Theatre Palisades held its 43rd annual meeting and awards show at Pierson Playhouse in late July. Members and guests enjoyed a buffet dinner under the trees outside the theater, and in the show that followed, they were entertained by performers from past and future productions. Thirty-five local kids gave a preview of ‘Forty-Second Street,’ which is the TP Kids musical that played last week. ‘Buddy Holly and the Crickets,’ along with local residents Martha Hunter and George Lissandrello, took us back a few years with their number from ‘The Buddy Holly Story,’ which will open at Theatre Palisades on August 18 and run through October 15. Palisadians Arnold Hofer, Ray Kerner, Bill Minderhout, and Monica Gilsanz were given Special Recognition Awards from the board of Theatre Palisades. Other residents receiving awards were Andrew Frew for lighting design for ‘All My Sons’; Bill Prachar for sound design for ‘All My Sons’; Dale Hale for graphic design for ‘Baby’; Joyce Gale Smith for costume design for ‘Plaza Suite’; Ashley Black for her cameo role in ‘Plaza Suite’; and Shirley Churgin as producer of ‘ All My Sons.’ Arthur Miller’s ‘All My Sons’ also received awards for lead actress, Joanna Churgin; featured actor, Steve Pierick; supporting actress, Dale Waddington Horowitz; and director, Sherry Coon. Other awards were given to Jack Winnick, lead actor in ‘Plaza Suite’; Steve Larkin, supporting actor in ‘Bad Seed’; Madison McCann, featured actress in ‘Bad Seed;’ and Sam Pitman, cameo in ‘Plaza Suite.’ Theatre Palisades’ Cristofer Cariello Award was presented to Sherman Wayne.

Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital Foundation (LAOHF) was selected by the Everychild Foundation as its sole 2006 grantee and will be awarded $925,000 to support the construction of a universally accessible playground. Children with crippling conditions will soon have an innovative new playground that provides a safe place to play, exercise and develop. It will be designed to accommodate children with wheelchairs, leg braces, crutches and other barriers that have previously left these special-needs children on the sidelines. Sensory-rich equipment will create a fun environment where children with disabilities can interact with their able-bodied friends and siblings. ‘The playground will be built on Orthopaedic Hospital’s downtown campus, but will be open to the community. There is a tremendous need for a place where children of all abilities can interact, and this playground will be used by more children in a single year than any other universally accessible playground in the nation,’ said Mary Schmitz, Ph.D., president of the LAOHF. Everychild Foundation’s members are a group of Westside women devoted to making a meaningful difference for children in need. Each member commits $5,000 annually to a project with tangible results. This year, the Foundation reached its goal of 200 members having brought in 40 new members to the organization. The Foundation targets one nonprofit organization each year and funds a project that helps children facing disease, abuse, neglect, poverty, or disability. Past projects include mobile dental clinics, 15 Wonder of Reading Libraries, Everychild Foundation Center for the Vulnerable Child at the Violence Intervention Program, the Optimist Youth Home’s new learning center, and the new Hillsides ‘Youth Moving On’ program to house and mentor aged-out foster youth. ‘Our mission has been to ease the suffering of local children due to disease, disability, abuse, neglect or poverty,’ Founder and Director Jackie Caster said. ‘And with this playground grant to the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital, we will have brought Everychild to a new level, in that we will have completely touched on all aspects of our mission. ‘The grant for the construction of this playground will benefit pediatric patients, their siblings, and children from the entire community for years to come. It will be a secure recreational environment where children with disabilities can play like other children and will serve as a model for other similar projects,’ said Caster, a Palisades resident. Since it was founded in 1999, Everychild Foundation has awarded more than $3.5 million to fund innovative projects for children. Selection of an organization to receive the funding is done by a majority vote of the Everychild Foundation membership. With funding for grants that comes directly from the members, the Foundation is able to create valuable resources in the most needed communities in Los Angeles. For nearly a century, Orthopaedic Hospital has been helping children afflicted with crippling conditions lead healthy, active lives, regardless of their families’ ability to pay. In a partnership with UCLA, a new inpatient hospital and residency program for orthopaedic surgery is being built in Santa Monica (opening late 2007) and the new Orthopaedic Hospital Research Center will be the largest and most sophisticated musculoskeletal research facility in the world (opening summer 2006 on the UCLA campus).

BRETT AUERBACH-LYNN, son of Bart Lynn and Beverley Auerbach, will begin studies for his doctorate in history at the UC Berkeley, beginning in August. His specialty is early modern Italian history, and the university has offered him a five- to seven-year fellowship in pursuit of his degree. Brett previously earned his B.A. from Berkeley with high distinction in general scholarship, which included a third year abroad at the Universit’ di Bologna. He graduated from Berkeley with a joint major in Italian (May 2004) and history (December 2004), winning departmental citations from both departments as the highest-scoring student. His undergraduate thesis for the history department, “Illusions and Delusions of Grandeur: The Politics of Grand Duke Ferdinand I d’ Medici (1549-1609)” was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Berkeley Library Prize for Undergraduate Research. Brett’s early education was from Palisades Elementary, Paul Revere Middle School, and Pali High. He has just returned from a year spent living in Bologna, where he was teaching English to Italians. o o o JEFFREY STECKMEST, son of Larry and Marie Steckmest, was named to the dean’s list at the College of William and Mary for the spring 2006 semester. o o o ALYSSA TENNANT, daughter of Debbie Francis Tennant of Pacific Palisades and John Tennant of Ojai, received the Thacher Cup, awarded annually to the Thacher School senior who best embodies “academic excellence, extracurricular achievement, moral leadership and concern for others.” Alyssa was 2006 class president at Thacher, a coeducational boarding school in Ojai. She was part of the history-making girls’ soccer team that went to the quarter-finals of CIF-SS Division VI this year, and served as captain of the girls’ lacrosse team. A horse lover, she was a member of the polo team through high school. This fall, Alyssa will enter Stanford University, where she is considering a career in science. Alyssa is a graduate of St. Matthew’s Parish School. o o o WILFORD EITEMAN-PANG, ELEANOR T. PHILLIPS, and JENNIFER J. YOUNG, were awarded college-sponsored merit scholarships based on their high performance on the PSAT/NMSQT. Each received his or her reward from a different university: Eiteman-Pang from Arizona State University, Phillips from USC and Young from Northwestern University. o o o SHELBY PASCOE, daughter of Sue and John Pascoe, was named a United States National Award Winner in Student Council from the The United State Achievement Academy. She attends Paul Revere Middle School. o o o JENNIFER R. CRON was named to the dean’s list at Northwestern University for the winter quarter of the 2005-2006 academic year. She is a student in the School of Communication. o o o CAITLIN TORTORICI, daughter of Peter and Susan Tortorici, played Becky Two-Shoes in the Whitman College’s production of Urinetown. Caitlin, who will be a sophomore in the fall, is a graduate of Crossroads School. o o o BERIT E. AUERBACH-LYNN, TAYLOR BRADLEY and ALEXANDRA P. KALINOWSKI were named to the dean’s list at Boston University for the spring semester.

From their anchorage at the southern end of Rindja Island in Indonesia, they watched Komodo Dragons, as long as broomsticks, parade up and down the beach. At dawn and dusk, it was monkeys. Deer and pigs also appeared…all within a couple of hundred feet from where Lawrence (Laurie) Pane sat with his wife, Carole Wells, and 9-year-old son, Ryan, on the deck of their 53-ft. sailboat. That was the fall of 1997, ‘Year Two’ of their six-and-a-half-year circumnavigation. And their adventures were just beginning. They had yet to discover hidden Roman mosaics in Turkey and walk under Angel Falls in Venezuela. The three-person crew’a middle-aged couple and a third grader’was not your average sailing team. In fact, Carole, an elementary school teacher, was prone to seasickness and new to traveling outside the United States. She and Laurie had met just two years earlier when he answered a personal ad she placed in the Los Angeles Times; he was a widowed father of a six-year-old child, and she was divorced with no children. Their relationship as a family was just beginning when they set sail from Marina del Rey in March 1996. The three-way partnership they developed on board and a good-humored but firm system of rules for living on and off the boat enabled them to travel safely and sanely around the world. ‘My advice to people who want to go cruising is: If you don’t have a kid, go rent one,’ says Laurie, a tall Australian with an accent as playful as his sense of humor. ‘Kids are the greatest ambassadors you can have; they get us to places we wouldn’t have dreamed of getting into or being taken to if we were by ourselves.’ Sailing around the globe was a dream that Laurie and his late wife, Patricia Mulryan, had shared and planned for since Ryan was a baby. An experienced boatman, Laurie had grown up fishing on the coral reefs off North Queensland and, later, racing catamarans in the Brisbane River and Moreton Bay. He and Patricia went on bareboat charters, principally in Tonga and the Whitsunday Islands. Ryan’s first sailing trip was a three-week charter in the Whitsundays when he was less than a year old. The couple, who lived in the Palisades Highlands, had even purchased the ‘Dolphin Spirit,’ a 1987 Mason 53 center cockpit cutter built and equipped for extended offshore cruising. When Patricia died after a two-year battle with cancer, Laurie focused intently on making their dream a reality for himself and for Ryan. Under Laurie’s guidance, Carole learned to sail, and she became an enthusiastic partner in the planning of their circumnavigation. They took classes in ‘medicine at sea’ as well as weather forecasting, sail repair, engine maintenance, refrigeration and navigation, among others. ‘A lot of planning goes into it,’ Laurie says, adding that weather- and season-related schedules had to be kept. ‘You have to be out of the South Pacific around November through March because that’s the cyclone season. The proper time to go up the Red Sea is January and February. You can only cross the Atlantic Ocean between November and February because you’ve got to miss the hurricane season.’ The ‘Dolphin Spirit’ became their mobile home, with three staterooms (two of which were Ryan’s territory) as well as a salon, galley and navigation station below deck. The boat was equipped with all the comforts of a house, including three televisions, three computers, a microwave, a blender, refrigeration, hot and cold running water, and even a washer and dryer. They also had a desalinator capable of turning 20 gallons of seawater into drinking water in an hour. ‘The cruising life is really quite special in a number of ways,’ Laurie says. ‘One is, you are very self-sufficient’you look out for yourself, you generate your own electricity, you make your own water, you’ve got to go out and shop locally, you do your own maintenance. If you get sick of a particular place, within reason, you can pick up anchor and move to another.’ In order to assure they would not get bored during long passages, they packed 183 videotapes to watch, 318 CDs to listen to and more than 200 books to read. Ryan became a master fisherman and a certified scuba diver while on board. Other than ‘first mate,’ Carole’s most important role on the boat was that of Ryan’s primary teacher in the maritime classroom they created. ‘I’m very structured, and Ryan had schooling every day,’ says Carole, who created her own curriculum after using the Calvert School system for the first year. ‘We totaled up his hours so that when he had a certain number, he earned his vacation days.’ Part of Ryan’s education was to learn some of the language, geography, history and culture of each country he visited. He learned to draw while sketching Roman ruins in Turkey, mastered playing ‘F’r Elise’ on the keyboard while crossing the Indian Ocean, became fluent in Spanish during a winter in Spain and studied Shakespeare’s ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ in Verona. ‘By the time we got to the Caribbean, Ryan was doing all the talking on the telephone and on the radio with people who were speaking Spanish,’ Carole says. ‘He did all the translating for us. He speaks much better Spanish than I’ve ever spoken.’ To separate the parent and teacher roles, they developed a charade in which Ryan would formally say ‘goodbye’ to his parents and greet his teacher (Carole) and principal (Laurie). After school he ‘went home’ and reported to his parents on the day’s activities. ‘It was sort of a matter of survival to get along,’ Ryan says about living and studying on the boat with his family. The experience ‘forced me into developing a lot more than I would have otherwise. I was just alone with adults and it made me mature.’ Ryan says the most challenging aspect of life at sea was ‘probably the lack of interaction with my peers,’ because he would meet other children his age about every three months and then have to say ‘goodbye.’ However, when he returned home at age 15, he found the classroom environment to be ‘sort of an impediment to learning.’ When Ryan, now entering his sophomore year at UC Santa Barbara, tried to learn Japanese in college, he felt the other students were a little distracting. S ailing at less than six knots most of the time, they covered 40,000 miles and visited 56 countries. It took them 19 days to cross the South Pacific (the first leg of their journey) and they only saw four boats during the entire passage. One of the ships was a fishing trawler changing direction to miss colliding with the ‘Dolphin Spirit’ when they were just two days from the Marquesas Islands, their first stop. From French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Tonga and Fiji, they sailed to Australia, where they spent about six months before heading up through Indonesia to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, then across to Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Wanting to get away from modern life, they tried to stay out of the big cities, traveling instead to areas like the north part of Flores Island in Indonesia and Suakin, Sudan. ‘We have one major rule when getting off the boat,’ Laurie says, referring to etiquette in dealing with local people. ‘It is their country, their customs, their language. You either do it the way they do it or you go somewhere else. You do not complain about the way it’s done.’ This philosophy was especially relevant during the sometimes long and tedious process of going through immigration and customs in the various ports. ‘In the Sudan, for example, you have to have an agent,’ Laurie says. ‘An agent basically takes you through the process of entering the country and you pay him for that privilege.’ However, when they ventured from Suakin to Port Sudan, the nearest big city, for ‘the best milkshakes in Africa,’ they were arrested by the Secret Police, supposedly for ‘taking pictures of military things.’ They later found out it was because their driver had not paid the appropriate fee at one of the police checkpoints. Another close call came out at sea when they were approaching Israel and missed a check-in phone call to the Israeli navy. ‘We were being circled by an Israeli gunboat,’ he says. ‘As soon as we got into the port, two officials came on board and opened every single locker in the boat checking for bombs.’ For most of their journey, they traveled with a small but diverse group of other cruisers’Texans, Canadians and Swedes’whom they first linked up with in Bora Bora in July 1996. This company proved particularly helpful when traveling up the Malacca Straits in Malaysia, which have a reputation for pirates. They journeyed up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean, spending their first winter (November 1998) in Antalya, Turkey. Their second winter layover was in Barcelona. They crossed the Atlantic and sailed down to Trinidad, Venezuela and Colombia, through the Panama Canal and then back to San Diego, ‘proving the world was round because we kept pointing in the one direction and we ended up back where we started,’ Laurie says with a smile. They were in Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela in the Caribbean, on September 11, 2001. ‘We just happened to be in a harbor where we were able to get television reception,’ says Carole, whose mother called from the States to tell them what was happening. ‘We saw it all. We were wondering, at first, ‘Should we be going home?” ‘We kept going,’ Laurie adds. ‘The world didn’t change after 9/11. Americans’ view of the world changed, but the world didn’t change. The only places that we had to chain our dingy to the boat was in the Caribbean and in Mexico. In all of the Islamic countries’Indonesia, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Malaysia’we locked the boat but we never took special precautions, never felt unsafe, never even came close to feeling unsafe.’ Laurie says he would set off today and sail the same route all over again, with the exception of the Red Sea. The larger concern, to him, is that people don’t care about what they experienced. ‘There are three questions people ask when they hear that we’ve been cruising,’ Laurie says. ‘The first is: Did you have any bad weather? And we say, ‘No.’ ‘Did you strike any pirates?’ ‘No.’ And the third questions is: ‘What about them Dodgers?’ People are just not all that interested.’ ‘Except that they love the book,’ Carole adds, referring to ‘Chasing Sunsets: A Practicing Devout Coward’s Circumnavigation with His Wife and Son,’ written from all three of their perspectives. They published it in 2005, three years after they completed their circumnavigation. ‘I take a great deal of pride in the fact that we sailed all the way around the world and we never had sustained winds at sea over 35 knots,’ Laurie says, explaining the title of the book. His advice to people thinking about sailing around the world is ‘Live the dream.’

‘Practicing ‘mindfulness,’ in as many moments as possible, is truly the secret to experiencing an ecstatic life,’ says Brooke Nachazel, a certified massage therapist and yoga teacher who grew up in Pacific Palisades. ‘Mindfulness means waking up and living in harmony with oneself and with the world. It enables us to appreciate fully each moment that we are alive. Both yoga and massage therapy encourage us to pay attention to the present moment, nonjudgmentally. It is a way to take charge of the direction and quality of our lives, including the relationship within our families, our work, our planet, and most fundamentally, the relationship with oneself ‘ Nachazel says. She is currently employed as a massage therapist at Jiva Yoga Studio on Sunset and teaches yoga at Yoga Desa in Topanga Canyon. Nachazel developed her passion for the healing arts while studying at UC Santa Cruz. After earning her bachelor’s degree in modern literature in 2003, she continued her studies at Twin Lakes College of the Healing Arts in Santa Cruz, where she received her certification in massage therapy. She also pursued additional training in deep-tissue massage at the McKinnon Institute of Massage Therapy in Berkeley. Nachazel has practiced massage therapy for the last three years in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Berkeley. She also has been a dedicated yoga practitioner for six years, and has studied with a variety of teachers. She currently studies and practices yoga with Hala Khouri in Venice. Trained in providing traditional Swedish massage, deep tissue massage, prenatal massage and Thai massage, Nachazel particularly enjoys working with women of all ages. She tailors her sessions to fit the individual needs of her clients. Below are her descriptions of the different types of massage she uses: ‘ Swedish massage is a nurturing and healthy modality. Among its many benefits, massage increases the supply of fresh nutrients to the tissues, aids in the elimination of toxins, improves muscle tone, increases range of motion, and calms nervous tension. Swedish massage offers a variety of fluid and sweeping motions on the surface of the skin. ‘ Deep-tissue massage can be very effective in altering structure and muscle restrictions in specific areas. A massage should never consist of entirely deep work. Deep-tissue techniques are intended to be used when the need arises, perhaps several times during a massage. It is as if you are driving on a country road and must slow down and downshift to a more powerful gear when encountering difficult hills or sharp curves. Once clients are accustomed to the benefits of deep-tissue work, many prefer it because of the increased degree of relaxation and the alleviation of pain. Deep-tissue massage also has the detoxifying and cleansing benefits that Swedish massage offers. ‘ Prenatal massage can help prepare for an easier delivery. Massage stimulates glandular secretions, thereby stabilizing hormone levels and making their side effects less severe. Massage to the legs can help control varicose veins, and the draining effect of massage facilitates reduction of edema to the extremities. An increase in general circulation offers a rise of blood to all areas of the body, including the placenta. This brings greater nutrition to the tissues of the body and enhances waste product removal. The lymphatic system circulates faster and more efficiently with prenatal massage. The result is more energy and less fatigue for the mother. Massage helps sedate the nervous system, facilitating much needed rest and relaxation. In utero, the baby also feels the benefits of the mother’s massage. Frazzled nerves are lovingly soothed, and insomnia can be relieved. Brooke has a special set of body support cushions specifically designed for pregnant women. She loves working with women during this transformational, exciting time. ‘ Traditional Thai massage is over 2,500 years old. It is often said that ‘If the mother is yoga, then the daughter is Thai massage,’ because many positions of Thai massage are related to specific yoga postures. Thai sessions are done on a shiatsu mat on the floor, with the client wearing loose clothing. Rocking and rhythm are key elements in Thai massage. The meditative flow is kept through breathing deeply, rocking rhythmically, repeating patterns, passive stretches and pressure points. Thai massage is also commonly referred to as a ‘dancing meditation’ for both the practitioner and the client. Nachazel’s love of dance, a variety of music, and the martial arts influence her teaching style, and her classes flow to music that ranges from soft and ambient sound, to upbeat tribal rhythms with flute and drums. She strives to make her students feel comfortable in her classes, regardless of age or experience. ‘Everyone needs to carve out a little time for themselves, where you can escape the challenges and stresses of a busy life,’ says Nachazel, who has studied Ashtanga, Anusara and Iyengar yoga. ‘Yoga and massage therapy provide opportunities for deep relaxation and mindful focus on the breath and the body, which enable students and clients to feel relaxed, refreshed, focused and energized. When we care enough about ourselves to commit to a practice of self-care, we create a beauty that surpasses the superficial kind. The beauty that we create in these modalities is about spirit, and everything else radiates from that center.’ Nachazel’s yoga classes are Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at Yoga Desa in Topanga (www.yogadesa.com). Massage-therapy appointments can be made with Jiva by calling 454-7000. She is also available for local house calls (women only), for private yoga lessons and/or massage therapy sessions; call 774-7469 or e-mail brooke@theory.org for appointments or questions. (Brooke Nachazel attended Corpus Christi School and graduated from Marymount High School.)

Days before Easter 2001, Michelle Hackbarth reckoned she’d be gone by the end of September. The Palisades resident is not a clairvoyant, she was just being realistic, having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States. ‘I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach; I’d hit rock bottom,’ Michelle says, describing her reaction she felt when she heard the diagnosis. During the previous two years the normally high-energy, fully engaged mother and teacher had been feeling increasingly tired. The thyroid problem, backache and indigestion signaled a number of ailments for her doctor, but not pancreatic cancer. Had it not been for the fact that Michelle’s cousin Gary Macdonald had died of the same disease in 1994, just six months after being diagnosed, her diagnosis might have been delayed longer. Although only about 10 percent of pancreatic cancer cases are familial, that information was enough for local physician Dr. Julie Ma to order a CAT scan. Again, in a sort of bitter turn-of-luck, because Michelle’s tumor was the size of an orange, the scan identified it. The diagnostic is useless for tumors smaller than a dime. The drama accelerated as diagnosis led to finding the right specialists, to developing a plan, and, finally, to treatment. ‘That’s when Dennis (Michelle’s husband) became very proactive,’ Michelle says, grateful for his tenacity in navigating the medical bureaucracy. While time was critical and the urgency crucial, the family were not afforded any special treatment. ‘It was Good Friday and we wanted to be fitted into the surgeon’s schedule, but the receptionist was not moved,’ Michelle recalls. ”I don’t care who this woman knows, you’ll have to wait your turn,’ the receptionist said.’ The frustrating and heartbreaking fact about pancreatic cancer is that it is not easily discovered. ‘If doctors could catch it six months sooner, they could reduce the mortality significantly,’ according to Elizabeth Flynn, communications managers for Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCan). Founded in 1999, PanCan is a national nonprofit advocacy organization that focuses attention on finding a cure for the disease by embracing the urgent need for more research, effective treatments, prevention programs and early detection methods. ‘The grim statistics about survivability equate pancreatic cancer for many with a death sentence,’ Michelle says. ‘Doctors tend to send you home, tell you to take care of your matters and that’s that. Approximately 33,730 people will be diagnosed with the disease this year in the United States and 32,300 will die.’ PanCan says it doesn’t have to be that way, according to Michelle, who is a grassroots advocacy leader for the the organization in the Western United States. ‘Research is showing strong promise, which may not cure the disease but will stall the progress and increase longevity,’ Flynn adds. ‘There are also advances in palliative care and diet and nutrition.’ Treatment for Michelle is really no different from what it has been for the past 25 years, Flynn says. ‘The drugs are pretty much the same ones that we were using then.’ Michelle’s treatment was powerful and so debilitating for six months that she was moved to the hospital two times. Her oncologist Dr. Peter Boasberg developed a protocol that Michelle could tolerate that included a course of oral and intravenous chemotherapy for six months. From the middle of May to the fourth of July, the tumor had shrunk from the size of an orange to a grape. Having rid her body of the cancer, Michelle was then offered the option of having what is known as the Whipple surgery’removing either the entire pancreas or a portion of it. ‘Dr. Reber (Hackbarth’s surgeon) said to me that to him I seemed like somebody who would always regret it if they had not had the surgery and the tumor came back.’ She now lives with two-thirds of her pancreas. Hackbarth has been clear of her cancer for 5-1/2 years, years in which she saw her two sons, Michael (29) and Keith (23) mature into young men, and years to reflect on the illness that redirected her life. There are no links between pancreatic cancer and lifestyle, except for the increased risk for smokers. But Michelle has pinpointed stress as having contributed to her susceptibility. She has returned to teaching math to 6th, 7th and 8th graders at Hawthorne School in Beverly Hills, but part-time. She is walking, eating with intention and drinking herbal teas, instead of her former ‘daily pot of coffee.’ But in her heart, she believes that being alive has prompted her to reach out to others and to be an advocate for those who are the least able to cope with the practical, emotional and spiritual immensity of the disease. ‘I feel that I am alive because I have a purpose, which is to give other people hope,’ Michelle says. As a PanCan Pal, Michelle is paired with a pancreatic cancer patient, their family and health professionals. In her advocacy work, she will be engaged in public speaking, media interviews, and raising public awareness by lobby for additional funding. With so many devastating diseases all seeking limited federal dollars, building awareness and offering hope is the challenge. ‘The key for PanCan is to clarify and demystify the disease,’ Flynn says. For more information about PanCAN, its programs and research initiatives, refer to the Web site www.pancan.org, call Michelle at 454-3113 or e-mail her at mhackbarth@pancan.org.

An unassuming office sits perched above the green-and-black awnings of the 26 Beach Caf’ on Washington Boulevard in Marina del Rey. Though only several rooms large, the office houses one of Southern California’s most prominent environmental advocacy groups: the Santa Monica Baykeeper. ‘We’re a very lean organization with a very small staff, our budget is not huge, and yet we’ve taken on some pretty big characters and prevailed,’ says Tracy Egoscue, Baykeeper executive director, referring to the group’s legal efforts. ‘We have a really great impact for the amount of resources that it’s taken us to do it.’ Indeed, the group has won a number of large and significant settlements, including a $2-billion ruling against the City of Los Angeles in 2004 for illegal sewage spills. As part of the settlement, the City has started a 10-year program that seeks to repair the dilapidated sewer system. While a settlement of such magnitude may seem grand for an organization with only seven full-time employees, court battles are not Baykeeper’s only business. In addition to legal wrangling, there is also the flagship Kelp Restoration Project, a hands-on program to regrow kelp forests off the Southern California coast, and the storm-drain pollution-monitoring program, Beachkeeper. Founded in 1993, the Santa Monica Baykeeper is one of more than 120 members of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a coalition of local Waterkeeper and Baykeeper programs throughout the world. Each Waterkeeper organization champions local water-quality issues within the framework of the Clean Water Act of 1977, as well as local environmental legislation. Egoscue ‘ known informally as the ‘Baykeeper’ ‘ is a San Diego native and former Deputy Attorney General with the California Department of Justice. Though she is a natural choice to lead an advocacy organization such as Baykeeper, the group has surprisingly eclectic roots. Started by Terry Tamminen, author of ‘The Ultimate Pool Maintenance Manual,’ and a former aspiring Shakespearean actor, sheep rancher and now Special Advisor to the Governor for Energy and Environmental Policy, Baykeeper began as a one-man operation with Tamminen patrolling the Santa Monica harbor on his boat. ‘Terry literally used to write tickets to polluters,’ Egoscue says. ‘Not a legal thing, but he would have a date and would write the violation, and he’d hand it to the violator from his boat when he saw someone dumping sewage or trash. ‘He did a lot of outreach and trying to educate the public by himself,’ she added. I boarded Baykeeper’s boat this past Tuesday with Tom Ford, director of the Kelp Restoration Project. As we rode the waves from the Baykeeper’s home base in the Marina del Rey harbor up the coast to Pacific Palisades, Ford spoke about his own interest in marine biology. ‘Growing up in Pennsylvania I was hundreds of miles from the ocean, but I was always fascinated with Jacques Cousteau on TV,’ he says. ‘I always loved the water, I was always swimming. Once I saw the ocean in high school, I was hooked.’ Passing through the Marina’s entrance channel, Ford motions to a group of men fishing off the rocks lining the Ballona Creek. ‘These guys here, hanging out and fishing in the Marina is part of their culture: go down there, catch some fish, bring some home, feed the family. But man, what kind of toxic burden do those guys have? Swimmable, fishable waters ‘ that’s what the Clean Water Act directs us to.’ Enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act is central to the group’s mission. While Congress originally passed the statute as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act in 1972, it became known as the Clean Water Act as amended in 1977 and sets numerous standards for regulating the discharge of pollutants.. Back at the office, staff attorney Dana Palmer, who along with Egoscue constitutes Baykeeper’s legal wing, spoke to me about issues facing the group in its legal endeavors. ‘Water-quality legislation is particularly confusing. In California, the clean-water laws predate the federal laws, and a lot of what we’ve seen in our lifetime is trying to make sense of both state and federal clean-water law. Whenever there’s a legal conflict, one side can take advantage of that to create confusion.’ Despite these conflicts, the group has been generally successful in court and, in fact, their legal muscle is a point of pride. ‘A lot of environmental groups are soft and cuddly like the animals on their Web sites,’ Ford says. ‘The Baykeeper, though, is not afraid to say, ‘We asked nicely several times and we’re not asking nicely anymore. Straighten out or we’ll bring a lawsuit against you.” As we rode up the coast, Ford also explained the Kelp project itself: among other things, how the Santa Monica Bay has lost between 70 and 80 percent of its kelp beds due to pollution and overfishing. Sea urchins are central to the problem. Allowed to procreate unchecked due to overhunting of their natural predators, the urchins consume kelp forest at an alarming rate. ‘We’ve lost the California sea otter, which used to live all the way down through Baja and ate sea urchin by the bushel,’ Ford says. ‘Those guys were hunted out in the 1850s. Lobster is another sea urchin predator, but they are now both recreationally and commercially sought after, and their numbers and sizes are dramatically limited due to those fishing pressures.’ ‘We’re trying to reset the ecological balance by thinning the density of urchins. What has been 13 to 15 [urchins] per square meter is now down to one or two per square meter, which is the index of how many would normally be there.’ Ford added that the group has thus far relocated between 70 and 80 thousand urchins over the rocky coastline of the Santa Monica Bay. While Ford says moving them to a location where they could not eat kelp at all would be ideal, the Department of Fish and Game, ‘mandates that we distribute them that way in the interest of the sea urchin harvesters.’ Though the project is almost overwhelming in scale, Ford speaks optimistically about progress. ‘We’ve had a kelp canopy form from just an inch tall all the way to 40 feet within about eight months,’ he says. ‘The kelp beds are a biogenic media, a living structure that provides lots of nooks and crannies to live in, and we see the fish respond very rapidly.’ In the water, much as in the courtroom, Baykeeper is a force to be reckoned with. ‘All of our divers are volunteers. We spend about 350 hours underwater every year ‘ two or three dive trips per week when conditions allow. A lot of environmental issues seem very imposing, but then we get people out there and they realize they can make a difference.’ This same mentality of volunteerism and public involvement also appears in Baykeeper’s other major program, Beachkeeper. Headed by Carlos Carreon, a three-year Baykeeper employee, Beachkeeper was started in 1995. ‘Our main program is monitoring the storm drains that empty into Santa Monica Bay,’ Carreon explains. ‘At the foundation of this program are our volunteers. We’ve sectioned Santa Monica Bay ‘ 44 miles of coastline ‘ into partitions, which our volunteers then walk once a month to observe water flow and collect samples, which they then send to us. ‘We try to limit pollution that deters kelp from regrowing,’ he added. When asked about the relationship among the Baykeeper’s three-pronged operations ‘ legal efforts, monitoring, and restoration ‘ Palmer characterized the organization ‘more as a circle: it’s a continuum.’ ‘The Kelp project, that’s restoring the environment. And here, what we’re doing is helping clean the water [through legal efforts]. Then Carlos’ program, the Beachkeeper, is this intermediate step, a watchdog check on the government and the legislation.’ Ford, for one, seemed pleased with the uniqueness of his job. ‘Most of the time, we’re out there and there’s nobody else. In the midst of Los Angeles and all of these socio-issues, I get to go out there and be like, wow, there are seven million people right over there and here I am in my little space.’