Music Sundays | Rickie Lee Jones | The Girl at Her Volcano

November 15, 2020MusicRaymond Tomlin

At age 15, a young Rickie Lee Jones dropped out of school and ran away from her Pacific Northwest home in search of her father, an itinerant jazz musician, who had abandoned her family when she was 10 years of age. After spending time living in a barrio in Los Angeles, once on the road again, Rickie Lee finally located her father in Kansas City, Missouri — but didn’t end up staying very long, instead returning to her Puget Sound home, writing her GED, enrolling first at a small college in Tacoma, and afterward, at age 18, moving south to Huntington Beach, California.

Tom Waits’ interpretation of the classic Bernstein/Sondheim song, Somewhere, from the 1961 musical West Side Story, the song on the 1978 Tom Waits album, Blue Valentine.

While in L.A., Rickie Lee played in bars and coffee houses in L.A., and at the age of 21 she began to play in clubs in Venice, sitting in with various jazz bands. Soon after Rickie Lee moved to Venice, where she met local piano player and songwriter Alfred Johnson, the two of them in time setting about to compose the songs Weasel and the White Boys, and Company, both songs later included in Rickie Lee’s eponymous début album.

By 1977, Rickie Lee was playing original material at Hollywood’s Ala Carte Club, when she came to the attention of Tom Waits, who was particularly impressed with her interpretation of a song her father had written, The Moon is Made of Gold. By early 1978, Rickie Lee found herself in the studio where Tom Waits was recording his latest album, Blue Valentine.

Towards the end of the Warner Bros. Blue Valentine recording session, with all the musicians in the room, Rickie was asked if she wanted to record some tracks on the master tape, whereupon she laid down four tracks: Weasel and the White Boys, Company, Easy Money, and The Last Chance Texaco — and thought nothing more of it, until Warner Bros. executive and producer Lenny Waronker was listening to the master tape in his office one day, and was floored when he heard Rickie Lee Jones for the first time.

A year later, in March 1979, Rickie Lee Jones was released and became a hit, buoyed by the chart success of the jazz-flavoured single Chuck E.’s In Love, which hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Rickie Lee became an overnight sensation, touring the album across North America and Europe.
I saw Rickie Lee in Vancouver, at The Orpheum, in the summer of 1979.
Rickie Lee followed up her début album with Pirates, considered by many to be her masterpiece, the album returning her to the upper echelons of the charts, along the way garnering a rave five-star review in Rolling Stone.

Long story short, success proved a challenge for Rickie Lee. Behind the scenes, by late 1982 Rickie Lee was struggling with intense addictions, ranging from alcohol, to heroin and cocaine. The authorities were aware of her drug usage, as a Reagan administration set about to make an example of her, and charge and jail her. An oft told tale in the music industry.
Prior to her being charged, Warner Bros. made arrangements to spirit Rickie Lee out of the country, to the south of France — but before leaving, Rickie Lee insisted on recording a 10″ EP, 1983’s jazz-infused Girl At Her Volcano, a virtually unknown album in Rickie Lee’s vast discography, but by far my favourite Rickie Lee recording, and the music which became the soundtrack of my children’s lives in their early, and most formative years.

Lush Life (Girl at Her Volcano), recorded live at L.A.’s Perkins Palace, April 16, 1982

Cobbling together a recording as best they could before spiriting a troubled Rickie Lee out of the country and to safety, the Girl At Her Volcano EP, while highlighting Rickie Lee’s propensity for jazz material, given that the recording is evenly split between classic pop studio and live jazz material actually reveals itself to be a surprisingly cohesive recording.

The studio material, arrangement and production-wise, balances the atmospherics of 1981’s Pirates with the impressionistic, airy tone of The Magazine, which also was to display a return to a more upbeat, joyous jazz-pop style. The lone original is the beautiful two-minute Hey Bub, which, as the liner notes reveal, was the first song written for Pirates in September 1979 but was left off the LP. It’s similar to those lonely, sad, forlorn ballads from the album like Skeletons or The Returns, and similarly gorgeous.

The brief, electric piano-fuelled So Long is a Girl At Her Volcano highlight.

The real highlights of Girl At Her Volcano, though, have to be her sublime live renditions of some notable jazz standards. Rickie Lee’s interpretations of Lush Life and My Funny Valentine breathe new life into familiar material; her emotive vocals and inventive phrasing completely rejuvenate and revitalize the songs. She puts in a passionate vocal performance, certainly, but also a technically superb performance — with dazzling range, precision, and control. Rickie Lee’s voice is not especially big but she wows with her incredible feeling and ability. Those two recordings are from consecutive nights in Pasadena’s Perkins Palace and the LA’s Roxy on April 17-18, 1982, and, along with a September 1979 recording of Something Cool from Amsterdam’s Theater Carre, represent three of Rickie Lee Jones’ career best vocal performances, simply moving and spine-chilling in their intensity.
All of six years of age, when Megan first heard Girl At Her Volcano, and Rickie Lee’s interpretation of Richard Rodgers’ My Funny Valentine — Jude and Megan and I were on our way back home from Seattle, where we’d spent the weekend, as we did once a month throughout the 1980s, and where I’d pick up a cassette of the as-yet-unreleased-in-Canada Girl At Her Volcano EP, late in the day, the night sky dark, clear and purple, Megan sitting nestled in the passenger seat, Jude sound asleep in the back seat, she turned to me and quietly asked, “Daddy, how can someone say …

Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable.

Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak
Are you smart?

“… isn’t Rickie Lee being cruel when she sings those lyrics? Are those the words you use to say to someone you love, that you really love them?”
From that chill 1983 autumn night until this pandemic-infused mid-autumn November, My Funny Valentine remains a Rickie Lee Jones unfavourite song for Megan, however much she loves everything else that Rickie Lee has recorded over the years, the soundtrack of a young girl’s life growing up, and now the mother of three children, living over on Vancouver’s east side.
Have a listen, and see what you think of Rickie Lee’s My Funny Valentine.

Stories of a Life | Summer Travels to Nova Scotia, But No More

November 14, 2020Stories of a Life, Travel, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

In the mid-1980s a friend of mine with whom I’d gone to school at Templeton Secondary on Vancouver’s east side, and someone with whom I’d worked in radio — his achievements in radio were far greater than mine — met a woman, fell in love, and in 1988 the two were married, in Nova Scotia, her home since the late 1970s, where she worked as a librarian.
Now, this woman had in the 1960s, while in her teens and early twenties, had a very successful career as a model, and on the advice of her financial advisor invested in property in Nova Scotia — which to this day remains undervalued — and specifically in the community where her parents visited each summer when she was a child, the east coast township of Annapolis Royal, a beautiful waterfront community nestled in the Annapolis Valley.
Both my friend and his new bride — who had moved to British Columbia with her new husband and taken on a job as a librarian in a rural, waterfront community just outside of Metro Vancouver — were people I spoke with regularly and visited often. We were close, and whenever they were in town, we would go for dinner at a comforting restaurant where the food was good, somewhere in the city of Vancouver. For seven years, the two of them were a regular fixture within my social circle, and good friends.
In early March of 1995, when I called over to their home one Wednesday evening, quite surprisingly my friend Corinne did not answer the phone — Donald answered the phone. “Where is Corinne?” I asked. “Oh, she’s at a library Board meeting,” he answered. And so it went, twice a week, every week through near the end of June — Corinne never available, at a meeting or out with friends, or a walk, in town, or otherwise unavailable. Until …
One day in late June, I got a call from Corinne; she was back in Nova Scotia, had returned there from her home in British Columbia, had filed for divorce from Donald, and was as lonely as lonely could be, she told me. “Raymond, come visit me in Annapolis Royal. I miss you, and I need to see you. Come stay with me this summer, and I promise that the two of us will have a good time together, and that you’ll just love Nova Scotia.”

And thus began, the first of 15 consecutive summer visits I made to Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia and environs, a lovely community, where I met everyone in town, during the summer months becoming something of a fixture in the community, where people pleaded with me to move back east, where I was repeatedly offered the job as general manager of the King’s Theatre, where I could purchase a house on 10 acres for $40,000, where I helped run NDP campaigns on three occasions (and where I met a callow young fellow by the name of Stephen McNeil who, as I predicted when speaking with him, would be Premier of the province one day — a prediction, quite obviously, which came to pass), where I fell in love with the community and all the wonderful people I met over the years, recovering from the hurly burly of my west coast life, over the weeks I spent each summer in the tranquil community on the Annapolis River.

All was well in each of the summers, until 2010, when I travelled back east to Annapolis Royal to celebrate my 60th birthday. Corinne, a decided personality, had over the years become increasingly dissatisfied with her life, both in Annapolis Royal, and with life in general.
As the years passed, she made it clear that my visit was to be shorter, more truncated, no longer than 10 days, after which I must leave. On my birthday in 2010, which we celebrated at a wonderful waterfront restaurant, Corinne insisted I pay for the two of us, a bill which far exceeded $150 — which for me was a lot of money, when added to the now $1000 airfare, my stay in Halifax on the way to Annapolis Royal, and on the way back, and Corinne’s insistence that I pay for all expenses for the two of us during my stay in her home, which was strange given that Corinne owned two large, revenue-generating apartment buildings in town, as well as thriving storefront properties, and her own, nicely-situated waterfront home.
In the summer of 2010, with Stephen McNeil finally having fulfilled his commitment to bring high-speed internet to his rural Annapolis Royal constituency, I also helped Corinne establish a stable Wi-Fi connection, set up her new laptop computer, got her on the world wide web, and placed a couple of thousand mp3s of her favourite music — like me, she’s a big fan of progressive country music — onto her newly acquired computer.
All was right with the world, as four of the nights I was in Annapolis Royal, the two of us were invited out for dinner at the homes of various mutual friends, enjoyed an incredibly bountiful church dinner on the Friday nights, visiting at the farmer’s market on Wednesday & Saturday, where I picked up a handful of hand-sewn wash cloths and nautically-themed cotton coasters, as well as a beautiful and a small, lovingly hand-sewn quilt, paying only $10 for the latter — all of which items I enjoy to this day!

All was well until the Saturday evening, when Corinne and I repaired to the King’s Theatre, to attend a student concert of a choir, musicians, and individual singers hailing from Annapolis Royal, a beautiful night of music and song celebrated with the townspeople, and visitors from across the Maritimes and the U.S. northeast — and me, of course.
On that evening, Corinne was working the front of the house prior to the concert starting, supervising the volunteer staff, making sure tickets were taken, the concession was working well & efficiently, and persons taken to their seats in readiness for the concert that was about to begin. One of the volunteers was a 17-year-old young woman, recently graduated with first class honours from Annapolis Royal Secondary and enrolled for the fall session at Dalhousie University, as becoming as could be, all primly dressed (as Corinne insisted) in a black skirt with a hem no more than two inches above the knee, and a starched white blouse, hair neatly kept, and all freshly scrubbed and presentable, a picture of innocence and sophistication.
As it happens, I first met this young woman when she was just a toddler, when Corinne and I visited at her parent’s home, which we both did each of the 15 years I travelled back east. So, I had watched this young girl grow into a woman of substance and no little élan, the apple of her parent’s eye and I’m sure they thought, a tribute to their superior parenting skills — which is to say, they loved her, brought her up with the values of service to the community, teaching her to express kindness and consideration for all.
Now, I hadn’t noticed it, but Corinne did, and as she was standing next to me, called the young woman over to angrily express her disdain at the …

“… entirely inappropriate nose ring you are wearing, which I will simply not have. You know the dress code, and have failed to meet that dress code. In consequence, I am suspending your participation as a volunteer, sending you home immediately, with an instruction that you may not return until I have spoken with your parents, and ensured that you have removed that damnable ring from your nose.”

The above said in a bitterly critical voice designed to embarrass this young woman, who by the time Corinne finished was in tears, the front of her blouse soaked, her nose running (I offered her a freshly-pressed cotton handkerchief, which I always have on my person), shaking, inconsolable.
The young woman left the theatre, people now seated, the concert began.
During the concert, I got up from my seat to repair to the lobby, during which time I called the parents of the young woman, both to check on their daughter’s emotional state, and to gain an understanding as to their position on their daughter’s nose ring, as to whether they approved or not.
They told me that although they were not necessarily thrilled with the nose ring, they saw the ring as an acceptable form of rebellion, and respected their daughter’s body autonomy, that as long as she was not engaged in an activity that would bring her harm, the two of them were just fine with her choice, and nothing as inconsequential as a nose ring would interfere with their love for their daughter, or her love for them. That said, it being a small town, neither would speak with Corinne about “the incident.”
Later that evening as we prepared for our overnight slumber, with warming herbal tea in hand, I addressed “the incident”, doing so quietly and respectfully, that had occurred earlier that evening in respect of the young woman and the “inappropriate” nose ring, asking Corinne, perhaps, if there might have been a better venue than the front of a packed house to address her concerns with a young woman she’d known since birth, and who had been brought to tears resultant from Corinne’s “intervention” to protect the heritage of the King’s Theatre.
Corinne was having none of it …

“Julienne came to the theatre dressed inappropriately knowing full well what the terms and conditions that have been set by me respecting matters of dress, she ignored the guidelines respecting her presentation, a slap in the face to me, and to the King’s Theatre. I could care less as to whether she is brought to tears — she ignored the rules, and if she wants to feel sorry for herself by crying, that’s her business not mine.”

No more was said that evening, but that was not the end of the matter.
The next day, I told Corinne that I wished to be heard on the matter of the young woman, and what had occurred the previous evening.

“I feel that what occurred last evening and your interaction with Julienne, Corinne, was entirely inappropriate and uncalled for,” I said. “You have, and had, no right to interfere with the bodily autonomy of Julienne, particularly when the item of her dress that so offended you was a barely perceptible nose ring, a bit of rebellion her parents told me last evening of which they both approve. Whether or not Julienne — appropriately dressed in a black skirt and starched blouse, wearing appropriate footwear, and as presentable as could be, the apple of her parents’ eyes, and a young woman, as you well know, who is celebrated for her many contributions to this community — meets the stringent requirements of a dress code you have established, a set of regulations for volunteers that I would suggest to you have been made by you arbitrarily and, as I understand, unilaterally implemented, to speak to this young woman as you did in a crowded theatre, causing her embarrassment, and for her to break down in tears, causes my heart to break, and offends every notion I possess on how those in our lives, and others, should be treated.”

Corinne did not respond, but simply got up and left the room. Later that day she approached me and said, “I’d like you to leave, first thing tomorrow morning.” Which I did, neither of us conversing again.
Upon arriving back in Vancouver, I received a terse, pointed e-mail from Corinne, which read, “You are no longer welcome in my home. Should I never see you again, it will be too soon. Please stay away from Annapolis Royal; it is my home, not yours.”
And thus my summer forays to Nova Scotia came to a close — although, annually over the December holiday season, I do post to Corinne my favourite progressive country music albums of the year, with a video of a song accompanying why it is I find the country artist to be deserving of both her time and my time, and the music transporting.
In 10 years, Corinne has not responded.

Arts Friday | Can Hollywood and Cineplexes Survive Coronavirus?

November 13, 2020Arts Friday, CinemaRaymond Tomlin

Movie theatres have endured world wars, depressions and recessions, and the advent of everything from television to streaming. But COVID-19 and the public health crisis it has generated this year around the globe represents an existential threat to the cinema business like no other.
The novel coronavirus pandemic is upending the movie business.
Once upon a time, a handful of big studios spent billions of dollars making movies, and marketing and distributing those movies to theatres across the globe. But over the past two decades, with a surge in content and streaming delivery services, the old way of doing things has been shifting.

Then, in early March of this year, COVID-19 started spreading across the globe in a big way. The first thing that happened was a bunch of blockbusters got moved: Black Widow Disney’s latest Marvel superhero adventure, was bumped from its May 1, 2020 release date to May 7 2021. That followed news Disney had delayed Mulan, originally slated for March 27, the film moved to Disney Plus — at $29 a pop for young families.

Ditto Warner Brothers’ Wonder Woman 1984, which was moved from this year to who knows when, and No Time to Die, the 25th 007 movie, about which there’s speculation that it, too, will soon become a VOD title.

Paramount’s A Quiet Place Part II (April 23 2021), and Universal’s F9, the latest in the Fast & Furious franchise were also moved (May 28, 2021).
Together, it was estimated that those movies would have brought in somewhere north of $1 billion at the box office in 2020.
“There’s never been a situation like this,” says IndieWire film critic, Eric Kohn. “Fear of the unknown is never a good thing. We’ll return to normalcy at some point, but as we ride this out, there’s going to be near-term pain.”
As Hollywood traverses uncharted territory, studio executives are pleading for patience. “We will get to the other side,” Jim Orr, president of domestic distribution for Universal Pictures, recently told respected industry trade publication Variety. “How long is all of this lasting? Nobody knows.”

Theatre owners believe that after two years of declining box office sales, business will return to normal, and they will see record high box office in 2021, as Hollywood releases a truckload of franchise sequels. The haul includes four films from the Marvel universe — Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (July 9, 2021); Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (tbd); Spider-Man 3 (tbd) and Thor: Love and Thunder (February 18, 2022) — as well as Jurassic World: Dominion (June 10, 2022)The Batman (March 4, 2022), Mission: Impossible 7 (tbd), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (August 6, 2021) and Avatar 2 (December 16, 2021).
“When the 2021 box office eventually is reported, we believe it will be the pessimists and the naysayers who will turn out to have been wrong,” AMC chief Adam Aron told industry analysts in a zoom call earlier this month..
“This year’s box office is going to look like the biggest asterisk you’ve ever seen,” says Kohn. “You’ll never be able to compare 2020 to any other year and have it mean anything. It’s simply going to be a lost year.”

As Barry Hertz wrote in the Globe and Mail earlier this year, “All audiences can do now is hold out hope for a Hollywood ending.”

#USElection2020 | New Prez, Congress + Initiatives, And More

November 9, 2020PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. | 2020 | President-elect | United States of America

Final vote count still to come, from Arizona and Georgia, that will take Joe Biden to 306.

On Saturday afternoon, November 7th, 2020, Joseph R. Biden — a former two-term vice president under Barack Obama, and 36-year veteran of the U.S. Senate — became the 46th president of the United States. His running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, will become the first woman, first African American, and first Indian American to serve as vice president.
The transition process — already planned for months, and underway in earnest today — is too important to be left to Trump’s whims. Fortunately, this isn’t the President-elect’s first rodeo. Having been an essential part of the incoming Obama administration team that collaborated with George W. Bush’s administration in 2008, Biden knows how a presidential transition is supposed to work. Unfortunately, the U.S. has never had a departing president like Donald J. Trump, who has yet to accept reality, and concede.

Nonetheless, President-elect Joe Biden signalled on Sunday he plans to move quickly to build out his government, focusing first on the raging pandemic that will likely dominate the early days of his administration, naming former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy and former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, David Kessler, as co-chairs of a coronavirus working group set to get started; the remaining members of the Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board may be found here.

“People want the country to move forward,” said Kate Bedingfield, Biden deputy campaign manager, in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, “and see President-elect Biden & Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris be provided the opportunity to do the work necessary to get the virus under control, and build our economy back to protect the interests of all Americans.”

Joe Biden’s victory has come as a massive relief to many Americans, after four maddening years of a high-octane, anxiety-ridden Trump White House.

For Biden and Harris, their victory marks the end of an unusually low-key, pandemic campaign — but the beginning of a daunting challenge. Biden, who enters the White House as both the chief executive with the most experience in public service in U.S. history and the oldest man to assume the presidency, will take on his duties amid an historic crisis, a pandemic that has already claimed more American lives than World War I, the Korean War, and Vietnam War combined, producing the highest U.S. jobless rates since the brutal, agonizing years of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

VanRamblings will continue to provide coverage of the Biden-Harris transition — and events as they unfold, through the transition period — up until Inauguration Day, on Wednesday, January 20th, 2021.
In this first of many wrap-up columns on the 2020 U.S. election, we’ll leave you with the following peripheral coverage of the Biden-Harris win, and information on the successful and unsuccessful ballot initiatives — but will begin first with coverage of Congress and Senate.

The Democratic Party lost seats in The House on election night, creating tension in the party between centrist Democrats representing conservative districts, and the more progressive congressional representatives from inner city urban districts.

Although Democrats will maintain the majority they won in the blue wave congressional election of 2018 — widely considered to be a repudiation of the policies and the egregious, uncivilized conduct of Donald Trump — the Democrats lost Congressional seats in last week’s U.S. election, as Republican candidates defeated incumbents in conservative-leaning districts in South Carolina, Iowa and New Mexico. Longtime Republicans also held on in Missouri, Michigan and Ohio. The results will mean that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will have the smallest majority in 18 years.
As more centrist members of Congress lashed out at progressive members of Congress, in a post-election interview with the New York Times, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez indicated she might quit politics, depending on the hostility of the Democratic Party towards progressive causes.

“I don’t even know if I want to be in politics,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Times. She said the Democratic party has been hostile to progressive causes, like Medicare for All and the Movement for Black Lives.

“I don’t even know if I want to be in politics. You know, for real, in the first six months of my term, I didn’t even know if I was going to run for re-election this year.”

“It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy. When your own colleagues talk anonymously in the press and then turn around and say you’re bad because you actually append your name to your opinion.”

“I chose to run for re-election because I felt like I had to prove that this is real. That this movement was real. That I wasn’t a fluke. That people really want guaranteed health care and that people really want the Democratic Party to fight for them.”

“But I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.”

The interview occurred Saturday, shortly after major news networks called the election for President-elect Joe Biden, and after some Democrats blamed progressive messaging for party losses down-ticket.

John Briggs of Black Hawk, Colo., drops off his presidential ballot, and his negative response to a Colorado ballot initiative, as he rejected a 22-week abortion ban.

In U.S. politics, the process of initiatives and referendums allow citizens of many U.S. states to place new legislation on a popular ballot, or to place legislation that has recently been passed by a legislature on a ballot for a popular vote, a signature reform of the Progressive Era.

New York Times’ indispensable The Daily, on how Americans are absorbing the election

Initiatives and referendums, along with recall elections and popular primary elections, are signature reforms of the Progressive Era; they are written into several state constitutions, particularly in the West.

Arising from successful ballot initiatives, marijuana is legal in 36 states across the U.S.

Even as Americans grow more divided politically, marjuana continues to gain ground with every election cycle — 5 states legalized weed in 2020, for recreational use, including Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota. The number of states where recreational use is now permitted:15; cannabis (as opposed to THC-free CBD) is still wholly illegal in 14 states. Every other state falls somewhere in-between.

In Florida, a state that voted for Donald Trump 51.2% to Joe Biden’s 47.8%, in a surprising — although, perhaps, not so surprising — development, Floridians approved a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15. The current minimum wage in Florida is $8.56. The minimum wage in Florida will be raised to $15 an hour over the next six years.
In California, the state’s citizens voted on 12 expensive and important ballot propositions …

Proposition 17, which will give people who are on parole for felony convictions the right to vote, passed, and Proposition 20, which would have increased penalties for some kinds of misdemeanors, failed;

Although homelessness and housing instability were dominant issues facing the state even before the pandemic made them worse, voters soundly rejected Proposition 21, which would have expanded cities’ ability to implement rent control.

Initiatives supported by Governor Gavin Newsom and the state’s Democratic Party, Proposition 19 would give Californians 55 or older a big property tax break when buying a new home. To fund that new tax break, it would curtail a separate tax break Californians may receive on homes inherited from parents and grandparents; and Proposition 15, the complicated, seemingly mundane, but ultimately very consequential measure on Californians’ ballots, if it passes would be one of the biggest tax increases in state history, so that alone is a big deal.

Otherwise, Colorado voters struck down Proposition 115, a measure that sought to ban abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy. About 60% of state residents voted against the measure. Meanwhile, in a regressive move, more than 62% of Louisiana voters supported an amendment to the state constitution that would limit abortion protections.

Voters in California sided with companies such as Uber and Lyft to prevent the state from enacting a local labour law that would have forced companies to provide basic benefits — such as health insurance, minimum wage, overtime and reimbursement for expenses — to independent contractors. Fifty-eight percent of voters approved Proposition 22.

Voters in Mississippi approved the design of a new state flag, which will include an image of a magnolia, the state flower, and the phrase “In God We Trust.” The previous state flag featured the Confederate Battle Cross. It was retired in June as protests against racial injustice were held nationwide. A majority of voters opted to keep the flag in 2001.

VanRamblings will be back later in the week with more on the U.S. election: Donald Trump’s refusal to concede; that Democrat battle to win the two Georgia Senate seats now up for grabs; and answers (or not) on whether Melania is leaving the Orange One, how long it may be before Drumpf is behind bars; whether the Trumpster will resign his office in December, with a newly-installed Prez Pence pardoning ‘The Beast’ for all past wrongdoings (‘cept, that won’t protect him from New York state prosecutors); and which country will offer Trump asylum when the judicial hammer comes down.
Don’t you just love politics? No? See you back here later this week.
First, though, we’ll leave you with a story, and the accompanying video:
Last month, Academy award-winner and everyone’s best friend, Jennifer Lawrence — now a proud Democrat — revealed Trump made her reconsider political views, admitting she was formerly “a little Republican” and voted for John McCain in her first election. “I grew up Republican. My first time voting, I voted for John McCain. I was a little Republican,” she said during an appearance on Dear Media’s Absolutely Not podcast. But soon, she “changed her politics” after Donald Trump was elected president.

“This is an impeached president who’s broken many laws and has refused to condemn white supremacy, and it feels like there has been a line drawn in the sand. I don’t think it’s right,” she said. “It just changes things for me. I don’t want to support a president who supports white supremacists.”

Following the Democratic convention in August, Lawrence publicly endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, explaining her reasoning thusly …

“I’m voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this year because Donald Trump has and will continue to put himself before the safety and well-being of America. He does not represent my values as an American, and most importantly as a human being.”

Here’s Ms. Lawrence outside her home, running through the streets in her pyjamas, screaming and dancing around, celebrating the Biden-Harris win.