Bye Bye Birdees Travel Blog

The thought of what if...? What if we knew that today's technology would bring back memories so real we could almost touch them all over again?   The other night I was watching a well known African American Classic "Cooley High."  I remembered when the movie first appeared in the theaters, the story of two friends,  one destined for glory and the other intelligent but living for the day.  For the teens of my generation, having lived in a big city in Los Angeles we related to their good times and their struggles.  Mostly, the story was about a memory written, documented and shared.  When one of the main characters was killed, we empathized, felt the pain, relived the memory with the author. Fortunately, in real life the main characters are still alive and well. Using today's technology, I wiki'd on my tablet Cooley High to see what happened to the actor who played Cochise (Lawrence Hilton Jacobs).  Like all things in movies, he went on to a...

Alberto's Tamales Don't you just love " Hole in the Walls"?   It was New Year's Eve 2015, I took the Pacific Surfliner to LA Union Station arriving @ 9:00 a.m.    My son Alex was already in Los Angeles visiting with his girlfriend's family.  Our plan was that he would meet me in Los Angeles and we would head to my parents home to spend the holiday with them. As  I hopped into his car, Alex asked if I was hungry and where I wanted to go. I had eaten on the train, but I wanted to get some good old East Los Angeles holiday tamales.  I said," Let's get some tamales."   Alex was lukewarm, but I googled Yelp and looked for closer locations near the train station and we were headed towards Mac Arthur Park. We started driving on Temple street where we saw a building with Tamales painted on the side. We had no idea whether it was good or not, we simply judged whether we should stop by the people walking out the door with bags of tamales in thei...