Postcards from L.A.

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This article was published 18/04/2020 (2270 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The great American urban cultural dichotomy has always been embodied by Los Angeles and New York.

But in the face of a pandemic, the big sprawl of L.A. is clearly preferable to the intense population density of New York City. That’s reflected in the numbers when it comes to COVID-19 infections. As of Thursday, in all of California, only 889 deaths have been recorded, compared with the 11,600 people who have died in New York, most of them in New York City.

In California, tallies continue to climb, however. In the past week, the state has averaged 1,148 new cases and 54.6 new deaths per day, with the largest concentration in Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous county.

Still, life goes on, in its own radically altered manner. For a look at life on the lower left coast, the Free Press touched base with three former Winnipeggers who call Los Angeles home: singer-songwriter Chantal Kreviazuk, screenwriter-filmmaker Collin Friesen, and writer (and newly minted TV showrunner) Johanna Stein.

Chantal Kreviazuk

There are worse places to quarantine your family than in the tony Los Angeles neighbourhood of Brentwood.

That’s where Chantal Kreviazuk and her family — husband and Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida and their three boys, Rowan, Lucca and Salvador — are holed up, doing their part to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“Brentwood is funny. A lot of the celebrities got the (COVID-19) tests right away,” Kreviazuk says, adding she believed a testing company was touring the neighbourhood and charging $2,500 a test because it knew there were people who would pay the high price to find out right away whether they had tested positive or not.

“We waited our turn, like good Canadians,” she says with a laugh.

Testing and the coronavirus became a hot topic for Kreviazuk and her fans in late March when the singer posted a photo of herself wearing a surgical mask and gloves at a doctor’s office, preparing for an appointment. She said she had been feeling unwell, off and on, for a few days, and worried whether she had picked up COVID-19.

“I felt really awful. Raine had it too,” says Kreviazuk, adding that she’s had pneumonia twice in her lifetime, which added to her anxiety.

She couldn’t get a test that day, but an X-ray she underwent at the clinic alleviated many of her concerns. Later that day, she posted on Instagram again, saying she was fine, and a COVID-19 test proved to be negative.

She’s since continued her semi-regular practice of performing a song or two on Instagram, and doing publicity for a new album, Get To You, which comes out later this spring. The title track was released as a single in late March, and on Friday she dropped another single, Love Gone Insane.

While some performers need the adrenaline from an audience to pump themselves up, Kreviazuk finds performing on Instagram isn’t much different than being on stage.

“It’s easy, fun, simple, relaxing. I always thought my shows are like me in my living room,” she says. “You get some of the energy. Believe it or not, you don’t really need much.”

Feels Like Home is one of Kreviazuk’s bigger hits, and life in Los Angeles does feel like home, even if it has its pitfalls. They live in a canyon and she says it’s not really a place to walk or bike around, making it difficult for her kids.

“They love it in Toronto and they can go wander, but here, they’re sort of trapped. Here, together means together.”

Kreviazuk and Maida explored togetherness, and their relationship, in I’m Gonna Break Your Heart, a revealing 2019 documentary that will begin streaming on Crave May 24. The social-distancing restrictions have amped up the inter-family relationships, she said.

“When we go on vacation, it’s all about reset, and as a mom you see what is really going on,” Kreviazuk says. “It’s like brushing the dirt out from under the rug.

“This is like throwing the rug completely away.”

To her family, friends and fans back in Winnipeg, who like everyone else are growing weary about social distancing and isolation, Kreviazuk urges them to stay positive.

“You’re not the only one with these feelings.”

— Alan Small

 

Johanna Stein

Johanna Stein is a woman of an unfailingly comic bent. There is a reason why she was picked to executive produce the Hulu Originals animated series Madagascar: A Little Wild, featuring juvenile versions of the characters from Dreamworks’ Madagascar movies, Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe and Gloria the Hippo.

Even during a massive social shutdown, Stein, 52, is working at her home in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley alongside her husband David and her 13-year-old daughter Sadie.

“We are in the thick of production,” she says in an email conversation. “As opposed to live-action TV shows and movies, which have had to shut down due to personal distancing, we’ve discovered that it is possible to make an animated show with everyone working from their homes.

Stein admits conditions aren’t ideal; everything is more complicated and takes a bit longer.

“And many of the folks on my crew are parents to little children who, surprise, want and need their parents’ attention,” she says. “But we’re making it work. And getting to know each other’s kids, pets, and spouses during our frequent virtual meetings — which is a charming side effect of this new way of working. Despite everything that is happening right now, we manage to laugh a lot.

“Mostly we’re all just extremely grateful to be working at a time when so many people are out of work… and while others are working dangerous, gruelling jobs that put their own health and lives at risk, in order to keep the rest of us safe.”

It’s not all La-La Land bliss. Like everywhere, a certain amount of anxiety permeates, especially because Stein’s husband, David, is in a high-risk category, making even grocery outings dangerous.

“We’ve been in the house since March 12, and the only time we leave is to walk our two dogs, who are pretty clearly stoked about us being home, 24/7,” she says. The family has been using grocery-delivery services wherever possible, although, as in Winnipeg, it’s difficult to get a deliver window these days.

“My tactic is to have a full online cart ready to go at all times, and I approach it the way I once handled buying concert tickets: I just hit SUBMIT over and over until a delivery window pops up.

“I end up getting groceries about once a week this way — I’ll generally get about two-thirds of what I’m looking for,” she says. “And sometimes, it results in me panic-buying things I don’t necessarily want or need, like celery juice, which is about as tasty as you’d imagine.”

Canadians may be routinely horrified by news stories coming from the U.S. in which rugged individualists or conspiracy theorists or right-wing wackos defy social-distancing guidelines and strive to “open up” the country, even if that means a rise in infections, such as a recent protest in Wisconsin. Stein says that segment of the population can be exaggerated.

“All I can say is, it’s a big country, so I can only speak from my own experience,” she says. “All of my U.S.-based friends and family (L.A., San Francisco, New York, Austin, New Jersey, Chicago, Florida) are hunkered down like we are.

“Everyone I know agrees that the health and safety of the community is priority,” she says. “I do read about people who are resisting the call to socially isolate — the I’ll-cut-off-my-nose-to-spite-my-face types — and I don’t understand them at all.”

Indeed, Stein worries about her own family in Manitoba.

“My parents still live in Winnipeg, and of course it’s a bit nerve-racking — living so far away, and knowing that they are, by virtue of their ages, at high risk of contracting the coronavirus,” she says. “I was on a call with my mom, who happened to mention that my dad has an upcoming doctor’s appointment, but that they don’t have any masks.”

Knowing she might not be able to mail masks to them quickly enough, Stein put a call out on Facebook to see if Winnipeggers had any to spare.

“Immediately I received a bunch of responses — including from one of my childhood friends from Luxton Elementary School, Evelyn Yauk, who then had a set of masks and gloves delivered to my parents’ house by the next morning.

“No matter how much I insisted, she refused to let me pay for them,” Stein says. “Which just goes to prove that Winnipeggers really are the best… and that everyone should shop at Evelyn’s local business, Sage Garden Greenhouses!”

— Randall King

 

Collin Friesen

In the 1990s, Collin Friesen’s face was known to Winnipeggers from his work as a TV news guy on Global, and later CBC in Alberta. But the movies beckoned, and Friesen, 55, turned his talents to writing movies such as the Winnipeg-lensed The Big White (2005), starring Robin Williams, and more recently the Winnipeg-set 2018 comedy Sorry for Your Loss, which he also directed.

Among his credits, though, is a 2005 TV movie titled Plague City: SARS in Toronto, for which he wrote the screenplay. You might think that would make him an especially knowledgable screenwriter on the subject of coronaviruses. And you would be mistaken.

“It’s been funny because on social media, people will occasionally pop up with the Plague City DVD cover, he says in a phone interview. “And, wow, that was such a long time ago.

“I was trying to remember any lessons I gleaned from the research I did and basically it’s … no I can’t remember a damn thing,” he says with a laugh.

Friesen says the experience of a real, more devastating pandemic has bought the subject home for him.

“When I went to Toronto and did all the research, it was really interesting,” he says. “But until you actually live through it, you don’t really have the experience of what it’s like — the ongoing fear and the masks and being wary of any person walking towards you on the sidewalk and holding your breath as you go past them.

“All that stuff sort of becomes a very strange kind of second nature to you as you live in the midst of all this.”

Friesen lives in Palm Springs, 160 kilometres east of Los Angeles, where he and his actress wife Stephanie Czajkowski own a property.

“It was supposed to be primarily a vacation rental, and of course March and April are supposed to be primarily the two biggest rental months we have,” he says. “But all of a sudden, it looked like everybody started cancelling and then the government made (shelter-in-place) official.

“So we felt if we had to shelter in place anyway, we might as well do it in a place with our own swimming pool,” he says. “So we decided to do it out here.”

Friesen lives most of the time in the Los Feliz neighbourhood in central L.A., where he has an apartment.

“It’s where all the hipsters live — home of the handlebar moustaches and ironic monocle,” he says. “Seriously, you might see a guy on a pennyfarthing bike. That’s my neighbourhood and so far, it seems to be holding together fairly well.”

“My life hasn’t changed all that much frankly. When you’re a writer, you’re kind of a shut-in anyway. Now I have company.” – Collin Friesen

As a writer and filmmaker, Friesen can pitch projects remotely.

“My wife has been doing a different voice-over auditions every day,” he says. “We set up a little sound booth in the closet. So the work continues.

“My life hasn’t changed all that much frankly,” he says. “When you’re a writer, you’re kind of a shut-in anyway. Now I have company.”

Like Stein, Friesen hasn’t encountered any extremists who may cry hoax.

“People have been, generally speaking, pretty good,” he says. “We have an awful lot of faith in Gavin Newsom, the governor of the state. At a certain point he said, ‘OK, everybody, you have to wear a mask when they go outside and we go: ‘OK great!’” (Friesen got to make a fashion statement out of his mask, fashioned from an old Winnipeg Jets T-shirt.)

“There’s no trust in the federal government right now, so people are relying on politicians that are a little closer to representing their constituencies,” Friesen says.

• • •

Friesen does end up recalling one interesting detail from his research into the Toronto SARS case that paints an encouraging picture of how things have changed.

“When I wrote that movie, one of the stories that stuck with me was how frontline health-care workers were being shunned by the rest of society because everyone was so worried they would come in contact with the SARS virus,” he says. “So there was a story I put in the script of the movie which I don’t think made it to the final cut. A nurse is having a flirtatious relationship with a guy who runs a local coffee shop… and then at a certain point the coffee shop puts up a sign that says ‘No health-care workers.’

“Stuff like that happened during the SARS outbreak and it’s interesting to me to look at how, with this particular outbreak, the first responders are heroes and we’re putting on parades and banging pots and pans going outside at 7 o’clock at night and yelling,” he says. “To my mind it’s a much more enlightened response for people who are putting their lives on the line for everybody else.”

— Randall King