well, you're in the wrong place.

This has been sitting in my drafts for longer than it should have. I’m ashamed to post this, as it’s so incomplete and lacking in words, but I want to share the last time I saw Lisa with you.

I cannot wrap my head around what’s happened over the past few days. I’ve gone from numb to sadness to anger to confusion, and back again.

As some of you know, Dr. Lisa Kelly passed away unexpectedly. I haven’t known her for very long; at the most maybe a bit over two years.

The hardest part of her passing is that I had dinner with her the night before it happened. She was the picture of perfect health, and it seems beyond cruel that she was taken from us like this.

Our dinner together was over a year in the making. We’d been talking about getting together for a girls’ night for what seemed like forever, but trying to find a free moment in both of our schedules was tricky. And then, like magic, we suddenly settled on having dinner on Wednesday at Osteria La Buca (her choice). Her message to me about the place: “[it] has the most amazing flat bread pizza. I’ll break my diet for it.”

I was excited about this. My work day was a long one, and I was looking forward to unwinding with her over a cocktail. She looked absolutely adorable when she came in and I felt a little bit shabby next to her. She was wearing a red dress with a short jacket; I was wearing jeans and a shirt (my only saving grace was that I’d thrown on some eyeliner and eye shadow beforehand). We hugged, sat down, and kept the girl chat flowing: dating, shoes, the gym, and nothing in particular. We probably only stopped talking in between sips of wine or bites of food.

We said goodnight to each other and headed home. She headed east and I went south. I’d never have even guessed that would be the last time I’d see her.

I’m still in shock. There’s a lot I’m trying to come to terms with. I’ve replayed that evening over and over in my mind, trying to see if there was any hint that something was wrong.

This woman worked with babies and volunteered to go to places like Haiti and Mongolia to help save lives. This is a woman who practically told cancer twice that it wasn’t going to keep her from doing what she loved. This is a woman who found time in her life to sit down and have dinner with me.

So that happened.

I knew that a lot of crazy things were going to happen during my three weeks in Vegas, but nothing prepared me for this event: all fifty-one contestants (District of Columbia was her own entity, not Puerto Rico) would be hula-hooping in Chinese Laundry-brand wedges at the Miracle Mile Shops with Richard Simmons. There may have been a chance that it was listed on the schedule a few days before the shoot, but after multiple schedule changes, anyone’s guess was as good as mine.

How do you prepare for an encounter with Richard Simmons when you’re running on fumes? You get coffee, in any form. I decided to go with an iced coffee, Vietnamese-style:

So I fell off the face of the planet for a few weeks, but it was all for a good cause: I had three weeks of work in Las Vegas.

What the hell was I working on in Vegas? Something that involved fifty-one girls, sashes, sponsors, and general chaos wherever we went:


By luck, I was recommended by a friend for this job as a Production Assistant. I became part of the team that gave the audience a glimpse of what the girls did for fun prior to the pageant. It was crazy, exhausting, and a lot of fun. (I’m still trying to recover energy to just even scrape together this post for you.)

I had to wait until the whole production was over, but I did manage to grab some shots behind the scenes on my phone. All can be found here.

Most insane moment during the entire gig? Being in a room with Richard Simmons and fifty-one girls, all of them hula-hooping.

Since Scoops has opened a location on the Westside, I’ve been trying to pace myself with my visits. I went for the first time last week after reading a few rave reviews on Twitter and was pleased to see that their ice cream was indeed worth the hype.

So today, on my day off, what better way to kill time and get a shot in for my Year of Photos project?

My New Year has started off with a nightmare. I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad sign, or if it’s a sign of the future apocalypse that will happen in 2012. Much of it was too scary to mention (I’m sleeping with a light on tonight), but the part that was most disturbing to me: my grandpa came back as a zombie. He didn’t have the decayed look of a movie zombie – in fact, he looked pretty much as I last saw him. What gave him away was that he was walking stiffly, holding his head to the left (kinda like the opening part of the zombie dancers in “Thriller”).

I’m guessing this was his way of complaining that I haven’t been to visit his grave recently.

The worst part of the dream is that the zombies were able to multiply with both living AND dead people. I’m still trying to figure out if there’s meaning behind this, or if it’s a sign that falling asleep while watching old Woody Allen movies is a definite no-no.