The Weston family is fraught with problems’alcoholism, drug addiction, adultery and suicide’yet playwright Tracy Letts makes their agony seem surprisingly entertaining in the play ‘August: Osage County.’   This three-act tragicomedy, playing at the Ahmanson Theatre through October 18, is a sitcom and soap opera all in one.   Living in present-day Oklahoma, the three adult Weston daughters return home with their respective husbands, boyfriends and children because their alcoholic father has disappeared. The daughters are greeted by their pill-popping, self-pitying mother, who has mouth cancer, literally and figuratively. Resentments abound and family secrets are revealed.   Estelle Parsons, who won an Academy Award for her role in ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ gives a towering performance as the family’s matriarch, Violet. She delivers her lines venomously, striking her victims with insults. Her character, who suffered from an abusive childhood, inflicts the misery in her own heart upon everyone around her.   She tells her daughter that she looks like a ‘magician’s assistant’ in her pantsuit. When the family sits down for dinner and the men take off their suit jackets, she scolds them by saying, ‘I thought we were having a family dinner, not a cockfight.’   Shannon Cochran, as the eldest daughter, Barbara, skillfully portrays a woman standing on the brink. Her character begins the play poised and ready to hold the family together. Slowly, her mother’s antagonism and husband’s infidelity wear her down.   Also notable is Libby George, who is downright hilarious as Aunt Mattie Fae. Her character banters with her husband, complaining that he is just sitting around drinking beers and watching baseball, while her brother-in-law is missing. When he points out that she’s being hypocritical because she’s drinking straight whiskey, she indignantly responds, ‘I am having a cocktail.’   Bitterly sad and fiercely funny, Cochran’s character sums up the play’s premise: ‘Thank God we can’t tell the future, or we’d never get out of bed.’   Tickets: (213) 972-4400 or www.centertheatregroup.org.

Jerry and Helen Chapell of Byron, New York, are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Kara Heist, to Alan Bruns, son of longtime Pacific Palisades residents Bill and Pam Bruns.   Alan and Kara met in Seattle, where they currently work at Kellogg Middle School. Kara teaches special education and coaches track and field, while Alan teaches social studies and English and coaches volleyball. He’s also the varsity baseball coach at Shorecrest High School.   Born and raised in Byron, Kara attended the State University of New York at Fredonia prior to earning a master’s degree in special education teaching at Buffalo State. She moved to Seattle in 2004 after teaching for a year in the San Diego area.   Alan grew up in Pacific Palisades and graduated from PaliHi in 1991. He moved to Seattle, where he earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Washington and a master’s in teaching at Seattle University.   Kara and Alan will officially tie the knot in Seattle on October 24 along the shores of Lake Washington. They will honeymoon in Fiji.

Gray Adams, a resident of Pacific Palisades since 1982, married Hilary Anne Cosgrave in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada’s picturesque wine country, on September 13, 2008. Following the service at the Cathedral Church of Saint Michael and All Angels, the guests proceeded to the Harvest Golf Club for a reception overlooking Lake Okanagan and the beautiful vineyards of the Okanagan Valley. Gray is the son of Toby Adams Whitney and the late Jim Adams, and stepson of Lew Whitney. After attending Curtis School, St. Matthew’s Parish School and Loyola High School, Gray graduated with honors from the University of Arizona with a bachelor’s degree in operations management, entrepreneurship and management information systems. He earned a master’s degree in business administration from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He is currently the director of corporate development at Rentech, Inc., an alternative energy company headquartered in Westwood. A native of Kelowna, British Columbia, Hilary is the daughter of Julie and Bill Cosgrave. She earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at Concordia University in Montreal and a master’s degree in communications at McGill University, also in Montreal. She is currently a freelance public relations consultant. The couple resides in West Los Angeles.

Longtime Palisadians Whitney Bridge, daughter of Julie Dellinger and Stephen Bridge, and Caleb Rapoport, son of Mary and Chuck Rapoport, were married in a Brentwood garden at sunset on Sunday, September 6. Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben performed the ceremony.

The age of radio may be over, but Fake Radio continues to keep those old transistors burning in the form of live radio entertainment. Fake Radio will stage ‘The Philadelphia Story’, ‘The Lone Ranger’, and ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ throughout October at The Lost Studio in Los Angeles. Fake Radio, directed by David Koff and co-produced with Christopher Heisen, is a comedy troupe that re-creates radio broadcasts from the 1930s through ’50s onstage. ‘We read the genuine transcripts,’ says actor Christopher Heisen, a Pacific Palisades resident. ‘We also read the commercials. In October, Fake Radio will be joined by such special guests as Mindy Sterling (‘Austin Powers’), Carlos Alazraqui (‘Reno 911’), Deborah Wilson (‘MAD TV), and Tom Kenny (the voice of ‘SpongeBob Squarepants’). Since Fake Radio’s founding in 2000, numerous notable guest stars have appeared with the troupe including John Larroquette, Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin, Dean Cain, and Marcia Wallace. ‘I have lived in Pacific Palisades since 2004,’ says Heisen, formerly a resident of Venice. ‘My wife is Laura Diamond, and she’s a lifelong Palisadian. She grew up in two homes, both on Via de la Paz. She could walk to PaliHi from where she lived, but she admitted that she drove.’ Diamond’s parents, Fran and Roger Diamond, have been Palisadians for decades, and her sister, Marni Diamond, owned the store Spanky Lane on Via. ‘My son, Aaron, 8, attends Palisades Elementary,’ Heisen says. ‘We also has a son, Emmett, 5, who attends Kehlillat Israel Preschool.’ Heisen, a native Pennsylvanian, grew up in Yardley, Pennsylvania. He met his wife while attending the University of Pennsylvania and forged another important relationship there: Koff. ‘At Penn, I was a member of the Mask and Wig Club, the longtime comedy troupe,’ Heisen says. ‘David and I became best friends and spent all four years in this comedy troupe together. He moved out to L.A. I came out a few years later. He’s been involved in L.A. theater forever.’ Koff’s acting credits include ‘The West Wing’ and ‘Sesame Street’. Heisen can’t wait to team up once again with his old college buddy. ‘We’ve been having some turning-40 angst, and we both needed to connect again and work together creatively,’ says Heisen. ‘What we decided to do is try to take it to the next level.’ So Koff and Heisen rented out the Lost Studio at 130 S. La Brea Ave. for these latest shows. On Thursday nights, Oct 1, 8, 15 and 22, ‘Fake Radio’ presents ‘The Philadelphia Story,’ adapted from the romantic comedy starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. Fridays, Oct 2, 9, 16 and 23, will bring ‘The Lone Ranger,’ one of the longest-running radio shows in history. The troupe will perform the first episode, from 1933, and 1946’s ‘The Missing Heir.’ On Saturday nights, Oct. 3, 10, 17 and 24, it’s 1946’s ‘Meet Me in St. Louis,’ adapted from the Judy Garland film. Additionally, one episode of the 11-part, 1948 serial, ‘The Adventures of Superman: Batman’s Great Mystery,’ will be performed on each evening. ‘Our motto is ‘Old-time radio, just funnier,” Heisen says. ‘We stick to the book and then stray.’ Tickets are $20 per performance; $50 for all shows. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; shows run from 8 to 9:30 p.m. Street and valet parking available. Contact: 877-460-9774; www.fakeradio.net.

Like Activision’s Laird Malamed, Karin Gilford is a senior vice president for an entertainment company. In her case, it’s the Web site Fancast, an Internet destination created by Comcast. Comcast comprises three divisions: the cable/hi-speed data/phone-packaging entity; programming, which owns such channels as E!, G4, Style and Golf; and interactive media, which purchased Fandango (whose CEO, Chuck Davis, is also a Palisadian). On the day Gilford met with the Palisadian-Post, the executive is eagerly awaiting the season debut of the critically acclaimed Fox TV program ‘Glee,’ which Fancast will stream. ‘Comcast is the largest purchaser of entertainment content in the nation, probably the world,’ says Gilford, who gained her expertise and experience working for Yahoo Entertainment, where she created the OMG site. She notes ‘the major shift that happened in the TV industry,’ alluding to a change of habits among viewers, who now catch up with many of their favorite shows on their own time schedule either online or via a DVR. Fancast’s goal, says Gilford, is to become the dominant entertainment portal where people can catch up with such programming within hours after it airs. The idea is to not only prevent what happened with the music industry”the equivalent being YouTube users posting TV shows for free”but to counteract and capitalize on it by providing said shows and maximizing advertising possibilities. ‘The networks said, ‘Hey, we better throw our reins on this or the users will go to YouTube to watch this,” she says. Of course, online advertising rates do not even approach TV ad rates, and therein lies a major problem. However, the way Gilford sees it, the bread-and-butter Comcast package, with its subscription base, is the ‘mothership’ revenue-maker, which Fancast complements. ‘When I started at Fancast last year, we had 1 million unique users,’ Gilford says. ‘As of July 2009, we had 7 million. So that’s tremendous growth.’ ‘The Office’ and newbies ‘Modern Family’ and ‘FlashForward’ will follow ‘Glee’ onto Fancast.com. Full-length episodes of such shows stay up for a month. ‘Our site might feature a showrunner or a cast member on our live chats,’ Gilford says. ‘We’re getting fans one step closer to the talent on their favorite shows.’ What Fancast also offers is access, and that’s attractive to the networks’ marketing department, as is the synergy between Fancast and its parent company’s video-on-demand platform, which reaches 25 million subscribers. ‘Our multimedia assets can get a lot of reach over time,’ Gilford says. ‘And we skew higher with females. Our research shows that our audience is affluent and tech-savvy. We get a high amount of people who watch TV with their laptops.’ She says that traditional television outlets will never completely go away for a simple reason: ‘It’s a $35-billion business. Online advertising is never going to drive enough revenue. It’s a fraction of TV advertising. So inherently, there has to be some kind of payment model [such as a cable package bill] driving the industry. ‘To have an online site, your primary business is the mothership, so that better do well. And Comcast is,’ Gilford continues. ‘The Internet can’t handle sports streaming, the Super Bowl. People will never cut the cord [on traditional broadcast media].’ As a result of streaming episodes onto sites such as Hulu and the networks’ respective Internet portals, new patterns are emerging in viewers’ habits. Gilford uses ‘Lost’ as an example, a show that dipped in its third season, only to skyrocket in season four. ‘In the days of, say, ‘Twin Peaks,” she notes, ‘if you missed episodes, you were probably not inclined to stick with the show’s evolving story arc. But with old episodes archived online following their broadcast, it’s easier than ever for viewers to follow their favorite show on their own time.’ Gilford hails from Homer Township, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. At 19, she moved to California to attend Cal State Northridge. The reason she moved to L.A.? ‘I hated the winter. Living in Sherman Oaks [in January 1994] was the only time I thought I was going to die,’ she says of experiencing the Northridge earthquake. ‘My building was red-tagged.’ While attending USC Business School, Gilford interned at Paramount Studios and worked as a production assistant for Cineville, an independent film company best known for the well-received Hollywood-insider comeuppance tale, ‘Swimming with Sharks.’ But upon graduation, she took her MBA and joined Launch.com, a Santa Monica-based music Web site. ‘I never aspired to be an actress or a writer,’ Gilford says. ‘But I wanted to be a business person in a fun atmosphere. It was 2000, the Internet was red-hot. Everyone at Launch was under 35, wearing jeans, playing music, but really passionate and hard-working. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. ‘I became the first pregnant woman ever at Launch,’ adds Gilford, who was carrying her first child, Carson. Then the Internet bubble burst in 2001. Of the 360 people in-house, 60 people, including Gilford, survived Launch’s layoffs. In October 2001, Yahoo acquired Launch.com and Gilford was promoted. She ran business development for the Yahoo-held site, which was replaced with Yahoo Music by the time iTunes began taking off. Gilford had Sophie (today almost 5), her second child with husband Darren Gilford, a movie production designer who worked on Mike Judge’s ‘Idiocracy’ and the upcoming ‘Tron Legacy.’ ‘After two kids,’ she says, ‘I didn’t listen to music as much as I used to. I couldn’t go to shows. Instead, I was watching more TV and movies. Lloyd Braun of Yahoo Media Group brought me in to run Yahoo TV/Yahoo Movies.’ By the summer of 2006, celebrity gossip sites such as TMZ and Perez Hilton had become a rising trend. Gilford and her team developed OMG, which launched in June 2007, synergistically working with Yahoo News to cross-pollinate links and ads. Gilford’s goal was to merge an attractive home page with photos and readers’ comments. ‘The site took off like crazy. I like being where the action is,’ says Gilford, who joined Fancast in 2008. ‘I lived throughout the whole digital revolution.’ Now, she’s passionate about online TV. Like Malamed, Gilford lives within walking distance of the village. The Gilfords moved to Pacific Palisades in 2005 ‘because of the community atmosphere,’ she says. ‘It’s really about the people who live here.’ Such as her network of parent friends who mind each other’s kids. Gilford finds herself hitting the beach these days. ‘I’m a huge snowboarder but I’m learning to surf,’ she says. ‘I’ve always worked in Santa Monica. I’m really lucky. I’ve moved through three major entertainment categories, found balance with my home life and maintained a great work life.’

When we last met Laird Malamed, Activision’s senior vice president of production in charge of the blockbuster video game franchise ‘Guitar Hero,’ he was standing in line to meet ‘Star Trek’ movie-maker Nicholas Meyer (‘Filmmaker Meyer Signs Memoir,’ September 3). One week later, Malamed nurses a tea on the patio of a village coffeehouse, a short walk from his Pacific Palisades home, as he discusses his journey from growing up in Beverlywood to studying aerospace at MIT to working for George Lucas to his present role as ‘Guitar Hero’ guru. Activision launched its fifth ‘Guitar Hero’ game on September 1. Malamed’s father, Kenneth, a business entrepreneur, and his mother, Sandra, author of ‘The Jews in Early America: A Chronicle of Good Taste and Good Deeds,’ allowed Laird, at age 12, to get an Apple computer (a hot new product in 1980), on the condition he learned a computer program. Malamed got his Apple. ”Wrath of Khan’ is at the beginning of a chain of events that affected my life and led me to an entertainment career,’ Malamed tells the Palisadian-Post. Malamed majored in aerospace engineering at MIT but was turned off to the subject after a professor used the Challenger disaster as the basis of a problem set following the death of the space shuttle’s astronauts, which Malamed found callous and upsetting. ‘This isn’t for me,’ he recalls thinking. After graduating from MIT, he attended USC Film School and, two units shy of graduating, he received a call from George Lucas. The ‘Star Wars’ director was looking for a student who had computer experience and a passion for sound. Professor Thom Holman, creator of Lucas’ THX soundsystem, recommended Malamed, who moved to the Bay Area to work on Lucas’ TV program, ‘The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,’ as a sound editor. Living in Lakespur, he met his wife, Rebecca, a physician, and Justin, today his stepson and a biophysics student at Johns Hopkins University. After ‘Indiana,’ Malamed worked as a sound editor on such programs as ‘Walker, Texas Ranger’ and ‘Mad About You.’ But it was ‘Party of Five’ which pushed him over the edge in October 1994. He was working on an episode that involved a traffic scene. He recalls asking his supervisor if the scene before had rain or not, as that would affect whether to dub in a wet- or dry-surface walking sound. His supervisor instructed him to ‘put in both and we’ll figure it out in the mixing stage.’ Malamed realized his work was ‘a little too paint-by-numbers for me.’ ??Malamed commends Rebecca. ‘She was brave enough to let me follow my passion,’ he says of the decision to move to Los Angeles and work for Sony (and take a pay cut in the process). While at Sony, Malamed applied to Activision. It took 11 months for them to respond with an offer: ‘Muppets Treasure Island’ or ‘Zork Nemesis’? Two weeks later, Malamed was working on ‘Zork Nemesis,’ an update of a favorite text-based video game from childhood. T hree years ago, Malamed moved from supervising all of Activision’s product to concentrating on the ever-expanding GH franchise, which, since debuting in 2005, has sold more than 35 million units and is played in about 16 million homes. Malamed puts in long hours at work, but he shrugs it off because he loves what he does. ‘What keeps me at Activision is the people,’ he says. ‘They’re passionate, intelligent, funny, like-minded individuals.’ The history of ‘Guitar Hero’ is an interesting one. A small California-based company called RedOctane, which ran a video game-rental business, heard complaints from renters of the Japanese interactive game ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ because the accompanying floor mat to play the game was not provided. RedOctane’s founders, brothers Kai and Charles Huang, realized that their Taiwanese parents had access to a factory in China to manufacture the sensor-activated foot mats and began producing them with the blessing of ‘Dance”s parent company. After success on this front, RedOctane banded with developer Harmonix. The result was ‘Guitar Hero,’ which sold out so quickly in 2005, that RedOctane could not keep up with demand. By the time ‘Guitar Hero 2’ hit in 2006, Activision had acquired RedOctane. ‘Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock’ became the first of the series to be developed from beginning to end under Activision’s auspices (with Neversoft, which produced the Tony Hawk games). As a result of Activision’s major push, GH3 sold the best, clearing 11 million units and becoming the first console game to reach $1 billion in sales. Whereas the pop tunes on the previous two were re-recorded by other artists, GH3 included downloadable master recordings of the actual song versions. ‘Guitar Hero World Tour’ (GH4) continued to improve on the game, allowing for content packs that let gamers play alongside such groups as Aerosmith and Metallica. With GH5, the franchise takes a major leap with the ‘jump in, jump out’ technology, which allows gamers to bypass the usual menu steps and provides for multiple instrumentals and vocals. One does not have to know how to play an instrument to excel at GH, Malamed says: ‘If you can keep a rhythm, you’re playing the game correctly.’ ??Call Pacific Palisades ‘user-friendly’ when it comes to the video-game industry because numerous Activision employees live in the community. The Palisades was always in the Malameds’ thoughts, even as they lived in Cheviot Hills during the Sony days and in England, where Laird spent a year overseeing European production. But with real estate, timing is everything. ‘We didn’t have the vision or the financial wherewithal to be in the Palisades,’ he says. But upon returning from England in 2004, a determined Rebecca found their home. ‘We love being within walking distance of the village,’ he says. ‘You can walk to the restaurants. [In the Palisades], you leave the city behind, as if you’re in a haven.’ Malamed enjoys such town traditions as the Fourth of July Parade and the Palisades-Will Rogers Run. ‘This year, I got a picture with Rudy [Daniel Ruettiger]! I somehow got a lot more of Miss America, as my wife pointed out,’ he jokes. An avid runner, Malamed, who had competed on four continents, has done the Palisades 5K three years and counting. ‘Any race just a half-mile from my home, I have an obligation to run it.’ Malamed feels good on this sunny Thursday morning, but it’s not from running. The latest ‘Guitar Hero’ is selling well and garnering good reviews. It appears as if GH5 is holding up against rival brand ‘Rock Band,’ which last week received mega-attention for its new Beatles edition. As sales in the video game industry are tallied up monthly, the victor in the GH5 vs. ‘The Beatles: Rock Band’ war will not be evident until October [editor’s note: ‘Beatles: Rock Band’ sold 595,000 units in its first month while ‘Guitar Hero 5’ sold 499,000], but Malamed is confident that GH5 has more to offer, with its 83 artists and 85 songs and compatibility with previous GH editions. After tea, the conversation returns to exercise as Malamed walks a reporter to his office and continues home, where he will prepare for another day at the office, which, of course, is not just another day in the office for this video game-industry executive.