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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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 >>

Nanette Gonzales

Cafe Jack, a Titanic-themed restaurant in Koreatown

The restaurant looks like an ocean liner that's run aground in the middle of Koreatown, with the survivors building ramshackle additions and living out their lives right where they landed. But the clue is in the name emblazoned on the ship's bow -- Café Jack. As in Jack Dawson, the young artist played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, a guy who comes from the wrong deck of the ship but captures Kate Winslet's heart just the same.

This part of Fifth Street was an empty 6,500-square-foot lot when owner Jack Shin, 48, invested what he shyly admits was around $500,000, and -- with just one "helper" -- built his homage to the blockbuster weeper. They used real boating material for the exterior, and it took a year of "painting and nailing" and scouring antique stores and Pasadena flea markets to find just-like-the-movie tables, chairs and nautical touches before Shin opened the doors in 2007.

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Courtesy of RingADoc

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

It's Sunday afternoon, and you've got chest pain. It could be the four Pink's chili dogs you hoovered at 3 a.m. after a night of mezcal and Tecate, or it might be something worse. Your primary-care physician is off on Catalina for the weekend, and you're leery of astronomical emergency-room costs. You've checked every medical website -- even Wikipedia -- to no avail. You need a doctor, but what kind? Where?

Cue RingADoc, the startup telemedicine service that bridges the gap between your paranoia and your primary-care physician. RingADoc soothes your burning question (or burning organ -- eww!) by providing on-call doctors 24 hours a day via phone, smartphone or tablet. Through a phone call or digital face time, you can renew a prescription, double-check your symptoms and get some peace of mind.

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Nanette Gonzales

Big Sexy with his wares

"I'm sorry, I'm just texting my butter maker," says the man in the black XL Rocca Wear shirt. He goes by "Big Sexy," and with a filled-out, 6-foot-5 frame, he lives up to that moniker and then some.

"It's more than a name," he says. "It's a lifestyle. Try to say 'Big Sexy' without smiling." The 32-year-old puts down his iPhone and looks up with a disarmingly youthful face. "I'm doing things that make me happy."

What makes him happy is food, specifically "handmade artisanal treats." He makes dark acai fudge brownies, white chocolate popcorn, cinnamon toast crunch crumb cake and six-ingredient, gluten-free granola. With favorites such as "caramel seduction" and "dark acai attraction," Big Sexy says, the "names of treats are flirtations," intended to "add a positive to your life to ease pain and anxiety."

The secret is in the butter. Cannabis-infused butter -- aka cannabutter -- goes into all of his muffins, cookies and brownies. Which might explain why the founder and head baker of Big Sexy's Sinful Sweets insists on going by a nickname. (He gives his real name only as "Joey.")

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David Silpa/UPI/Newscom

Jerry West

Reading West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life is like overhearing a celebrity patient talking to his therapist: It's unsettling and uncomfortable -- yet you can't stop listening.

Jerry West was a college All-American at West Virginia and an instant All-Star after he joined the L.A. Lakers in 1960, and every year thereafter, until his 1974 retirement. As the Lakers general manager, he built the "Showtime" championship teams in the 1980s and the Shaq/Kobe three-peat teams more than a decade later. But West now says that success brought him little happiness.

The book reveals the restless, quirky, often depressed man behind the flattering nicknames -- Mr. Clutch, Gentleman Jerry. Losing the 1959 NCAA Championship game by one point, followed by eight losses in the NBA Finals and just one championship, was a tremendous burden for such a hypercompetitive person.

But it was two boyhood events that cast a dark shadow over his life: the death of West's beloved older brother, David, in the Korean War, and a series of brutal beatings at the hands of his father, Howard, which only ended after West, at the age of 12, threatened to kill him. He admits that many people advised him not to write the book -- an instant New York Times best-seller -- and a review in the L.A. Times predicted he would regret it.

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Nanette Gonzales

Lindabelle Montero, left, and Mayra Sossa

Here comes the bride, all dressed in cream satin, with a sparkly brooch on her hip. "They've been together for a very, very long time. Like, two years?" says Yesenia Villanueva, 22, the bride's classmate in nursing school.

Driving north on Normandie Avenue, just before the road crests and the Griffith Observatory comes into view, signs advertising the only business between Beverly and Melrose ask, "Why go to Vegas? Marriages -- $170.00 -- Matrimonios."

Why indeed? This is Mayra's Wedding Chapel, and officiating today, as on most days, is Lindabelle Montero, imperious in her burgundy minister's robe and black, high-heeled ankle boots. Montero, 40, lives with her sons in the back of the house, works at a desk in the foyer and performs weddings in between.

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Asad Faruqi

Dr. Mohammad Jawad treats a patient in Pakistan.

"Where are the stars?"

Riffat Masood, the consul general of the Pakistani Consulate in Los Angeles, has hushed the crowd gathered in the living room of her palatial home in Beverly Hills. Now she just needs to find the guests of honor. "Where is the director? Where is the famous doctor?"

As the two make their way to her side, Masood explains what an honor it is to have them here this evening, the Friday before Oscar night. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is co-director and co-producer of Saving Face, the first Pakistani film ever to be nominated for an Academy Award. The documentary explores the horrific acid attacks that disfigure hundreds of women in Pakistani villages each year, and its star is Dr. Mohammad Jawad, the plastic surgeon who labors to restore the victims to normalcy.

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Nanette Gonzales

Patrick Davis, Brawler

With a fit build and a face that's equal parts Ryan O'Neal and Ralph Lauren model, Patrick Davis looks like a dude who'd play beach volleyball, or audition for "handsome" roles in TV commercials. Scratch the surface, though, and you'll find a fearless brawler who can transform in the blink of an eye from a mellow, endearingly spacey soul to a whirlwind of hard-swinging fists.

"It was never like someone would step on my shoe and I'd be, like, 'Let's fight, bro,' " says Davis, 42. "It was more like somebody would shove me in a bar, and I'd be, like, 'Hey, calm down.' And he'd be, like, 'What are you, Mr. Tough Guy?' "

As it turns out, he was Mr. Tough Guy. After about 35 street fights -- many in L.A. -- he was hit with the inspiration to combine his bloody, bare-knuckle hobby with his mostly deferred dream of being a writer. He self-published Fighteytown: An Auto-Fight-Ography, the self-deprecating story of an overprivileged underachiever told through the prism of his often ridiculous fights.

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Nanette Gonzales

After six years in porn, Crissy Moran is helping women heal from "sexual brokenness."

Crissy Moran holds a pair of drumsticks, her long, slender fingers clanking off-rhythm as she looks up at a monitor above, following along to the directions of Guitar Hero.

Eyes smoky, lips pouty and dark brown hair flowing over her shoulders, Moran, flanked by an all-girl band, shreds "With or Without You" on a dimly lit stage in a bar tucked deep in the Valley. The lead singer, blonde and doe-eyed, hits every note -- off-key. It's so bad that members of the audience join in out of sympathy. But Moran doesn't seem to notice, her gaze trailing off in space as if she's dreaming.

The crowd of a half-dozen at the bar doesn't know what to make of the group's music, FYI, but patrons are enraptured by the beautiful disaster onstage. A few boos are mixed in with catcalls, and then silence.

Moran and her "bitches," as the bar's MC repeats on the mic, are here for her birthday. Her 26th, her girlfriends joke, taking their seats to down Cadillac margaritas and munch onion rings. Rotating in their atmosphere, a steady stream of hanger-on Casanovas crash like asteroids. She looks familiar, they say.

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