Brilliant Thoughts Something I Ate

by Ashleigh Brilliant

You are a stranger on the road, passing within sight of a dwelling. The people who live there invite you to come and share their meal. It doesn’t sound that remarkable. It might almost be Biblical. And in a way, it was – because this happened in the Land of the Bible. But it was modern Israel, and I, in my late teens, was the traveler – hitchhiking at that time in the north of the country, only five years after it had become a State. What made that meal particularly memorable for me was that my unexpected hosts were Bedouin Arabs, and at the time of its birth, this country had had to fight for survival against all the surrounding Arab countries, from which came armies of invaders.

But Israel still had a large Arab population (which indeed is proportionately even larger today) and the peace which prevailed was a very uneasy one, with “terrorist” incidents disturbingly frequent. But these people were inviting me to be a guest in their hillside tent, under the legendary Arab code of hospitality. So, since I was hungry anyway, I happily accepted, glad to have this new experience. Our communication had to be through the children, who had learned a little English in school. There was no furniture in the tent, so we were all sitting on cushions on the ground. Our simple repast was, of course, based on the type of Arab bread with which people today have become more familiar.

What I remember even more than the meal itself was that, when I was leaving, the children ran after me offering coins (which of course I didn’t accept); apparently another part of the hospitality code that I hadn’t heard about before.

Another meal that haunts my memory – for very different reasons – was partaken of as part of my professorship on board a “floating university” sailing around the world. We were visiting Japan, and I was a guest teacher at a High School English class there. It was winter, and quite cold, but there appeared to be no heating system in the school, yet all the classroom windows were open. I naturally was hoping for some opportunity to get warm. When lunch time finally came, I was taken to the “faculty lounge,” and they did indeed have some kind of wood or coal-burning stove in the center of the room. I was told that lunch was on the way, and of course what I longed for was a good hot meal. Maybe you can guess what it turned out to be. That’s right – the least appetizing to me that it could possibly be: COLD FISH. I had never been fond of “sushi,” but under those circumstances I found it absolutely revolting. show Truth or Consequences, for which Milt had become a writer.

Of course, I had to avoid offending my hosts, so I made a pretense of eating, and even enjoying, what was served. But this was one of the most ghastly eating experiences of my life.

As the setting of one of my least likely, or most surprising, gastronomic memories, I would nominate Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Within living memory, along with Timbuktu, Lhasa has long been considered a byword for strangeness, remoteness, and inaccessibility. None of these supposed features discouraged my wife Dorothy, however, who specialized in traveling to the hitherto virtually unknown. And sure enough, since the demise of “Red China,” it had indeed become much easier, purely for the purposes of tourism, to reach that fabled objective. I accompanied my spouse on this adventure, and I was quite prepared for all kinds of hardship, particularly in such matters as accommodation and eateries. I was therefore astonished to find that among the facilities now offered to Lhasa visitors was a purely western-style Holiday Inn, with its own cafeteria!

But for an eating surprise in reverse, I offer you a delectable fruit I was delighted to discover on a first visit to Costa Rica. It had many large seeds buried in the pulp, but, once these were removed, what was left was extraordinarily juicy and flavorful. It was called a cherimoya, and when we came home to Sana Barbara I lost no time in announcing my discovery – only to find that what to me was something new and exciting was, in fact, well-known, and was actually grown and sold locally! The only way of dealing with my chagrin was to start growing cherimoyas, quite successfully, in my own garden.

Their wedding was held at their beachfront property in Montecito on August 27, 1989; it was a first marriage for both. He was 55, she 39. They had agreed to marry some months before but kept putting it off, afraid they’d spoil what had been a great 20-year friendship. Milt decided, however, that the marriage should happen and that they should throw a party where they would announce their engagement and a wedding day.

What Arlene and nearly all the invitees didn’t know was that Milt had decided the actual wedding would take place at the party.

His days as chief writer for Truth or Consequences – whereupon the subject would be kept in the dark – played into his plans, and it all worked out, even though his Best Man – Milt’s brother – never showed up and hadn’t been told of the wedding arrangement. Instead, Milt’s longtime friend Richard Sherman (the two met as teenagers) served as Best Man. Sherman and his brother Bob were the Sherman Brothers songwriting team, whose successful tunes ranged from Disney World’s “It’s a Small World” to “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and the score for Mary Poppins, The Parent Trap, and many others in between.

In 1974, Milt opened the Mayfair Music Hall in Santa Monica, and went to England to gather the material he used to build the inside of the theater, that included a half-circular bar, ornate structures galore, and even the chairs. He, Dick Sherman, Arlene, John Shrum (Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show art director), and Toni Kaye (choreographer for The Carol Burnett Show), worked together to put on Music Hall-type performances featuring old English songs, and specialty acts (including a doctor-witha-seal routine that never quite got itself together).

The Mayfair Music Hall is gone now but it lives on in two movies: Harriet & Walter Go To New York (starring Elliott Gould, James Caan, Michael Caine, and Diane Keaton), and Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’s send-up of gothic horror that starred Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, and Gene Hackman. Dr. Frankenstein’s hilarious “Puttin’ On The Ritz” medical re-animation demonstration takes place at the Mayfair.

One of the last things he did before his death was to write a song that he’d In Remembrance Page 304 pant drug use and a ‘chop shop’ of stolen bike parts. We even found an improvised skateboard park. And there was a massive crowd camping across from the cemetery, an absolute party scene. We found out the main character was in that spot because his parents had thrown him out of their family home. We persuaded his mother to take him back in.

Ashleigh Brilliant born England 1933, came to California in 1955, to Santa Barbara in 1973, to the Montecito Journal in 2016. Best-known for his illustrated epigrams, called “Pot-Shots,” now a series of 10,000. email: ashleigh@west. net. web: www.ash leighbrilliant.com.

Q. From day one, I have been so impressed by the way you follow the homeless people we meet with your big spreadsheet with names and descriptions that you continually update with information about this and that person. Including all sorts of details like where they are from, what drugs they have been using, who they have partnered with, where they hang out during different parts of the days and weeks.

A. It’s called a “named list.” You use that named list to start working with people and digging into what they need: What are we doing for Joe? He might need detox. But Marlene, she might just need a bus ticket to go home to her mom. It’s humanitarian to follow individual people, always asking what they need, what should we try this time that didn’t work previously. The named list also helps you evaluate yourself, figure out how well you are doing, and it allows us to share information with our partners like Citynet, government agencies, and so on.

Q. I know you count about 35 people as having been served by the program each year, but I always wonder, how many of them have stayed off the streets?

A. Of the 35 that are we following now, I’m proud to say that three of them have been housed permanently. Another two we housed for two years, and they stayed in their housing but recently decided to go back on the streets. At least 25 have left Santa Barbara/Montecito for other nearby environs, and some of them migrated to other parts of the county. It’s a very transient population, they don’t have a home base, and many of the people we encounter aren’t from Santa Barbara. I’m thinking for example about these three young guys who were camping near the Bird Refuge; they were from San Francisco but somehow decided to come here for the summer, then they went back up there.

Q. What about three elements of homelessness that make people hard to work with: drugs, crime, and mental illness?

A. There’s a lot of drugs, and there’s a lot of intra-homeless crime. They steal each other’s drugs. Last year, someone allegedly sexually assaulted another homeless guy’s girlfriend. For homeless women, fear of sexual assault turns out to be a big issue, and it’s one of the reasons why we have women experiencing homelessness coming down the railroad tracks from Santa Barbara into Montecito. There are fewer homeless people here, and they want to escape from aggressive men who might be in the big encampments downtown. Mental illness – well, you know we have a manifestation of that issue right here in Montecito ....

Q. You are referring of course to the individual who lives in front of Pointe Market on Coast Village Road. I see her almost every morning when I go to get my coffee and paper. I try to talk to this person, and I know the name, but I get the impression this person considers me a busybody associated with helping the homeless – a label with which the individual does not want to be associated.

A. There might be light at the end of the tunnel for this individual, who is suffering from an acute mental illness. Even in the three years we have been dealing with this individual, she has gone downhill physically and mentally, and we’ve been in contact several times with the distraught daughter and sister, who have witnessed a long slide into mental illness. In California you can’t force someone into treatment, so Governor Newsom pushed through the CARES Act, which allows first responders and social workers to refer a person showing signs of acute mental illness to the court system. It’s being rolled out county-by-county, and Santa Barbara is scheduled to adopt its legal framework regarding this law by 2024. I promise all Montecitans, we will be nudging this person into that system. When you think we have devoted so many resources to this one person, we could be helping 15 people. We have referred that individual to assisted outreach treatment, three times to adult protective services, and to the public defender who wants to help because this individual has an outstanding warrant for trespassing.

Q. This would be a major accomplishment ‘lighting this one little candle’ for our village, and such a step forward for this senior citizen – about whom so many of us worry. But turning to the big picture, so often you and I have spoken about Santa Monica’s management of the homeless, and their large number of available shelter beds that give their homeless outreach teams a strong talking point to persuade people to get out of their tents and to come indoors. This is related to the now-infamous “Boise decision” by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which holds that unless a city or county has enough beds available for every unhoused person, the government cannot enforce no-camping, no-sitting, or no-lying ordinances. Do you see any movement toward getting more beds made available here in Santa Barbara, since our numbers of unhoused are not in the tens of thousands like L.A.?

A. That’s the goal. The county – and I still sit on the county’s Behavioral Wellness Commission – is trying to achieve this by partnering with Dignity Moves to build three more of the ‘tiny house’ communities as quickly as possible. We already have hundreds of shelter beds available throughout the county. I would say, if things go well with this new program, we might be able within two years to have enough places so that everyone can be offered a bed. And hopefully that will mean we can outlaw tent camping, and that will mean fewer fires being set, hopefully less crime among the homeless, and so on. It’s important to get people off the streets so that we can interview them, help distinguish between people who have chosen a lifestyle of living on the street and don’t ever want to come indoors, and the people who desperately need help.

Q. The ‘tiny home’ concept seems to be working in other places too, such as two sites in L.A. County. But have you folks on the Be Well Commission considered what will happen after the three-year leases expire? Are the leases renewable?

A. I don’t know what will happen with the tiny homes in the long run, but I do think solutions like this are what we need to do.

Q. I want to join you in being very hopeful that this vision will come to fruition. It does seem, though, that mitigating the goal of housing the unhoused is the ever-skyrocketing cost of housing in South Santa Barbara County. Montecito of course being the crown jewel in terms of housing prices – clearly people at this economic rung aren’t going to move to our village – but we keep seeing examples like in Isla Vista, the disappearance of relatively affordable apartments.

A. I see housing in Santa Barbara County going in two very divergent directions. If what we are going to build is more and more expensive housing, we are going to displace more and more people. If rents are going to continue to rise and everything we construct is luxury, then there won’t be places where the formerly-housed can rent when they find a basic job and want a basic apartment. There was a fancy apartment complex called The Marc that came online in 2016, and I remember they started charging $2,700 for a one-bedroom. Then people who owned other apartments, not even nice apartments, then raised their rents to $2,500. And now prices are going higher and higher. We are continuing to build nothing but very expensive stuff, there’s going to be nothing for the people at the bottom of the rung to rent. And we have timeshares and vacation rentals taking more rental homes off the market.

Q. What can we do?

A. The best thing our most generous Montecito villagers can do is to continue to support programs like Hands Across Montecito and our partners Citynet, Dignity Moves, Heal the Ocean, New Beginnings and any of the other nonprofits that are working so diligently to serve the larger community by reaching out to those who haven’t had access to the American Dream.