VANISHING ACT IN VEGAS

SIN CITY WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!   Former vaudeville magicians, 80-year-old Flossie and Sterling Silver, try to unravel the mystery surrounding their grandson's new girlfriend Mara the Magnificent, a magician who performs at the Glitz Palace with a white peacock act. Silver Sister twins Goldie and Godvia try to convince their mother and uncle to just enjoy Las Vegas and let them be the sleuths. But Flossie and Sterling enjoy putting on disguises and working "undercover." It almost earns them a couple pieces of real estate six feet under instead.

The Kindle edition of VANISHING ACT IN VEGAS was just released on Amazon and the paperback will follow soon. BarnesandNoble.com has a great presale price on the paperback and they will release it August 28.

There is more to it than meets the eye!

It is a definite given that our country is in a slump. Unemployment is high and in a totally normal reaction we search for the cause and solution.

Well, there are some obvious givens and politicians on both sides add their spin so they can justify pointing the finger at the other side. That's also normal--nothing more than business as usual. Let's face it, we've been through two wars, corporate bailouts of a proportion that no one would ever have imagined, both sides of congress at odds with each other resulting in a stalemate, i.e., absolutely nothing gets done quickly or without lots of yelling, accusations and logjams. We have elections on the horizon so it appears the main agenda is to make sure the other guy doesn't get elected.

Somewhere along the line I thought Congress was supposed to support the good of the people, but that seems to be nothing more than a pipe dream. Fat cats are getting fatter, the "thin cats" are on forced diets and the normal sized ones--what used to be the backbone of America--are present in smaller and smaller numbers every day.

So, with all of that said, here's what hit me like a sledge hammer on Sunday. Sure, we have sent so many of our technical and manufacturing jobs to emerging or thriving nations while ours wallows in unemployment, but there is another factor no other president had to contend with to the degree it is present today. No other generation was faced with this. Think Industrial Revolution, then hype it so many times you'll lose count. The name of the other culprit is AUTOMATION.

On Sunday we drove to The Grove shopping mall and took our ticket from the machine. A real person used to be in the booth. We checked out automatically, too. Many times when we go to the movies we get our ticket online to speed things up and make sure we have a seat. High school kids used to depend upon jobs in the movies to earn expenses. Not now. Most of it is automated.

We went to the grocery store where the scan lines were busy. Less checker's jobs. We made it a point not to use the scan, but waited for the person who was hanging onto their job. Then we filled up at the gas station and inserted a credit card. How many remember the days when gas stations actually had attendants who checked your oil and washed your windshield?

The list just goes on and on. Try to make a list of all the jobs that have been lost that will never come back. Sure we still need people to do the new customer service functions, programming, and all the other things attendant to commerce, but most of them are no longer in the U.S. Once you count the jobs that are now done electronically and multiply that by the number of stores or services across the entire country that replaced real people, it becomes scary. When you only look at one automatic checkstand, for example, it doesn't seem like that much, but what about putting that into the context of over 200,000 supermarkets in the United States. The picture looks a lot different. The big question, of course, is how do we retrain people for jobs that we can then keep in our own country?

Everything we see daily in the news is of great concern, but it is only part of the problem.

Growing up in a happy family

Here's to my mother, Rosetta Lachman, whose brilliant smile guided us through the good times and the bad.

Some of us are fortunate---others are not. Every day the lucky ones read about horrific family situations and wonder how anything like that could ever happen.

But the people living in these disfunctional, sometimes violent families know all too well. I remember a fellow I dated back in the 1980's. His was an alcoholic family, given to vicious arguments at family dinners once his parents and siblings had consumed more booze than they should have. He only indulged in a glass of wine now and then. Once he said, "I can't stand going to those family events because I know all too well how they end."

My sister and I were so lucky. We had a wonderful mother and a wonderful extended family. Our dinners were filled with humor, horsing around, love and everything that goes with the sort of families depicted on the old "Father Knows Best" show of the 50's. I was 17 and my sister was 12 when our father, only 49 years old, was felled by a heart attack. We never knew of Mom's struggles to keep her head above water financially because she soldiered on. There was little insurance, as Dad had his first heart attack when he was 44 and was never able to get more insurance after that. Still, our apartment was filled with laughter and we were raised believing we could do anything we set our minds to.

Until we were adults with our own lives and families, we thought everyone had families like ours. The old Three Musketeers motto "all for one and one for all." We did lose track of the aunts, uncles and cousins on Dad's side after several years, but Mom's family remained close knit---they were always there for each other. Some in Chicago, some in Los Angeles and one in Phoenix. Mom, born in 1909,  was the youngest of ten children. Her brothers and sisters were all dedicated to each other. Many lived into their mid and late nineties, including Mom who nearly reached 97.

I remember the first time I witnessed the back-stabbing possible between siblings. I was in my thirties when I experienced the treachery that existed in my second husband's family. The stories I heard about why they were not in communication with each other seeme so foreign to me. Apparently, his grandfather had been notorious for not trusting banks. The family figured he had a minimum of $25,000 stashed in his apartment in the 1960s. The old man died and while the funeral arrangements were being made, one of the sisters stole the money, then embarked on conspicuous spending within a few weeks. The others stopped speaking to her. His mother's brother cheated her in a real estate deal, then sued her for commissions due to him for selling her an apartment building she lost because of cooked books that he was aware of. One more scratched off.

His mother's younger sister borrowed money to cover her husband's gambling debts. When it wasn't paid back, the two sisters never spoke again. This was so shocking to me, but my ex was used to it and accepted it as normal.

Today as I sit at my computer, time has passed and all of those older members of Mom's family are gone. I reflect upon how much it meant to all of us to be raised in a loving, positive atmosphere and how it helped to shape our lives. My cousin and I remain close, I write books with my sister and consider her my best friend, another cousin just told me they're moving to Las Vegas and I stay in touch with another cousin in Chicago. But the days of those crazy fun-filled family dinners with up to 40 people at a clip are gone, too. I miss them.

Apocalypse Again?

Okay folks, once again the end of the world is supposedly coming--this time by massive fires-- and a fellow named Robert Fitzgerald, a 60 year-old Staten Island resident, has put his money on the line. Either he believes it or figures he'll get back his investment with interest when it doesn't end on May 21 if enough of the people who did buy into this also buy his book.

Every several years someone or many someones hop on this bandwagon, but here we are--still standing! As for Fitzgerald, a retired MTA employee, according to the New York Post he spent his life savings to the tune of about $140,000 on subway posters, and ads on bus kiosks and subway cars. Yep! He set up a campaign to blast the message: "Global Earthquake: The Greatest Ever! Judgment Day May 21, 2011." Wait a minute. The tongue-in-cheek commentator on this morning's news said it would supposedly be  fire. Do they have their signals crossed, or will the fires trigger Fitzgerald's alleged earthquake?

The first question one would have to ask is 'why would someone spend all that money on advertising?' Well, in the case of Fitzgerald, he's written a self-published book, The Doomsday Code. He claims the Bible offers "proof that cannot be dismissed." So is it all a big advertising campaign? Does he hope folks will shell out the money for his book before everything goes KAPOW? After all, if his premise is true, they won't need any money after Saturday.

I don't know about you, but I have plans for Sunday. Apparently Fitzpatrick based his book on the teachings of a fellow named Harold Camping, an 89-year-old radio host. This guy has a rather poor track record when it comes to end-of-the-world prophecies, because he also went public with a prediction that the world would end on Sept. 6, 1994. If my math is right, that's just under seventeen years ago. Long enough for a kid to be born and graduate from high school and any number of other events. Heck, today's Camping's prediction for 1994 came to pass, neither the teens nor Beeber would have seen the light of day. Maybe that's a bad example, but we definitely wouldn't have had Facebook and the internet as we know it today.

Many, many years ago one of my friends was sucked in by a fiery minister who preached all of the bad things in Revelations. She walked around terrifed for days that she would go to heaven and her Lutheran husband would be left to endure Hell on earth. I remember consoling her by saying I was likely to be on Earth, too, so I'd look out for him. I wonder how many of Fitzgerald's books will be sold before last swipe of a credit card, and how will he feel when he opens his eyes on Sunday and nothing has changed?

A Lovely Memory

I spent most of the day working on reviewing the pre-proof for the new Silver Sisters Mysteries book, "Vanishing Act in Vegas." After a few hours, I decided to take a break. The intelligent thing would have been to take a drive or do something away from the computer. Not me. Instead I logged onto my Facebook account and was greeted by a message from my daughter Jakki that brought back a beautiful memory from long ago in a rush of flashbacks.

The song Jakki posted a link to on the Facebook message was Chuck Mangione's BELLAVIA. At first it sounded like the YouTube video had the hiccups, because the same strain repeated over and over. Then all of a sudden, there it was---our "Palm Springs" music. Visions of Highway 111 on the way to Palm Springs CA, Jakki and my son Jason, only a few years older at that time than Jakki's sons are now, a temperate breeze ruffling our hair as we flew along the wide open highway in my big 1970 Buick convertible with the top down and the radio blaring Bellavia. The music was so perfect for the day. It felt like the freedom to do whatever we wanted to.

Would you believe that until she posted the link today, I never really knew the name of the piece. It was simply our Palm Springs music. She mentioned stopping at the big brontosaurus at the side of the road, which was really a small museum later joined by a T-Rex museum. Sort of an icon of the road for anyone who has traveled that way. Upon seeing it in the middle of the desert, most kids shout, "Oh, can we go see the big dinosaur?" and my kids were no exception.

The power of music is amazing, isn't it? Think about it. We remember the words to songs years and years later, but might not remember what happened a few days ago. All we have to do is hear a few notes. Quite often a string of images, experiences or sights and sounds come right along with that memory of lyrics, more or less like the magician continuing to pull handerkerchiefs out of his sleeve.

So to Jakki I say, thanks for that string of memories today. I loved it. There are certain trips I remember so well, and that was one of them. I was still an interior designer back then and working on designing a corporate condo in Palm Springs. I had to install the accessories---the finishing touch, and decided to bring the kids along for the weekend. Just the three of us, beautiful weather in Palm Springs and Chuck Mangione.