

These movie ads are all over town, and each movie has two on the Strip itself.

Similarly, the television ads are more about male action than sex appeal. This billboard is for a reality show, where Steven Segal is an actual police officer in the New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. It turns out that Segal has been a bona fide law enforcement officer for many years, and now he can also play one on TV.

You may have seen ads and marketing materials for the movie 2012, with a storyline tied to the Mayan Calendar, which ends in 2012. That, to some people, portends the end of the world. It could also mean the Mayans just got tired of counting.

Presumably, the Mayans somehow knew when the world would end, but they didn’t know enough to keep their own civilization from collapsing. Naturally, fear and superstition are always effective storytelling tools. Ghosts, monsters, boogie men and aliens fall into this category.

Animal rights advocates also know the power of shock value. This fearsome image sits at the famous spot where Tower Records once stood. It was vast, but now it’s gone. Book Soup, the independent book store across the street is still going strong. Virgin Records, at the end of the Strip, is also doing well.

Still, this was the only music album billboard I could find, on the outside of the famous club, Whisky A Go Go. It’s about eight by ten feet, at street level, so it barely qualifies. It’s aimed more at people standing in line than at cars driving past.

And here is another small one, a poster not far from the sidewalk. It’s an ad for Henry Jaglom’s latest film. He was one of the original independent do-it-yourself filmmakers; his film Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? from 1983 put him on the Hollywood map. Like Woody Allen, he’s popular in France and cranks out a movie every two years or so. His ads have always been on the Strip when his films come out. They’ve never been huge, but he’s still doing his films the same as he’s always done them. Stars and movies crash and burn on the billboards high above and flame out never to be heard from again, but Henry’s been doing his thing for over 30 years now. A good story, good acting, no special effects, low budget… and a gigantic body of work.

Web-based shows like Suzie Cocktail are even more of an unknown. At some point, we’ll all be watching on the web, but right now, none of these shows is really making any money. That means nobody is sure how this new way of watching programming is going to work.

In the cable TV arena, Showtime has overtaken HBO as the subscriber network with the hippest shows. That means series like Weeds, Californication, and Dexter. Personally, I find the Showtime shows all bleak, with dark souls. None of the characters are redeemable and I feel like taking a shower afterwards.

In Dexter, a serial killer has been urged by his now-deceased father to steer his murderous desires to kill only “bad” people who deserve to be killed. And now, Dexter is a father. Welcome to 2009. I sound old, but this is the kind of poster that would not have been possible when I was young. The image here implies that Dexter and his baby son are both drenched in the blood of someone Dexter has just killed; that they are posing for a happy family picture is supposed to be humorous.

There are other examples; horror movies, and torture movies like the Saw series are now part of popular culture, and their posters are everywhere. For Saw III, the gigantic poster showed three chopped-off fingers standing up on end in a small pool of blood. People drove underneath the ad for months without pause. It’s hard not to interpret our culture is one where blood, murder, guns and torture is normal. If so, then we are ancient Rome.

In my view, torture is another pornography, and cuts through the boredom of our cubicle lives.

The real reason I like this billboard for Virgin Australia is because there are hot chicks in it having fun. It’s a sort of nostalgic and refreshing throwback; images of attractive women are still being used to sell beer and cars, but it’s been some time since airlines used sex to sell their services in the United States.

I spotted this on the side of The Roxy Theater, another of the famous clubs on the Strip. I’d much rather see a billboard of sexy women (and men) than see babies drenched in blood.

Donald Bull is a husband, father and TV producer who has lived in Los Angeles for the past twenty years. As they say in Hollywood, you can “imdb him” here. He has made countless drives up and back along the Sunset Strip.

Watch a documentary about a life on the Strip here.

I was watching a Seinfeld re-run and picking at some leftover kung pao chicken when an octopus curled its tentacles around my midsection and squeezed. I should have thrown this food out two days ago, I thought, and then the octopus squeezed again and took my breath away. Beads of sweat popped out on my forehead and my skin went all damp and clammy. Great. A hot flash and heartburn at the same time. Welcome to modern maturity. That’s the time between your first copy of the AARP Magazine and your first social security check, when you start getting used to theidea that you’re not only middle aged any longer, you’re old. Unless you expect to live forever, of course—which, up to then, you sort of do.

There was a little pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol in a striped ditty bag in the bathroom that I’ve carted all over the world in case I get sick from eating food from the street, which I never have and always do; my philosophy is, if you’re going to play it safe, you might as well stay home. But I couldn’t get to it—a wave of torpor held me down on the couch like an invisible force field. After a few minutes the octopus seemed to relent, so I tried moving. But then it snaked itself around my ribcage and let me know it was still there.

The phone rang, but there was no way I could reach it—it was only a couple of feet away but it might as well have been in the apartment next door. It rang seven times before voice mail finally kicked in; I counted them while I tried to remember how long ago I’d ordered in that chicken.

Maybe it wasn’t food poisoning; it might be a kidney stone. I’ve never had one, but once on a flight from L.A. the man in the aisle seat told me in excruciating detail how he’d once passed one on the seventeenth green. Actually, I don’t remember whether it was a kidney stone or a gallstone, only that when the stewardess held out the little cup of olives for his martini, the way they used to in first class, he’d just gotten to the part about how he still managed to finish the round a respectable three over par. He didn’t say that passing a stone felt like a contraction that went on and on, although to be fair, he couldn’t have known that. But he also didn’t seem the type who’d asked his wife how it really felt to birth little Tiger Woods Junior, either.

I took shallow, silent little breaths so the octopus wouldn’t notice, and let go of the remote; for some reason I’d muted the TV when the octopus struck, and when the phone stopped ringing it was suddenly unnaturally silent in the room. I felt alone and abandoned, like I’d fallen overboard without anyone on deck noticing while the boat disappeared over the horizon; when I turned the volume on again my arm tingled the way your foot does when you try to move it after it’s fallen asleep, and then the tingle heated up a couple of hundred degrees and radiated in waves down to my fingers.

“Oh shit,” I said out loud, “I’m having a heart attack!”

Tory looked up from her pillow—not hearing any magic words like ‘Let’s go out,’ or ‘Do you want a treat?’ she went right back to doggy dreamland. It was beginning to dawn on me that if I didn’t do something, call someone, get myself moving, I was going to die right here, all by myself, on a faded green velvet sofa surrounded by greasy white cardboard containers, a half empty can of Diet Coke, and the latest issue of Vanity Fair. Shuffle off this mortal coil in my ratty old sweats, irony of ironies, to the theme song from Going It Alone, which follows Seinfeld on weeknights on Nick at Nite. Live by TV, die by it, I used to say. But please, God, I didn’t really mean it.

Jane Adams

I managed to drag the phone over, but then I couldn’t decide who to call. Ignoring the mocking voice in my head—Help, you’ve fallen and you can’t get up, call 911, what are you waiting for?—I pushed “6”on the speed dial for Tel Aviv taxi instead. I’d rather be dead than carted through the lobby on a gurney under the rheumy gaze of Mrs. Bosenberg, who lives in one A and keeps an eye on the lobby, just in case Louie the night doorman is sleeping on the job.

Mrs. B.’s apartment is rent-stabilized, which means they can’t throw her out. So is mine, and the only way anyone ever leaves a rent stabilized apartment in New York, especially a classic five on the upper West Side, is feet first. After the relatives of the deceased have finished sitting shiva, the owners haul away all the dark, heavy furniture and slap on a few coats of paint before they put the place on the market for a sum that could foment a revolution in an African backwater. Since nobody was doing that to my stuff, especially not until I took my vibrator out from under the bed, cleaned out my stash of recreational drugs, and threw away some pictures I’d just as soon nobody saw, I’d rather let Mrs. B. think I was catching the red-eye to the coast.

Jane Adams has been writing about work, love, sex, success, intimacy and friendship in women’s lives for nearly three decades. You can continue reading Sugar Time by buying it from an independent bookstore, through Amazon.com, or for your Kindle.

Customers love petite, blonde Amanda, but she’s back with her boyfriend and a stable job at an upscale department store in the suburbs. They also love little Danielle, who is in her 40s, but her latest excuse, a locked steering column, made Maya finally give up making appointments for her.

Meanwhile, potential customers keep sending messages and calling to schedule sessions. It’s up to Mama Maya, who once held the unofficial title of Seattle’s Number Two Madam, to manage the clientele.

Like any entrepreneur, she turns to her laptop. She logs on to commercial sex sites to keep up with business; to find new customers she’s also been checking some from Southern California and Las Vegas.

She poses as the girls themselves and sends coy replies as excuses until they’re ready to work again. “I hope to be back in town next week and I look forward to meeting you,” she taps out.

Fateful year: In 1982, Maya was 23 years old.

Reaching for another Camel menthol, she pads out to the patio of her friend’s (and sometime client’s) nouvelle ranch house, set among hilly cul-de-sacs in suburban Seattle, near the Microsoft corporate campus. “I’m such an honest person. I hate telling all these lies,” she exhales.

But that goes with the job: it keeps the customers happy, earns flexibility for the girls, and keeps future dollars flowing. It’s noon, it’s quiet out, and her friend is still sleeping enthusiastically.

Maya shushes his dog and sorts the recycling. She’s in her early 50s, slightly short and square-shaped, with big eyes, a pierced eyebrow, a pointed pixie chin and a reddish pageboy.

She won’t start eating for another few hours; she’s a former bulimic and wants to lose some weight. It’s one way to make up for snacks of Skippy peanut butter and caramel-flavored rice cakes in front of the evening TV.

The housework and on-line sex-market chatter don’t distract Maya from worrying about her dwindling bank account. She had considered herself retired, and hadn’t wanted to work again as a madam or in the “industry” at all: “I get sick of the bullshit, the drama, the excuses.”

There’s no pension or retirement plan in the sex industry, and no time for a career change. “I can’t wait two weeks for a paycheck—I have no choice.”

There’s no bordello, no red velvet wallpaper, no scantily-clad ladies misting themselves with perfume behind a beaded curtain. Customers no longer need to turn to madams if they don’t want to pick someone up off the street—they can use the internet. Mama Maya has to compete digitally, and her competitive edge depends in part on the relationships she can develop on-line and into real life with the girls and the men.

While a convicted pimp currently serving time in Washington State calls madams “female pimps,” and law enforcement is focused more on street-walking, juvenile exploitation and money-laundering, madams now are usually a souped-up combination of web-savvy receptionist-schedulers and cellular mother-therapists.

The internet means less standing around.
(Photo: klabusta via Flickr)

During a separate conversation at a coffee shop in Bellevue, just east of Seattle, Amanda vigorously vouches for her: “I wouldn’t work for anybody but Maya.” She tells how Maya meets customers herself first to keep her girls safe.

“She’ll take the heat, she protects us, she makes sure these are quality people who aren’t going to hurt us. She even has my credit card information.”

Maya doesn’t consider engaging in paid sex herself. “If I was young and hot, I probably would, in a New York minute,” she says. But jumping back into “adult entertainment” is harder than it used to be; the internet is her lifeline but it’s also choking off her supply.

“Craigslist is riskier, but it’s killing the business,” she frets. “All these girls are advertising for $120 an hour.” Her girls usually charge $350; Maya’s cut is a flat $75 commission.

So she’s come up with a different idea: selling not her body, but her story. Maybe she isn’t the Mayflower Madam, but she’s got great tales and vast amounts of spicy, unusual knowledge. Speaking for this article might help turn her story into a book, now that recent political sex scandals have increased the public’s curiosity. It’s another scheme, along with her website, www.lippss.com, to pay the bills.

In the meantime, she’s right back to the hustle, where she knows she can come up with the cash—now—for her daughter’s cell phone bill and her son’s over-limit credit cards. It’s not the men in her life these days who get her money, it’s her three grown kids.

But without available girls to book for appointments, there’s no commission. Zero funds come in. “Desperate times don’t afford me the luxury of smart choices and mainstream jobs,” she sighs. And desperate times, as they say, beget desperate choices.

+ + +

“The only thing I ever wanted was to be a mother,” Maya reminisces. “I just wanted a family with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence.” She has some warm memories from when she was very young, of riding her tricycle over to grandma’s house in a small town in upstate New York near the Finger Lakes.

Business portrait: Maya from the front.

But in first grade, her parents, who were both from alcoholic households, divorced. Maya’s untalkative and unavailable father continued drinking himself into rages. His remarkable talent as a softball pitcher earned him a series of minor, sham jobs at banks and companies that coveted him for their teams. Her mother, a new divorcee, landed in a social caste reserved for whores, and got up before dawn to work as a key-punch operator at American Can and then as a secretary at an old-age home.

At age eight, Maya recounts, she began witnessing an alcohol-tinged tangle of short, violent remarriages and mismatched pregnancies. She made her mother proud by cooking dinner, keeping house, and watching over her four-year-old brother.

For fun, she tossed bags of garbage from the top of her apartment building into the dumpsters below. By the time she was 11, she impressed the local teenagers by smoking Old Golds and drinking beer on the roof with them.

One Christmas was nice, with a new bike courtesy of one of her mother’s serial husbands. Another marriage moved them out to a trailer and then to a two-room cabin so rustic that all their water had to be collected from a stream down the hill. To avoid smelling like a wood-burning stove, Maya carefully hung her clothes out to air before she went to school.

“We were poor,” she says simply. “This was 1969, and we barely had electricity.” She stayed pretty and popular—and guarded. Nobody knew about the outhouse, or the laundry hanging from the rafters. Nobody knew they were building a bigger cabin by constructing new outer walls around the old ones they were still living in.

She kissed a boy at a seventh grade party, which led to disastrous school rumors that she was pregnant. That’s when she learned how babies are really made. Maya first had sex later, when she was 13, as a way to keep her 18-year-old boyfriend.

...and from the back.

“It was zero pleasure,” she says, “I thought I was in love, I thought I was going to marry him.” The relationship didn’t last, and she married someone else when she was 19. By then she had graduated from high school and was working in a baseball bat factory. They divorced before their first anniversary; her ex-husband retired recently as a janitor at their former high school.

Following an invitation from a “random” girlfriend, Maya moved to San Diego. She found a bank job and then, in a downtown bar, the father of her first daughter; the family and the white picket fence hadn’t yet turned up.

Some of the relationships were more successful than others; a few men were unfaithful or violent or both. After buying her new husband a used sports car and watching him drive away with another woman, she followed them and punctured all four tires with a knife.

Months before he finally disappeared to Las Vegas for a career in high-stakes drug dealing, he wanted to become a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman. The only obstacle to the stability and happiness the job would bring: the $100 necessary to purchase the required sales kit. Maya rashly promised him she would have the $100 by 5:00 that afternoon. She was 23.

+ + +

Mama Maya’s personal cell phone is mainly for her kids. She has another Seattle-based phone for girls who are working. They sit on the tidy kitchen counter next to her Vegas phone. One starts to ring.

Peering through her glasses at the caller ID, Maya sighs, “It’s Ding-Ding”—her private name for Gail, whom she describes as a beautiful, disorganized loser. Gail is flat broke with two grown kids and a broken-down Mercedes. She wants Maya to check out new photos of herself she has just posted on a California sex site.

“Oh, honey, you should have let me see these pictures before you did anything,” Maya exclaims. “You’ve got some bad shadows here on your inner thighs that should have been Photoshopped.”

She soon snaps the phone shut, fed up. Photos won’t be any help if Gail keeps saying she’s still a few hours away from being ready for dates—today will be scrubbed. Plus, Gail’s description of herself in the ad as “lonely” is a definite turn-off.

“What man wants to spend time with a pathetic, lonely loser?” Maya asks. “Men love to hear you’re a survivor, not a loser.” And yes, she says, most of them do want to find out all about you. “They love to get you to cross that line, to get you to fall in love with them.”

Maya thinks Amanda’s sob story was one of the best. “She would tell the guys that she was from Alaska, that both her parents died, and so she came down here to stay with her grandmother, but then her grandmother needed to go into a nursing home. And that’s why she was doing this, to get the money for the grandmother’s nursing home. Guys love that. You get more tips.”

Amanda probably would have earned fewer tips and gotten less customer interest than if she had told the truth: that she was from rural Kitsap County, Washington, and was just plain poor. That she lent her ever-jobless father money for a new pick-up truck and was never repaid; that her mother was a martyr, struggling to keep the family afloat; and that several tours in the Iraq War had left her brother “pretty messed up” and her boyfriend chronically unemployed.

One of Maya’s phones chirps: her oldest daughter, in Las Vegas, is texting the news that the rent has been paid on her apartment there. That’s a relief. Maya pores over the sex sites and notices a beautiful young woman on Craigslist. “I would love to recruit her, but I’m sure she’s got a pimp. You can see bruises on her.”

Maya says she’s more mother than madam: “That’s why I’m Mama Maya. I would give the shirt off my back for these girls.”

Maya tries Gail again to see if she’s finally ready to start taking appointments. No answer. She takes out the duffel bag she used back when she had up to 10 to 12 girls working for her, back before she supposedly retired. Inside are tea light candles, room freshener, mints, mouthwash, drinking water, a spray bottle of Febreze, and plastic bags full of hotel soaps and shampoos.

“You have to make the room look like you just got there. You arrive early, grab extra sheets and towels, and hide them in the drawers,” she explains. “If they ask, you tell them you have one client in the morning, and one in the afternoon.”

Maya's book. Another way to support the family.

The reality is different, of course: girls who know what they’re doing want to make the most of their time and the room fee by seeing, perhaps, five men consecutively, and girls will normally share the use of a room with each other.

Mama Maya’s record was with Amanda, when together Maya scheduled and Amanda entertained nine men in one day, back-to-back in one-hour time slots, at $300 a pop. Not long ago, Inez saw six men in one day and earned $2,790. The money’s fast, good, and tax-free; there’s no college degree or certification required. Plus, the job is flexible enough to let them get back to dealing with their lives.

Gail’s teenaged son calls from somewhere in Orange County, California, looking for his mother. Later, after mulling over the best price to charge for her services, Gail laments the lack of control she has over her kids: “Back when we stayed at the shelter, they always knew they had to go to school.”

Maya is exasperated; this is a woman who needs a better work ethic. She points out that Gail is still attractive enough to earn the money for her family’s needs. It’s hard not to agree.

+ + +

Maya remembers she had no real plan at all to get her husband the $100 she promised him for his Kirby vacuum cleaner job, and the 5:00 deadline was a few hours away. She was living in San Diego with him and her two-year-old daughter, and his mood and behavior were getting “progressively worse. I knew money would bring him back to me.”

She had a vague idea of being a drug runner, but didn’t know how to go about it. She brought her friend’s dogs to the park while she considered the problem. A pimp pulled up in a van, started a conversation, and offered a solution. Maya was riveted by his explanation of the trade that centered on El Cajon Boulevard.

There are ready-made templates for creating escort web sites.

“He said if I could fuck him, a total stranger, right then and there, that I could be a ho. So we climbed in the back of his van and did it. Sex didn’t mean anything to me anyway.”

Still, it took a couple of fretful hours of walking up and down the “stroll” to get up her nerve. “I was petrified. I just couldn’t get in a car.”

Finally, a white Mazda RX-7 pulled up, and the graying, portly man inside bargained her from $25 down to $20 for a blowjob. She remembers he was very nice, with a box of tissues in the console.

“I couldn’t believe it—this much money, this quick. I couldn’t wait to get back to the boulevard. In 1982, minimum wage was like $3.35 an hour.” Maya shakes her head: “Twenty-five years later, girls are still giving away twenty-dollar blowjobs!”

The second customer was a blur, as were all the rest. For about eight months, her daughter stayed home with her husband while Maya worked the stroll—plenty long enough for her to realize he didn’t love her.

He quickly gave up the vacuum cleaner gig because she made more money than he did. He left for good and she stopped streetwalking. Two more children, a few boyfriends, and a husband later, she wound up in the Seattle area as a Navy wife.

She gave up a relationship with a man she found who really adored her to return to chasing her white picket fence dream. A devoted mother, she went on every school field trip. Military pay was so low the family qualified for food stamps, but she was determined that her kids would have the things and the nice shoes she never had.

Marketing sex has never been faster or easier.

Maya’s eldest daughter, Dominique, now 29, is a staunch defender of her mother. “She was always the cool mom,” she says by phone from Las Vegas. “Our birthdays were like holidays—she made the world stop.”

What Dominique doesn’t volunteer is about the day she was molested by Maya’s third husband. The marriage immediately turned ghastly and ended. Maya’s guilt and disappointment are still worthy of a day-time reality TV show; bouts with alcoholism and bulimia set in.

She drove a bus in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula; her three children rode along on her route in the early morning until school started. With Dominique’s help (“My mom always said I was like the Marilyn character in ‘The Munsters’”), Maya built a house with her own hands, the way her impoverished stepfather had done back in upstate New York.

She worked in administrative jobs in western Washington, where overbearing supervisors found bureaucratic methods for punishing her “trailer park” style. Reprimands and memos floated into her file for not dressing appropriately—foregoing stockings on a hot day was a no-no. She was accused of sexual harassment and suspended for 30 days without pay for showing coworkers her vacation photos; one showed a man holding coconut halves over a woman’s breasts.

Maya gave up and emptied her desk. “I’d rather suck a dick for money than kiss somebody’s ass for $10.83 an hour,” she remembers telling herself.

+ + +

Maya is sweeping the spotless steps near the kitchen again at the suburban house when her 20-year-old son, Ian, Jr. calls from Las Vegas. “I feel like a fucking ATM machine,” she grumbles.

He’s bought himself designer clothing and can’t make the credit card payments. This galls her, considering he wore her down until she bought him a used Mercedes a year ago; she knows she will have to sell it soon, at a loss.

“After the molestation, my kids lost everything, including their father and their home,” she explains. “As far as I’m concerned, I can’t give them enough.” She admits she has spoiled them, and can’t seem to set things right; with no money coming in, her options are even more limited.

One good picture can sell a thousand sex acts.

Suddenly, the clouds of doom part: the next phone call is from Inez, one of Maya’s all-time best workers, back from visiting her sick mother. She’s ready to work—hallelujah!— the retirement is really over.

Maya wastes no time helping her post a new ad on a Los Angeles sex site. She starts the coffeemaker while she’s still on the phone and before it’s done brewing, the first call comes in, vibrating across the Formica.

The exhorting and lamentations she delivered to her son a few minutes ago have evaporated. Now her tone is friendly, breezy, and businesslike:

“Good morning, may I help you?” She remembers the caller as a previous customer; he is itching to spend an hour with Brazilian Inez’s smooth olive skin and long hair. Reading off a web site, she gives him directions to a Southern California hotel as if she were near the freeway herself.

“Oh, aren’t you efficient! Don’t forget the diamond ring!” she coos. She hangs up and chuckles: “One first-timer told me he was too nervous to go through with it but that I was so friendly I put him at ease.”

She texts Inez when to expect the customer’s arrival and adds what kind of car he’s driving. She writes down the name and appointment into a spiral-bound notebook. Inez texts back and Maya calls the customer again:

“Inez just got there and she wants to get the room ready for you; I just need you to give her an extra five minutes.” Little white lies help massage extra men into more tightly-scheduled appointments. By the end of the day, there will be five appointments, limited only because Inez will have to pick up her niece.

Maya states the obvious: “I’m really good at multi-tasking.” Phone calls add up quickly, especially when several girls are each seeing a series of men.

The next call comes from Jessica, Maya’s younger, 23-year-old daughter, who is in a vicious struggle with Oxycontin, the hugely addictive prescription painkiller. Jessica has hocked all her jewelry and plowed through the thousands of dollars of rent money Maya gave her.

Now she’s crying on the phone, unable to reach her boyfriend who has locked her out of the apartment they’re borrowing out in a small town in the country. He’s dead asleep and Jessica had to spend last night in their car.

The boyfriend has his own troubles, having finished a prison sentence for manslaughter after killing a teenager during the course of an impromptu drag race.

Streetwalking: not quite obsolete. Selling sex: never obsolete.

“I’m scared something’s going to happen!”Jessica wails, in a post-high semi-paranoia. She has spent time in jail for writing false checks. “I just can’t go back to jail!”

Maya calls her daughter’s neighbor, claiming to have a question about picking up their dog. The innocent neighbor obliges, wakes the boyfriend, and Maya spends several minutes urging him to get a job—and help for both of them. She admits to me in an aside that it pains her to learn that Jessica tried turning a few tricks.

Another phone call interrupts the parental lecture. “Good afternoon, may I help you?” Again, from the sound of Maya’s voice, there’s no way to detect her anguish from an instant earlier.

“Hey, where are ya, pretty boy?” She tells the caller Inez’s room number, and gives him parking advice. “Thanks, baby!” She hangs up, calls Inez to let her know he’s parking his car, and mixes herself another café latte in a take-out Starbuck’s cup.

“I think I have to spend some time in Vegas,” she says. “With cell phones, I can take this job with me.” First she’ll take a day or two to help out Jessica in the country while Inez is off work, visiting her mom in the hospital.

Then she’ll spend time with her two grandchildren in Vegas: their father used Maya’s—their grandmother’s—history in the prostitution business as the basis for getting custody of them.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Tears slide down her cheeks and her voice closes up. “The motherhood thing I wanted—well, I’m accepting the blame for how everything turned out,” she weeps, wondering if she has failed despite her lifetime of effort.

Knowing she was completely different than her own, ungiving mother, though, is a tremendous comfort. When Maya hears her children say “What’s wrong with being like you?” she feels not only redeemed, but successful. But she’s shaken by any news in the business, as when the “D.C. Madam” committed suicide after facing up to 55 years in prison for promoting prostitution.

“I’m supposed to be part of the underbelly of society because I was a whore,” Maya muses later. “But I don’t feel like a criminal. I feel a lot more honest than someone who marries a person for their wallet.”

Two weeks later, Maya navigates her Ford Escort to the interstate on the way to Vegas, where, both proud and disgusted by her roles as madam and mother, she will keep chasing the dream of the family with the house and the white picket fence.

Photo of see-through stilettos from Mandy’s Hot Stilettos.

L.D. Kirshenbaum is Editor-in-Chief of NewsPlink.

There are so many myths about South Africa. Here are the three I’ve heard the most:

Myth #1:
Since South Africa is in Africa, wild animals like lions and elephants are therefore walking around in the streets.

The place to find a herd of elephants visiting a watering hole is in the Umfolozi-Hluhluwa Game Park in the Kwa-Zulu Natal province.

No, like most civilizations we managed more than 300 years or so ago to build our first cities and put some walls around ourselves.

Travelers through the savannah and brushlands are more likely to see a gift stand with carved wooden animals.

Like tourists, we have to go to our zoos and parks to see the animals.

Myth #2
Every person in South Africa is black, except for the few white racists that still manage to hang around somehow.

Wearing rarely-seen Zulu ceremonial dress gets these rickshaw drivers in Durban more tips from tourists, who are expecting an exotic African experience.

Actually, South Africa is not called the rainbow nation for nothing. We have a very diverse nation that is made up of many different groups and cultures. This includes everything from black people to caucasians to asians and everything in-between.

In a more relaxed setting, locals aren't nearly so exotic. Here, playing music at an herbal medicine stall at Durban's open-air market.

In fact, we have 11 official languages in South Africa. We believe it’s our diversity that makes us strong.

Myth #3:
South Africa is a third world country.

Yes and no.

Picturesque setting, but this shantytown outside of Capetown has no electricity or running water.

South Africa has a very strong business sector in the formal economy, a sophisticated financial system with great banks, an extended road network, good universities, modern cities and all the other things one might find in any developed country.

Durban, with highrise hotels and condos, is often compared to San Diego.

Unfortunately, as a result of our apartheid past, many of our citizens are still living just on or below the “bread line,” which means South Africa also has a large third world component. This is similar to what one would find in India, Brazil, Russia and many other emerging economies. One of our government’s stated aims is to address this situation to create a better life for all South Africans.

Deon Terblanche is the ninth generation of Terblanches born and raised in Africa, and he considers himself as African as the big five and kwaito music. Lawyer jokes encouraged his departure from the big city, corporate law, and structured finance. He now enjoys a sea view from his office at a real estate group called Terblanche Total Property Solutions. Follow him on Twitter @TerblancheProp.

(Sun City West, Arizona) Tanned, lean and healthy, Jim and Evy Heath tool around town in a white golf cart festooned with flags. Jim is 65; since he retired as a union trucker in 1993, he and his 60-ish wife, a nurse, have split their time between here, in Sun City West, and Minnesota. The Heaths say they love their lives.

“We’ve got four rec centers, a pool, bowling alley and bocce ball,” says Jim. “You can do anything out here.”

Many of the area’s 100,000-plus seniors agree. Even Money Magazine touted the Sun Cities as one of the top places to live in the U.S.

But now, Arizona’s pioneering, age-segregated planned community has become an all-ages town. Affluent senior citizens still enjoy their golden years with little tax burden, but this enclave of silver-haired retirees appears to be undergoing significant change.

A Place for Living the “Golden Years”

Once, this land was deemed fit only for cotton, creosote and horned toads. Then, in 1954, real estate broker Ben Schleifer and banker Clarence Suggs purchased 320 acres of cotton fields to create the nation’s first master planned retiree community.

Schleifer wanted his new community to be “associated with youth and ambition,” so they called it Youngtown. Tellingly, though, AARP founded its first chapter in Youngtown. Author Andrew D. Blechman spells out the history in his book Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008).

In Phoenix, mythic developer Del Webb seized quickly on the retiree concept, and created the Sun City empire right next to Youngtown. While Schleifer’s vision incorporated more humble silver-haired immigrants, Webb catered to more upscale seniors. Youngtown Police Chief Dan Connelly, 65, says “Youngtown was designed for blue collar workers; there were middle-income workers here, retired sergeants, and the like.”

The original Sun City, at the border of Youngtown.

Social Security, better health care and the prosperity of the mid-20th century all contributed to this expanding retiree cohort. With the increasing disintegration of the extended family, entrepreneurs like Schleifer and Webb got in on the growing business of giving retired people a new life in what Webb first styled as “golden years.”

Seniors swarmed into cozy ranch houses. Recreation centers and homey downtowns sprang from the desert. Retirees bought golf carts and settled into what many still see as Utopia.

The dazzling array of activities for the 55-plus denizens of the Sun Cities—the original Sun City, Sun City West and Sun City Grand—still includes recreation centers, golf at greatly-reduced fees, and over 100 clubs. Residents pay a modest fee for services.

Homes are generally lower-priced than elsewhere. A basic two-bedroom detached home in Sun City, can cost as little as $90,000.

Old age is a big business

There’s no doubt that retirees bring in big money. The Arizona Department of Commerce’s community profiles estimate that Sun City alone brings in over $300 million in annual business revenues.

Senior-oriented businesses here include health care, physical assistance equipment, financial advisers and, of course, golf cart dealerships. Two area hospitals have geriatric practitioners on staff, and a major Alzheimer’s research facility is nearby.

Instead of incorporation, the Sun Cities opted for government by homeowners association. The Sun City Homeowners Association (SCHOA) and Sun City West’s Property Owners and Residents Association (PORA), perform duties that would normally be tackled by a municipal government.

And then there are taxes—or rather the lack of them. Residents in age-restricted communities pay one-half to two-thirds less tax than anybody else in the county. PORA’s Web site states that the property tax on an $80,000 home is less than $400 a year. SCHOA’s annual magazine reports that the average Sun City property tax is $800 a year.

Residents pay no municipal sales or property taxes. School taxes are virtually non-existent.

Naturally, residents want to keep it that way. They even have their own taxpayers association, the Sun City Taxpayers Association. The association’s Web site trumpets a food tax elimination in Sun City.

Blechman commented via email on the trend towards segregating seniors together. “It’s not hard to understand why seniors choose an age-segregated lifestyle,” he wrote. “Families are increasingly blown apart by geography; the car-dependent suburbs are antithetical to aging-in-place; with so much transience, hometowns only exist in a physical sense—the people are gone so where do you return to?—and we have a miserable track record of caring for our seniors.”

Blechman is also concerned that age-segregated, sometimes gated senior enclaves lure some of society’s most valuable members away from public engagement. “With age comes wisdom and experience. We should treasure our elders.”

Sun City boasts of being the “City of Volunteers,” but Blechman has something to say about that, too. “Many residents volunteer outside of Sun City’s boundaries, but not in large enough numbers to make up for the fact that Sun Citians don’t pay any school tax,” he writes.

Senior services congregate in Sun Cities

Social service agencies here deal with age-related issues on a grander scale. Steve Lacy, an advocate for seniors with the Area Agency on Aging, sees many of these cases. “Definitely as you age, you can start getting isolated,” Lacy says. “Your spouse passes, you may lose your driving ability or develop cognitive losses.”

This exacerbates the fact that so many seniors have left their old communities—and their support systems—behind. “If you’re in Nebraska and end up in a nursing home, everybody knows where you’re at,” Lacy says. “Some actually leave and go back [when their health fails], but that’s really hard to do; it takes a lot of work to sell your old home, find a new place to live.”

On the other hand, Lacy notes that the Sun Cities do offer seniors more in the way of support services. “There’s more being done [in Sun City] to prevent isolation and other kinds of situations. The network to protect people is strong there.”

Seniors need that strong network. Jane Burzzese of Interfaith Community Care based in Surprise, Arizona, notes that many of the 600 to 700 calls for assistance her agency handles each month come from elderly people who have lost their support system.

“Some of them have survived their adult children or have only one left,” says Burzzese. Others never had children. And some are estranged from their adult children. “When they learn that their parents are moving to Arizona, they become really angry and cut off contact; ‘If they want to live out there, let them deal with it,’” she relates.

Interfaith operates six senior day care centers, and maintains a cadre of volunteers and staff to help seniors with home repair, meals, transportation and most importantly, human contact. Burzzese says many seniors struggle to survive on less than $1,000 a month.

Golf cart dealership, in Youngtown.

The Sun Cities do suffer from crime, only it’s not usually visible from the tidy streets. Senior fraud is the big concern here, and Burzzese says a coalition to battle the problem is made up of representatives from the Arizona Attorney General, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Interfaith, area banks and financial institutions and other agencies.

“These con artists are really sophisticated,” says Burzzese. “They will befriend a senior and then start taking over their finances.” Among other strategies, local banks monitor withdrawals of large sums from seniors’ accounts, notifying an adult child or other interested party.

Everyone this reporter spoke with said they have a great working relationship with local law enforcement and emergency service agencies.

Another, fuller version of this article with more local detail is available here and owned by the Arizona Capitol Times, normally available by subscription only. Our thanks go to the editorial staff for allowing us to provide this link free of charge.

Debra Utacia Krol, an enrolled member of the Xolon (or Jolon) Salinan Tribe of central California, is a freelance journalist and NewsPlink correspondent based in Arizona.

Things have changed in 40 years.
(Photo: Uploaded to Flickr by Zellaby)

Like a lot of people, I enjoy looking at women in bikinis. So I started Bikini Beat one year ago.

Most sites out there serve up spammy porn dominated by ads. Or they’ll ruin pictures of a beautiful woman by adding sexual language that, frankly, I find offensive. It’s in the guise of humor, but there’s no hiding the misogyny behind it.

There’s no outright nudity on Bikini Beat, and I keep overly suggestive poses to a minimum. The site is SFW, or “safe for work,” and is also ad free.

Wicked Weasel in Australia and Nasty Diva in Milan
are top micro-bikini makers.

Having said that, some suits and images do come close. You might find some of the more daring suits in Brazil or parts of Europe, but few of the suits you see here make it onto American beaches, except for bikini contests or the occasional party spot like Lake Havasu in Arizona.

The C-string:
as practical as six-inch heels.
(Photo: via CStringDirect.com)

A lot of these suits aren’t necessarily made for practicality or comfort. Wearing a C-string bikini strikes me as the equivalent of wearing six-inch heels. Wearing very little can be more uncomfortable than wearing nothing at all.

Infinite variety: these bikinis are sheer.

I have thousands of images yet to post; our readers submit more every day. I think being amidst all of them makes me more appreciative of beauty. But as for my own preferences? I’m a fan of variety.

First there was the slingshot bikini.
Now there's the sling-cross.

I admit that those old-school slingshot bikinis, made famous by the bikini contests of the ’80s, have a special place in my heart.

A thin line: the same sling-cross, but from the back.

Bikini Beat isn’t a source of income for me, but I do think it makes me more productive in my work. I spend a lot of time in front of a computer, and the blog is a nice break when I’m mentally drained. A lot of our readers say it serves that purpose for them, too. I estimate only 70% of our readers are men.

A cutaway one-shoulder suit from Herve Leger.
(Photo via Fashionising.com)

The two big trends of 2009 are cut-away bikinis and one-shoulder bikinis, so we may be seeing more of them this summer. Our sister site, Beach Girls, was started in Brazil, and it shows real women wearing bikinis on the beach, at the pool, and in the backyard.

Lindsay Lohan in a cut-away.
(Photo: via Fashionising.com)

No fossil fuels required for these airplanes.

Some purists prefer driving stick-shifts to automatics. Others like to play LPs on a record player instead of listening to an iPod. And then there are the model airplane purists, who power their aircraft not with electric motors, but with strips of rubber.

For George Benson, building the plane is as important as flying it.

George Benson, who will turn 82 in June, is one of these purists, as he is an enthusiast of rubber-powered model airplanes. He remembers growing up in England, when there was a huge interest in the latest civilian and war planes both in Europe and in the United States.

Benson and his father would build and fly the planes into the early years of World War II. Model airplane competitions were intense, and sometimes there were larger, heavier, and noisier gasoline-powered models.

Nowadays, technology and modern materials mean just about everyone can use a remote control with a model airplane that is purchased ready to fly and usually manufactured from molded plastic. Some prefer a challenge, so they fly “free-flight” models that are unpredictable: they go where the wind blows.

Models are often built—without nostalgia—to plans from the 1920s and ‘30s.

But the devotees of rubber-powered model airplanes go so far as to keep their art close to the way Alphonse Penaud invented it, back in 1871. His “Planophore” achieved a flight of 131 feet in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. Strips of rubber powered his model airplane, which was a delicate arrangement of balsa wood and tissue paper.

That’s the way Benson and his colleagues like to keep their hobby. They belong to the Marin Aero Club, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they meet regularly to fly their planes. They also show the younger flyers how, when it’s done properly and if all goes well, the planes are “trimmed” to climb steadily, reach level flight, then slowly glide back to earth. But there are endless variables; one of the most common is a rising warm air “thermal,” which can make the plane soar out of sight in minutes.

Marius Canard at age 17, learning about the hobby.

Benson, who is a long-time resident of Mill Valley, California, says the hobby is incredibly satisfying. There’s pride in the workmanship required to construct the planes, and in the skill to “trim,” or adjust them, to fly well.

“Once flying,” he says, “it is a beautiful sight to see one’s handicraft overhead with the sun streaming through the tissue, revealing the wood framework.”

No seatbelts or traytables. Just sun, wind, and handicraft.

Benson reveals there’s really only one drawback: “With an exceptionally long flight, one occasionally loses a plane.”

Roberto Soncin Gerometta is an established travel and corporate photographer based in San Francisco.

For more information, see the Marin Aero Club blog.

Meret Ryhiner is lying face down in Quang Huynh’s Uptown New Orleans clinic, awaiting a blood-letting treatment for spider veins in her legs.

“I hate needles,” Ryhiner says. But she got good results from Quang’s acupuncture treatments, so she agreed to take her treatment one step further. She’s nervous about letting the healer extract blood from her body. She’s also a bit skeptical. But she’s decided to give the ancient medical practice a try.

Quang pricks her spider veins with a small blood-letting pick, forming beads of blood on her legs. And?

“It just feels like little pin pricks, like acupuncture,” Ryhiner reports. “It doesn’t hurt much at all.”

A common medical practice for more than 2,000 years, sometimes used with the help of leeches, blood-letting has largely been pushed underground since the arrival of 20^th century medicine. Most people don’t realize that the red stripe on a barber’s pole represents blood, a symbol that dates back to medieval days when barbers moonlighted as surgeons.

New Orleans is one of many cities seeing a renewal of ancient and exotic healing practices. The rising cost of health care, the growing acceptance of alternative medicine and — in New Orleans — all the hospitals and clinics that have remained padlocked since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have helped create a booming business for Quang and other practitioners.

Paltrow in 2004. (Photo: Velahos.com)

Along with blood-letting, New Orleans and other places are seeing an increase in the practice of “cupping,” particularly in cities with large Asian populations. In 2004, actress Gwyneth Paltrow created a stir when she walked onto the red carpet of a film premiere with a row of distinctive raised cupping welts visible above her gown.

Do these practices work? Some patients report positive results for conditions as varied as joint and muscle pain, headaches, insomnia, and sexual dysfunction. Quang insists that Ryhiner’s blood-letting was not just a cosmetic treatment. “All of these spider veins hold what (Chinese medicine) calls ‘stagnant blood,’” he explains. “We believe if any of it escapes and goes to the brain, she will have a stroke.”

The theory behind cupping is similar to blood-letting. A practice closely linked to acupuncture dating back to ancient Chinese alchemists, cupping involves using a glass cup (ancient practitioners used horns) or similar suction-producing device to raise sections of skin and superficial muscle and unblock “chi,” the body’s internal vascular energy, by promoting blood flow along specific pressure points.

Valerie Viosca, 37, is an 8th-generation New Orleanian, and about to be cupped by a Vietnamese healer, Hu, who declined to give his full name. Viosca says the practice was used in the West as well as the East, and both traditions believe that negative energy is being drawn out of the body by the forced suction.

Viosca seems calm as she arrives at a Hu’s tidy, non-descript home in the suburban New Orleans. She removes her shirt and lies face down on a treatment bed. He wheels in a tray of clear glass cups, each no more than a half an inch in diameter. He lights an alcohol-drenched cotton swab, and with a tall flame, heats the inside of a cup. Then he places the heated cup on Viosca’s back. The skin inside the cup begins to swell into a bubble.

As Hu applies more cups, Viosca’s back appears to be growing a cluster of light bulbs. Though not painful, Viosca says that cupping leaves blisters for a few days. “I feel great,” she states in mid-treatment, and drifts off into an endorphin-enhanced sleep.

Hu also places a few acupuncture needles into a few pressure points, then puts cups over each needle. After he removes the cups, Viosca awakens. “I feel dizzy and way acu-stoned!” she exclaims. “I feel the weight of the world lifted!”

Then, as if answering the observer’s question, she feels compelled to add, “This is real medicine.”

Sean David Hobbs is an avid traveler from Wisconsin who spent time in Turkey before settling in New Orleans.

Modern-style miracles. (Photo via wejew.com)

Every year I like to pull Michael Walzers’ book “Exodus and Revolution” off the shelf and read up about how the Jewish exodus from Egypt inspired just about every big struggle for freedom. There were the Puritans back in England, the American revolutionaries of 1776 (who really knew their biblical history), and the African-Americans yearning to break free of slavery and then racism.

But a friend of mine isn’t inspired at all. “Great,” she says. “God released us from Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. And for this we are condemned to live on cardboard for a solid week.”

I think she has matzah all wrong. Sure, it looks a lot like packaging material. But if you get the really good stuff, there’s a barely perceptible nut-like aroma that allows you to close your eyes like a proper gourmet and exhale with an authoritative “Oy vey.”

You can also do great things to matzah. With enough processing in egg batter, matzah turns into matzo brei. You can slather it with butter and jam. And you can just crumble the heck out of it – it’s so much tastier than sawdust.

Besides, matzah is an incredibly pure product, made only of flour and water mixed under strict supervision. So when my English friend spreads Marmite on her matzah, I feel that’s really unkosher. After all, Marmite is a revolting, dark, yeasty goo. I’m terrified every time she brings the Marmite in contact with the matzah that there will be a horrible “poof,” as if matter and anti-matter had met.

Still, the Passover holiday itself is a really nice one. During the seder, which is comprised of a few hors d’oeuvres and a lot of text, everyone gets together around the table before the meal. All of Washington is abuzz about the different Passover seders that the Obamas and the Clintons will be attending. There is one worrying trend, though: these seders are getting to be much too long.

I’m sure this trend started when the rabbis were assembling the first Haggadot, which are the little booklets of prayers and rituals to be performed before dinner is served. I think the rabbis got carried away, putting in whatever the Jews were doing back in the days of the Ancient Greeks, and not leaving anything out since.

Karl Kraus, the learned Austrian satirist, couldn’t get over it: “These Jews spend hours reading to each other from the menu!”

I have to agree: could we try to keep the whole business to maybe half an hour, tops? Fortunately, you can order a “30-Minute Haggadah” on line for only $5.99, which leaves out all the optional parts, like the rhetorical questions and the instructional use of current events. Who has the patience for zealotry with the smell of home-cooked food around?

There are lots of things, actually, that you can buy for Passover. For $8, you can buy a kippah, the little cap that observant men wear, printed with an astonishingly authentic matzah pattern. At the same web site, there’s a doll called the “Matzah Man” who sings and dances to “The Matzarena.” Get it? So clever, and a bargain for $16.

But I drew the line at the toilet lid cover decorated with the same matzah pattern. A deal, I know, at only $20. I’m sure anybody else could add to the dignity of the occasion with such a thing. But with my Brooklyn apartment? Better not to. Let’s eat!

Hannes Stein is a correspondent for Die Welt, the German newspaper. This article was adapted from the German from an article he wrote for Juedische Allgemeine, a Jewish newspaper in Berlin.

NewsPlink starts at about 3 minutes, 20 seconds. The entire clip is less than five minutes long.
The original source and KTVU’s written news story are here: “Democracy in Peril as Newspapers Crumble.”