Shaela Cook

French Stewart as Buster

By the end of his five-year run on the hit screwball sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, French Stewart found himself at a career crossroads. The problem was that his success as the series' hilariously harebrained extraterrestrial with the quizzical squint, Harry Solomon, had in the eyes of Hollywood typecast him. He was effectively the new Gilligan.

Stewart huddled with his agent. "I asked him, 'What can I expect?'" Stewart recalls. "He said, 'If you want to be in a big movie, you can have a small part as a retarded guy. If you want to be in a small movie, you can play a lead retarded guy. And if you want to be in the theater, you can play King Lear because you've been on a TV show.' And it was really true, you know?"

Opting for none of the above (including his now-former agent), Stewart returned to the stage, paying for the privilege with a steady stream of solid character work in TV and films.

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Courtesy of Los Angeles Poverty Department

36 portraits of Skid Row visionaries by street artist Mr. Brainwash

At first glance, L.A.'s Skid Row doesn't seem like it would have a flourishing performance-art scene.

But Skid Row's Los Angeles Poverty Department -- abbreviated as, yes, LAPD -- was founded by director John Malpede in 1985 to develop the arts and culture of the city's well-known home to the homeless. Though its focus is interdisciplinary, LAPD is also the first performance group in the nation to be made up primarily of homeless or formerly homeless people. Its theory of social justice: Create change and supplant stereotypes by placing the community's narrative into its own hands.

This Memorial Day weekend, LAPD will host a three-day-long parade called "Walk the Talk" that will take place across Skid Row, led by a brass band called Paradigm Brass as well as pick-up musicians. Dozens of performances will take place at approximately 31 stops, each a symbolic site that will honor one of 36 men and women who have positively shaped the Skid Row community.

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Kevin Scanlon

Liz Meriwether

Yes, Los Angeles is wading in a profusion of comedic talent and is home to countless excellent comedy clubs (some housed in fish taco joints.) For our People 2012 issue, we zeroed in on six L.A. comedians who traffic in everything from sitcom writing to cartoons to YouTube videos.

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Allen Murabayashi

Laura Dave made a career of writing the kind of fun, unabashedly frothy fiction we all tend to impulse-buy at the airport before long flights, but that doesn't mean she hasn't earned her literary stripes.

For one thing, the author has an MFA from the University of Virginia's highly regarded creative writing program, which also claims as alumni current literary stars Chad Harbach and Eleanor Henderson. But while that program is known for producing the kinds of novels whose covers wind up on the front page of the New York Times' Book Review, Dave says that even in her student days, she had her sights set in an entirely different direction.

"Somebody said to me early on, you can write for other writers, or you can write for readers," Dave said by phone from her home in Los Angeles. "I always wanted to write for readers -- for people who, if they get to read two books a month, my book is the one they want to read." In one writing group, she added, this habit earned her the nickname Laura Ephron, an apt label considering Nora Ephron turns out to be a key figure in Dave's career.

On May 26, Dave will read from her third book, The First Husband, at Barnes & Noble in the Grove. In the meantime, she was kind enough to chat with us.

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Kevin Scanlon

Two of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

The first time Isaac Aptaker and his partner, Elizabeth Berger, were on a professional soundstage together, everyone kept trying to take their clothes off.

"Hair and makeup kept coming up to us," Aptaker reports, "saying, 'OK, let's get you guys in your nude cover; let's get you guys in body makeup; your scene is probably coming up!' "

"They kept thinking Isaac and I were a couple," Berger interjects.

"And we had to be, like, 'No, we're not shooting a sex scene -- we're the writers,' " he says.

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Courtesy of ScoreBig

After working in ticketing and marketing for the National Basketball Association, Adam Kanner recognized that the league had a problem: too few butts. Butts in the seats, that is.

"The challenge of live entertainment industry is unsold ticket inventory," Kanner explains. "That inventory is perishable, and filling those seats every night is challenging."

Overall, live entertainment -- concerts, sports events, theater -- is an industry with $25 billion in profits, but around 40 percent of seats go empty.

The flipside to that problem: It has gotten tougher to obtain reasonably priced tickets to events. The casual fan was being priced out of events.

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Photo by Angela + Ithyle

Bri Emery, uberblogger

Erika Brechtel's kid is only 3 years old, but she knows the perils of being raised by a fashion blogger. "Mom, put your iPad down," she'll say. Or rather, scream: "Mom! Put! Your! iPad! Down!"

Brechtel, 38, is a mom, homeowner and full-time graphic designer married to "a workaholic architect husband." She is also a blogger: She started posting about fashion on her "brand styling" company Small Shop Studio's website a year and a half ago. Her most successful posts deconstruct a particular trend. "How to wear the gray tee," for instance, or "how to wear red jeans."

"Thousands of hits a day," she says incredulously. "For those!"

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Courtesy Mungo Thomson

Mungo Thomson proposes a piece in which viewers enter to find a cloud of marijuana smoke.

In 1966, Robert Smithson, famous for piling up mud and black basalt in Utah's Great Salt Lake and sculpting it into a 1,500-foot coil called Spiral Jetty, went rock hunting with sculptor Donald Judd. They went in New Jersey, where Smithson was from, and spent an hour chopping away at a lump of lava in the center of a Montclair quarry, because they'd heard lava lumps yield quartz crystals.

Then they stopped at a nearby ice cream bar to eat "AWFUL AWFUL" ice cream bars -- "awful big and awful good" -- Smithson writes in an essay on the trip published posthumously (he died in a 1973 plane crash while surveying sites for a Texas earthwork). They also saw flashy roadside signage and abandoned excavation equipment, and visited another quarry that "resembled the moon." For Smithson, rock hunting meant fantasy, infinity and chaos, but also kitsch curiosities.

"Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974," an exhibition about to open at MOCA, aims to show how land art like Smithson's involved so much more than just an "escape to nature" impulse. Curated by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, it has been in the works since 2007 and has suffered some hiccups, understandably, given that the show is about artists who make milelong drawings in desert sand or grow hog pastures in galleries. It originally was scheduled to open April 8, but that was pushed to May 28 to make time for more fundraising.

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Joel Engel reads from his book L.A. '56: A Devil in the City of Angels at Book Soup.

When you investigate the life of a rapist based on a decades-old case file, you don't expect to be confronted by the rapist's family member. Yet that is exactly what happened April 11, when author Joel Engel read from his new book, L.A. '56: A Devil in the City of Angels, at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip.

The book tells the story of Willie Roscoe Fields, a serial rapist who terrorized countless women in the summer of 1956. A middle-aged woman in the third row asks Engel how he came up with the book's subtitle. "Did you really think he was a 'devil'?" she says. The question hangs over the room for a moment.

Engel knows that the woman asking the question is the rapist's daughter. He looks uncomfortable. His editors in New York suggested the subtitle, he says. "The 'devil' refers to the crimes and not the criminal," he adds.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

Eight is considered a particularly lucky number in Chinese culture, so Bertha "Bert" Chan's 88th birthday on Feb. 8 should have signaled the beginning of her most fortuitous year. Instead, she found herself covered in shingles on New Year's Day and suffered a heart attack as soon as she had healed enough to return to her studio to resume teaching tap dancing. But Chan isn't hung up on age, and she doesn't exactly fit a traditional Chinese mold, either. "Chinese don't tap; they do martial arts," she quips.

Chan's dance practice is an age retardant. The muscle memory helps prevent dementia, she says, and she should know: She started tapping eight decades ago and still teaches classes for seniors six days a week at the Tap Academy in Santa Monica. The group of elderly hoofers often performs at retirement centers around the city, where, Chan jokes, "You can wear the same thing every time and they won't remember."

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