Courtesy of Dan and Laura Dotson

Dan and Laura Dotson

Creatives is a new recurring column about creative people in L.A. following their passions.

If one man's trash is another man's treasure, then Dan and Laura Dotson are the guides who bring it all together.

The married team of licensed auctioneers owns American Auctioneers in Riverside. Dan Dotson learned the business from his grandfather, a cattle and farm auctioneer from the Ozarks. He fell in love with Laura after they exchanged smiles at -- where else -- auction houses. (She'd come to bid on restaurant equipment.) He trained her, and now they travel the country, hosting about 3,000 auctions a year. They also monitor storage auctions through their website, StorageTreasures.com.

But to reality TV aficionados, Dan and Laura, 49 and 43, respectively, are the good-natured, fast-talking folks who keep things moving on A&E's Storage Wars.

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Illustration by PJ McQuade

Why all the hate for the 818?

Midafternoon at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Santa Monica's Main Street, an impromptu conversation sparks between two strangers just feet from me -- he a cheerful, swarthy, well-fed, balding accountant originally from New York City, she a pretty, willowy, 20-something brunette, just arrived from the Boston area and looking for housing.

She mentions parts inland and his face flickers with mild concern. "There are some areas that are OK, I guess," he says. "But I live right around here. And this is par-a-dise."

He savors the word like it's a white truffle.

She assents with a smile, then asks about the area around Sherman Oaks: "What's that like?"

His head tremors from side to side. "Oh my Gaaaawwwdddd. No! I never even go north of Mulholland. Never!"

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Photo by Ted Soqui

The crowd at the Best Fish Taco in Ensenada, getting ready to laugh.

It's just after 10 p.m. and already five comedians have done their thing when comic Eddie Pepitone strides up to start his set. Short, bald and decidedly unhinged, Pepitone gives the air of a blue-collar Buddha: a wizened, workaday sage who happens to be slightly crazy-eyed.

Getting right to the point, he starts his trademark screaming.

"Let's address the elephant in the room," he shrieks. "We are out-fucking-side a fish taco place -- things are not going well for ANYONE!"

Pepitone is in the outdoor faux-cabana of the venerable Los Feliz taco hut Best Fish Taco in Ensenada -- a spot that looks like a cross between a Corona Light commercial and Keanu Reeves' man cave. Normally you'd come here to eat fish and/or shrimp tacos, and gulp down any number of canned sodas. And yet, for the 11th time on alternating Tuesdays (the first and third of every month), the hip, the punk and the snarky are crowded here under stage lights, listening to some comedy.

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All photos by Star Foreman

Dita Von Teese wears a vintage dress from The Way We Wore and bracelets by J. Max.

See also:
*A gallery of pictures from our photo shoot at Dita Von Teese's Los Feliz home.
*Top 10 Strip Clubs in Los Angeles
*Marilyn Monroe's Seven Never-Before-Seen Mostly Nude Photos at Duncan Miller Gallery

Dita Von Teese can't remember the first time she took her clothes off for someone. It was probably early on, before she became the queen of burlesque and undressing became her job. Probably after ballet class, changing in front of other girls.

She does remember the first time she stripped. She was 19, and back then her name was Heather Sweet. She had been working as a scantily clad go-go dancer in the Los Angeles underground scene when, one night, a friend took her to a bikini club. She was fascinated.

She auditioned on a Monday -- amateur night. Rock & roll and blondes in neon bikinis were the name of the game. But she took the stage in a pink corset with black velvet trim, black stockings, long black gloves.

"You're wearing a lot of clothes up there," the manager said afterward. He hired her anyway. "Dita Von Teese" was born that night, a stage name Heather Sweet pulled out of a phone book.

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Photo by Drew Barillas

The writer and The Sled

In our new column, First Person, L.A. writers tackle the good, the bad and the funny about life as they know it.

Three years ago, I became the proud owner of a 1988 Toyota Corolla with 240,000 miles on it, approximately 40 dents -- I stopped counting -- and a broken cassette player.

Times were tough. I had moved to California from Florida, and for a year my future bride and I shared a car. In Los Angeles, that's like trying to rub your belly, pat your head and masturbate at the same time. But writing assignments were hard to come by, so I took a waiter/bartender job at a fancy country club about the same time Sally started a new job on the opposite side of town. Sharing wheels no longer worked.

So we found the Corolla, for which we paid $800. The Manhattan Beach couple who sold it to us had been its only owners. They were probably thinking: suckers.

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Illustration by Jimmy Geigrich

"Stephen, how's your eye?" Ethan Lindsey asks.

It's 3:30 a.m. Outside in downtown Los Angeles, it's the dead of night, but inside the Frank Stanton Studios on Figueroa Boulevard, it's the heart of the work "day" for the Marketplace Morning Report overnight shift. And things are bustling.

While most of the world sleeps, Lindsey, the show's 34-year-old producer, spearheads a close-knit team of six, which churns out seven newscasts and more than 40 minutes of original programming nightly. This is the fast-paced world of public radio: There's no time to be tired when 5.9 million listeners depend on you for the morning news every week.

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Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett

By Dr. Paul Abramson and L.J. Williamson

Riot Act is a semi-regular column that challenges conventional wisdom in controversial issues

In 2008, a 35-year-old LAUSD teacher got one of his fifth-grade students alone in the classroom at lunchtime, and convinced the 10-year-old boy to masturbate him to orgasm. The teacher continued to molest the boy when other students left the room, including performing oral sex on him, into the following year. The abuse finally ended during the summer, when the father sought to include the teacher in more family activities, at which point the horrified kid blurted out the truth.

For a pedophile, the first order of business is to gain access to children. We're not talking about trolling the playgrounds with a sack of candy. That's for amateurs, and the committed pedophile is far more sophisticated. He's in it for the long haul. So he gets a teaching credential, or becomes a member of the clergy, or maybe even a pediatrician. He creates a foundation for wayward boys. He becomes a foster parent. He finds a single mom and starts dating her, working his way toward becoming a stepdad. In short, he manages to put himself in a position of trust so that he will have access to kids on a regular basis.

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PHOTO BY FELICITY MURPHY

Lauren Berger held 15 internships while in college.

Lauren Berger has gotten coffee at MTV. She's gotten coffee at Fox. And yes, she's done it at several other agencies that may not have as much brand recognition. She even broke the darned coffee pot once.

These days, the 28-year-old entrepreneur gets others to fetch the java for her. Her web-based business, InternQueen.com, connects top-level companies with the cream of the college-student crop.

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Nanette Gonzales

Rabbi Mark Borovitz in his office at Beit T'Shuvah

It seems like the setup for a corny joke: A rabbi and an ex-con walk into a room. Except here's the punch line: They're one and the same.

Rabbi Mark Borovitz, 60, runs Beit T'Shuvah, a residential treatment center and Jewish congregation in an otherwise nondescript building in an equally average section of Culver City. And though he looks every bit the part now -- he has the gray suit, full beard, glasses, steady eyes, calm voice -- as a teen growing up in a lower-middle-class Jewish home in Cleveland, he didn't necessarily exhibit traits one associates with a rabbinical scholar. More >>

Illustration by Patrick McQuade

Jayne Amelia Larson is a Jersey girl who made it to Harvard. But she may have gotten her greatest education from her job as a chauffeur.

Larson's 16-hour days behind the wheel were spent driving royalty of every variety: Cross-dressing movie stars. Coked-up rock stars. Spoiled Beverly Hills brats. And princesses -- real ones. As in, members of the royal family of Saudi Arabia.

"There's a lot of bad behavior that happens in cars. People would do stuff in front of me they would never do in front of other strangers. Drugs, alcohol, infidelity. I guess they figure you're in their pocket, especially the upper echelon," Larson says. "It becomes strangely intimate in a car. You're one-on-one for long periods.

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