I swore I’d be more prepared if it ever happened again. Who was I kidding?

I think it’s time to come to terms with what I have always considered a very serious flaw. I’m not a planner. And anyone who knows me would say that’s a gross (in every sense of the word) understatement.

I don’t organize my underwear drawer, I don’t have any idea where my marriage license is, and there are days when I dread having to open the mail. And when it comes to an actual crisis — like the wildfires blazing at this very moment a couple of miles north — I just get paralyzed.

This season, The LA Fire Department has issued a guideline for all of us to follow when faced with the rolling red freight train thundering down our lane.  It’s a simple, easy-to-remember survival campaign called, “Ready, Set, Go.” 

Clear enough. Easy to understand. Direct.  But why I have to skip the first two orders to blitz right into the third one, is beyond me. The LAFD says being “ready” means prepping your home and car with necessities: gathering all the pertinent docs, meds and memories ahead of time. Getting “set” means parking your car facing out of your driveway. And “go” — well, that’s where I come in. I am ready to GO.  Let’s get the hell outta here. Just don’t ask me to organize anything before that. 

To be honest, I have trouble explaining my “crisis avoidance system” — but it’s pretty clear when someone suggests I prepare— well, they might as well just be speaking Urdu.

My only working theory is that after 25 years reporting thousands of news stories on what could be described as insane deadlines, I got used to the pace. There really was no time to prepare. No time to “set.” We’d get an assignment and have to gather the facts, often in minutes, to make air time. Skipping the first two steps became habit, and then our daily M.O. — always with the goal of being first on the air.

My husband’s theory is that I’m an adrenaline junkie. He thinks I create a last-minute panic because it gives me a rush.  As a producer at KCBS-TV News, he witnessed my pushing every story I covered to the very last second — to the point where the director overseeing my live-shot would ask, “Where the hell is Lardner?” My head would pop into frame 10 seconds before the anchors tossed to me in the field. It was a rough way to conduct business. And admittedly very selfish.

But he has a point. And in the end, he would probably be the first to say I can I give up the self-hate for just doing things differently. He might even appreciate the fact that I’m even looking at “the why.” But we’re about to be evacuated from our home right now, so I guess I gotta go.

Meet the man who mixed politics with paint.

Last week, we put the finishing touches on a mural on a 30-foot wall in the City of West Hollywood. The work showcases a collection of classic pieces of gold jewelry, arranged into a utopian narrative. (Pic #2 below). Residents tell us the image is “an uplifting addition” to the neighborhood. I had the privilege of curating the project, and always love the enthusiastic support for year-round public art projects in WEHO. The city is dedicated to celebrating the arts, and makes it a top priority. It’s no mystery why they call it “The Creative City.”

But public art isn’t always considered a normal budgetary line item for most municipalities. This, despite the fact it can change the urban landscape in profound ways. And now that we hear this story from a corner of the former Soviet Union, we learn that art in public places can even transform a city crippled by corruption and crime.

“I try to bring something of the artist in me to my politics.” So says Edi Rama, former Mayor of Tirana, the capital city of Albania. When the art professor took office, the city was described as “downtrodden” and crime was at an all-time high. The city budget was blown, and there was no funding for repairs. But Rama had one simple idea to raise the spirits of his town — so he painted a grey building bright orange.

That was just the beginning. As Mayor for eleven years of one of the poorest European capital cities, he was determined to order the city’s drab, communist-era apartment buildings to go through “a rough-and-ready makeover.” He wanted even more of the city painted in loud colors and bold designs. We’re talking pink polka dots and green stripes. Quirky angles and geometric shapes. (Pics #1 #4 #5 #6)

At first, residents resisted the changes, and other countries in the European Union asked him “to opt for more neutral colors.” He told them no. “Compromise in colors is grey,” he explained.

Moving forward with his plan, he described the transformation as palpable: “When colors came out everywhere, a mood of change started elevating the spirit of the people who lived there. Residents started to drop less litter in the streets. They started to pay taxes. They began to feel something they’d forgotten. Suddenly, beauty was giving people a feeling of being protected. This was not a misplaced feeling — crime fell.”

BTW, Edi Rama is no longer the Mayor of Tirana. He’s taken a step out of local politics. He came to power leading Albania’s socialist party in 2013, and won a landslide victory in the race for Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, the city says there’s a special energy in the streets of Tirana right now…unlike anywhere else in the Balkans: “the city is young, multiethnic, and literally multicolored.”

To hear more about the radical transformation of Tirana, and about Rama’s thoughts on how politicians can bring hope to people through seemingly small actions, watch his moving talk.

…is another man’s cool art.

She was about to toss it. At first she saw it as collateral damage from her family garage sale in the midst of a triple-digit heat wave. This crinkled ziploc bag filled by her daughter with dozens of newly-melted wax crayons. What a mess. But my good friend Lisa paused, and (thankfully) she shot the above photo for me. Her text read, “You probably think this is art.”

She was right. I do see this image as a colorful, loose, high-energy abstraction. And I couldn’t wait to hear how she — or as I later learned, nature — made it. It’s a joy I never get tired of: the emergence of a work of art in the most unexpected circumstances. And I can’t help but feel it’s our obligation to acknowledge it each time, so we can experience those little surprises over and over again.

But what truly makes this image art — isn’t the fact that it’s a perfect composition, nor a great a palette of colors — it’s that it represents a friendship, in which one friend saves something for another — on the off chance it makes her smile. More proof that art is constantly connecting on our behalf.