Love Affair

Art sometimes imitates life. And then again, life often imitates art. Just ask Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave and her husband, Franco Nero. In the new romantic comedy, "Letters to Juliet," the 73-year-old Redgrave plays a widow named Claire who had left the love of her life, Lorenzo (Nero), 50 years earlier when she was a student in Verona, Italy. Before she had left, Claire did what numerous women in love have done over the centuries, write a letter about her love affair to the Shakespearean heroine, Juliet, and tack it on the wall of the courtyard where the fictional character had lived.

The show tune unfurls grandly from the Roland Super Spinet organ out across antique Dodger Stadium, momentarily and splendidly turning a game of baseball into a ride on a calliope. You hear the familiar melody and think of one person, the composer of Chavez Ravine, the keeper of the Dodgers soundtrack, the franchise's most enduring three names since Pee Wee Reese, the organist known as Nancy Bea Hefley. Listen closer. Listen close enough to hear past her sophisticated chords to the Southern twang of a man standing by her side and softly asking, "Everything OK, dear?"

In the traditional recitation of the seven capital sins, envy is preceded by lust and anger. So, too, in California writer Kathryn Chetkovich's extraordinary essay, "Envy," which appears in the current issue of the London-based literary magazine Granta and already has created something of a minor sensation in Britain. It seems likely to attract even more attention now that it is available in the United States, where the identity of the unnamed object of her jealousy is more easily discerned.

Right when the Dodgers had to clear a roster spot for left-handed starter Ted Lilly, someone conveniently turned up injured. And it so happened that the injured player was the reliever with the highest earned-run average on the team. Funny how that happens, no? Todd Coffey, with a bloated 36.00 ERA, was placed on the disabled list Saturday. Lilly was activated to start the game on this night against the Padres. Mattingly insisted that the right-handed reliever's right knee is inflamed, as did Coffey himself.

What if your husband decided to write a play about your 30-plus years of marriage for his playwriting class--and then mounted the finished product at a local theater? What if he went on to write a second tell-all installment and stage it? And then a third?

MUSIC It's a little bit before Valentine's Day, but we defy you to not get in the mood early at Hot 92.3's Love Affair. The bill features R&B touchstones the Intruders, Bloodstone, the Impressions and seven others. If you don't walk out of this having earned some smooches, you must have really messed up. Gibson Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City. 8:15 p.m. Fri.-Sat. $25-65. http://www.Hot923.com .

Julius Shulman received his first Eastman Kodak Brownie as a gift while in high school. Brownie in hand, he proceeded to prodigiously photograph the bridges, streets and buildings of Los Angeles, as well as the local mountains he loved to hike, recalls Judy McKee, the daughter of the iconic photographer, who died two years ago at age 98. "My dad never missed an opportunity to take a photograph. We'd be driving along and he'd suddenly see something: 'Oh, look at that!' Then he'd stop the car, grab his camera, sometimes even climb up on the hood.

Dumb things get repeated, some so often they become the "truths" we use to interpret the world. Take "California's love affair with the auto." Please. Where is the evidence for this love affair? Californians own fewer vehicles than the national average: .73 vehicles per person versus .75 nationally. We use less fuel in a year: 520 gallons per person versus 560 nationally. And we drive less: 8,400 miles versus 8,500 miles. So how did this "love affair" phrase get started?

Just as I was beginning to believe that your editorial writers had suppressed their anti-gun fanaticism in pursuit of more creative journalistic endeavors, I abandoned all hope when I read your editorial (April 28), "Trying to End a Love Affair." Your generalization that a majority of Americans want gun control certainly cannot be validated by the defeat of Proposition 15 by an overwhelming majority of California voters in 1982, and the lack of enthusiasm that gun control proposals have been met with from residents of other states.

Sometimes, she would forget the words. Nobody cared as long as Sarah Vaughan just kept on singing. Summer evenings under the stars at the Hollywood Bowl won't be the same this year without the incomparable Vaughan, the jazz vocal virtuoso who died this week of lung cancer at age 66 in her Los Angeles home. What a musical treasure was Sarah--the sound of her silky, rich and versatile vocal instrument was instantly identifiable.

SUNDAY Back in 1991, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, below, made "The Announcement" that he had contracted HIV. The basketball great's startling revelation and his remarkable journey in the two decades since are revisited in this documentary. (ESPN, 6 p.m.; ESPN2, 8 p.m.) Livin' large: Asa, Golnesa, Mike, Sammy, Reza and Mercedes are the "Shahs of Sunset" — six thirty-something, good-life loving, conspicuously consuming members of Beverly Hills' Persian-American community — in this new unscripted series.

MUSIC It's a little bit before Valentine's Day, but we defy you to not get in the mood early at Hot 92.3's Love Affair. The bill features R&B touchstones the Intruders, Bloodstone, the Impressions and seven others. If you don't walk out of this having earned some smooches, you must have really messed up. Gibson Amphitheatre, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City. 8:15 p.m. Fri.-Sat. $25-65. http://www.Hot923.com .

Love is always lovelier some place other than home. Well, at least in the celluloid universe. Traveling by boat, train or even bus can lead to romantic entanglements in the movies, as does visiting über-romantic locales such as Rome, Paris and Venice. Of course, these romances may not last, or they may even end tragically - just think of poor Jack and Rose in "Titanic" - but it doesn't matter. Movie audiences crave these idealistic, sexy trysts. Here's a look at some of the best films in the romantic travel genre: All aboard!

Franz Kafka hardly conjures a light, romantic image. But a summer tour of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic highlights the love affair between the author and the little-known Dora Diamant. The story unfolds in the streets of Prague,  Czech Republic, where the German author was born, moves to the Jewish Quarter of Krakow, Poland, where Diamant organized plays and ends in Berlin, where the couple lived the Bohemian life in the early 1920s. Kathi Diamant (no relation), who wrote the book "Kafka's Last Love" and heads the Kafka Project at San Diego State University, leads the Magical Mystery Literary History Tour that includes meeting with Kafka scholars and descendants of Dora Diamont too. Proceeds from the trip support the nonprofit Kafka Project, which seeks to recover lost letters, journals and notebooks by the author.

As Herman Cain heads home for his first face-to-face meeting with wife Gloria since he was accused earlier this week of a 13-year extramarital affair, his campaign has launched “Women for Herman Cain,” an “online national fellowship of women dedicated to helping elect Herman Cain.” The new Web page, which appears to have been added to Cain's campaign website late last night, offers a forum for people to voice their support for the Republican...

The aqueduct stretched across the desert like an endless blue freight train, carrying its cargo of Colorado River water to a concrete building at the base of a craggy-faced mountain. Inside the plant, adorned with the seal of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a set of massive pumps hoisted the water 441 feet high, disgorging it into a tunnel and the final leg of its journey from the Arizona border to a Riverside County reservoir. The Julian Hinds Pumping Plant is one of the hydraulic hearts of California's vast water supply system, built early in the last century to push water from where it is to where it isn't, no matter how many hundreds of miles of desert, mountains and valleys are in the way. Defying geography on such a grand scale takes energy.

This is not a subtle town. Its people drink Corona beer from the bottle and eat chili dogs. They celebrate important events by dining at Chinese restaurants in which food is ordered by the number. Sometimes they order No. 4 with the chicken chow mein, sometimes No. 11 with egg foo young. But they never order bird's nest soup and they never use chopsticks. I mention that by way of explaining the current bewilderment at the turn of events that may bring the Raiders back to Oakland.

A castle is what lures travelers here for the first time. After that, they come back just to relax in this friendly country village. Not that Cambria is a remote rural crossroads with only cows and cats to keep you company. Scenic Pacific Coast Highway is the heavily traveled path to its door. A stream of cars is always headed just up the road to Hearst Castle, one of California's most popular attractions.

Anne Enright doesn't believe in leading readers gently into anything - certainly not an affair. In "The Forgotten Waltz," the Irish writer plunges us headlong into the world of Gina Moynihan, young IT consultant and adulteress at large. Gina is not so much an unreliable narrator as someone obsessed with her own unreliability. Dissecting her love affair with married man Sean Vallely, she constantly doubles back on her own thoughts and memories, gamely trying to pinpoint the moment when her conventional middle-class life - complete with husband and mortgage - dissolved into something darker and more complicated.

The scene Tuesday night at the ArcLight's Cinerama Dome looked like any other Hollywood premiere: a high-energy mix of bright lights, loud music and enthusiastic crowds. Yet there was no red carpet, no celebrity entourages, no drove of paparazzi — because the real stars of "Paranormal Activity 3" are not the film's cast, but its fans. More than 2,200 ardent followers of the "found-footage" horror franchise queued up for several hours for a special "Paranormal Activity 3" preview two days ahead of the film's Thursday midnight opening.