Who Else is Going to Ronda's After- After Party ?

So, you might wonder, just who else is going to Ronda's after-after party?

Marina Shafir told me today that she is coming, and so did Gene Lebell.


Today, I gave the first donation check to Dr. Jacob Flores, Chief Medical Officer of Community Outreach Medical Services, who is the beneficiary for this party.

Details in a nutshell below, or you can watch the video with Ronda here. 

What do you get? You get to come to a party with 100 other people including:

Ronda Rousey (UFC champion and actress)
Gene Lebell   (Actor & stuntman extraordinaire)
Terry Ilous (singer from Great White)
Mandy Lion (singer from, duh, Mandy Lion)
Marina Shafir (professional MMA fighter)

You get a tax write-off since you are benefiting a non-profit that provides medical care to anyone, regardless of ability to pay.

You get the good feeling of knowing you have helped people in the community while drinking beer.

Tickets are $200 and you can get them here.

Everybody has a back story

"Everybody has a back story."

Since Ronda is always quoting me, I figured it was only fair if I took a turn quoting her. This is her explanation for always giving people the benefit of the doubt, the belief that they may well have just found out they lost their job, their mother may be dying of cancer, who knows. Her point is, it's wrong to judge anyone based on a single interaction.

Two things happened lately that have given me a closer look at other people's lives. First, I bought a bike. I'd been meaning to do that for years and finally got around to it. When you are riding around the neighborhood instead of driving, you see more clearly how people live - old people sitting on their front steps, the smell of fresh cut grass, mothers pushing babies in strollers - and, since this is Santa Monica, lots of nannies pushing babies in strollers, too.  You see houses decorated for the holidays, office workers having their lunches at picnic tables outside.

In short, you see people going about living and realize that there is more than one way to have a good life.

The second thing that happened is Julia got her permit, which means she can drive with a licensed driver in the car. Since she is still learning, we have spent many hours driving off the freeway, through every neighborhood in Los Angeles  - Century City, Beverly Hills, Eagle Rock, West LA, Brentwood, Laurel Canyon, North Hollywood, West Hollywood, Little Armenia.

The world is a complicated place. We drive by orthodox Jewish families who walk everywhere on the weekend because they aren't supposed to drive on the sabbath. We pass hordes of tourists checking out Hollywood and Vine. We see lots of gay drunk people having arguments on the streets outside of clubs. We see lots of straight drunk people having arguments on the streets outside of clubs. We drive by the second and third wives of really rich old men, out jogging to keep in shape so they don't become the third ex-wives.

The benefit of all of this is that as you see people closer, instead of driving 60 miles on hour on the freeway past the exit to their neighborhood, you realize how we are all similar in many ways - just trying to get home from work, hanging out with family and friends, trying to have a decent place to live.  

You see that every life, no matter how privileged, has its challenges and every life, no matter how disdvantaged, has its bright spots.

Los Angeles really is a great place to live. If you don't think so, maybe you just haven't looked closely enough.

After-After Party for Health Rocks

I made that name up so PLEASE feel free to suggest a better one.

On November 9, 2014 Ronda will be having an after - way after - party. Tickets are $200.

It's a party - live music, a no-host bar - with some people you'll recognize from both mixed martial arts and music communities.

The Purpose
Whether you are a musician, an actor or a professional athlete, the entertainment business is feast or famine. For every person making a million dollars, there are 10,000 others barely scraping by.

It's been said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but the fact is, if you are broke you can't afford that ounce of prevention. So, you don't get your cough checked, your flu shot, your screening for anything you might have caught from that groupie you knew you shouldn't have ... well, you get the idea.

We expect to collect a minimum of $20,000 which should go 100% to fund two "Health Rocks days" for entertainers.

It will work like this - we expect to serve a minimum of 200 people with the funds raised and possibly many more.

We'll schedule a date at a clinic in Hollywood and send out notices. If you are in the entertainment business and have financial need, you can make an appointment by phone or online. Possibly you could walk in as well but my guess is that all of the appointments will be taken in advance, so probably not.

You come in that day, get a physical examination, any vaccinations you need, screened for anything of concern, from pregnancy to HIV. If it is minor, you can get a prescription or recommendation and sent on your way.

If it is less minor, you can get a referral to a specialist.

If you are found to have a serious injury or illness and cannot afford treatment, there will be staff right on site to help you sign up for Medicaid, Medicare or any other program that can help you pay for treatment.

We figured this was the best use of the funds, since $20,000 could easily be taken up by one operation. On the other hand, providing care for 200 people could prevent a lot of significant problems later on.

You can buy tickets here. (If you don't see the purchase button on the site, scroll down.)

Why I don't give a damn about winning medals

There was a time when I cared very much about international competition, first as a competitor and later as the parent of a competitor.

I'm very ambivalent about it now. Although it was a great experience for me, I have seen the results be mixed or even overwhelmingly negative for so many people that I feel as if I dodged a bullet.

I teach a class of tough, motivated, hard-working kids in an urban school. They are just starting judo at an age where most kids in the area are dropping out. Well-meaning (and not so well meaning) people encourage me to take them to all of the local tournaments and suggest that a few of them could even be successful on the national or international circuit.

For even one of these kids to compete at the national level would take a lot of money. Who would it benefit? In the wise words of Julie Koyama,

Funding one gifted kid is not a development program.

For the cost of sending one kid to a single national tournament, we could pay for water for every kid at practice for the next two years. (Actually, we have water paid for this year thanks to a donation from Orange County Judo Training Center - THANK YOU that was an amazingly kind thing to do!!!)

For the cost of sending that same kid (or another one), to a second national tournament, we can buy judo gis for five or six kids. (We bought gis for 7 kids and t-shirts for all of the class thanks to a donation to my friend from Italy who I have never met, but THANK YOU also.)

Even if we had the money, who would it benefit? Yes, we do take as many kids as we can to one tournament out of state each year. The last two years, we went to Kansas City. We also took almost everyone on a judo weekend trip a couple of hours away where we had a workout with the team from Millenia (thanks to Gary Butts) and then an inter-club tournament with Guerreros and friends.  This year, we are planning to do that twice, once in the fall and once in the spring.

The answer to who that benefits is  - as many kids as possible.

Too often, the person who benefits from taking students to a large number of tournaments is the instructor. His or her ego is stroked by having students win, sitting in the coach's chair, getting complimented by officials and other coaches who want to USE that young person to win medals for their club or organization.

Here is what I know, and pay attention, because this is important ....

For far too many people, the only happy moments in their childhood will be those they spent on the mat.

For others, the time they spend in judo will make them more physically fit, better able to face their fears, more disciplined and self-confident.

This is why I teach judo.

I have very limited time. In my day job, I'm president of a group of technology companies. Every week, it is an effort to carve out a  few hours for judo. As you can see, every inch of our mats is taken up.

In his book, Inequality, Christopher Jencks argues that ....

Perhaps the reason for building playgrounds for eight-year-olds is not that it increases the average earnings when they are adults, but rather, that in increases the probability of having a good time when they are eight.
 
The judo community seems overrun with people who see these kids as a means to an end, run through enough of them and we can produce an Olympic medalist.

I don't see it that way. Every day is an end in itself.