Jackie Danicki

Luke Ford’s years-old profile of our friend, journalist Cathy Seipp, really is a great read. (I’ve read it before, but ended up re-reading it Saturday night for some reason I can’t remember.) Part one is here and part two is here. My favourite comment on Cathy comes from our friend Nancy Rommelmann:

Cathy has convictions about everything, convictions that can startle you, even if you think they’re total hooey. Example: In 1997, we were at a Buzz contributors’ lunch, and I mentioned I was set to write a piece about how Vegas was becoming kid-friendly, and that a friend and I were going to take our kids there for the weekend. “But that’s a sin,” boomed Cathy from across the table, Moses decreeing over tuna tartar at Maple Drive. I thought this was hilarious—I actually thought she was kidding—but she was seriously indignant, and repeated, “It’s a sin.” Why? Who the hell knows why? I thought she was a fundamentalist, or had something personally against me, but no, she was simply having a conviction; if it weren’t kids and Vegas, it would have been the rye bread, or Tom Christie’s [the Culture columnist as Buzz, and is now Arts Editor/Senior Editor at the LA Weekly] shirt. I think Cathy is sort of like that friend of your parents’ who intimidates you when you’re little, but who, once you realize she simply doesn’t varnish things, you want to hang around with, because she makes the other grown-ups seem sort of mushy.

I also think Cathy is true blue, and seriously has her friends’ best interests at heart. At lunch recently, when Cathy asked me about my health insurance status, and I admitted I hadn’t gotten around to it, she put down her fork and fixed the laser-beam blue eyes on me. “You need to promise me you will do this today” she said. I did.

Yep, that’s Cathy.

By the way, Luke was just featured in LA Weekly’s 100 Most Interesting People in LA list. The journalist missed out on some of the most interesting things about Luke, though, which is weird and just bad journalism. Indeed, there are profiles of Luke all over the blogosphere which are much more revealing and well-written. I won’t say what all of the missing threads are, but certainly the fact that Luke is nothing without Cathy Seipp should have been mentioned.

Filed under: Life