About the Creator

In the last days of the long summer of 1998, a girl-child was born in the orderly, sunbaked environs of the less glamorous side of the Hollywood Hills.

The city was called Panorama, although really it was not a city, and in fact the things that could be seen from within its confines were much the same in scope and splendor as could be seen from without. The city on the other side of the hills was also not a city, but instead many cities that through years of turbulent and fecund entanglement had resigned themselves to being called by the same name at parties, and to receiving each other's mail. Much has been committed to paper on the subject of this monstrously fickle arrangement, but it does not interest us here. We turn our attention back to the narrows of Panorama and a hospital room in which the girl-child sips her first earthly breaths.

Though she is the focus of our attention, the nexus through which we begin to understand events, she is not alone. Few are at the moment of birth, by necessity if not by custom. Both parents are in attendence, her mother being key to the proceedings and it being long past the days of ceremonial cigars in the waiting room. Outside, her newly-minted older brother, days away from his seventh birthday and fed up with weeks of false alarms and long stuffy car rides to and from the hospital, has declared that if once again no baby presents itself he will run away from home. When pressed for details, he reveals his intentions to abscond to his grandmother's house. The woman in question is also on the scene and maintains she will not give succor to any boxcar children as may show up on her doorstep. Tensions run high. Only minutes old, and the happiness and fortunes of many rest heavily on the girl-child's fragile shoulders.