The club nights were still fun, but they really only happened once a month or so. It didn’t matter much; we still went out and celebrated whenever something good happened to someone in the group. Still, we found the evening get-togethers at people’s houses to be a lot more fun. It’s a little strange that people didn’t come to our house more. We had a decent sized yard even with Al’s office taking up one corner, and we had a nice charcoal grill that would have been perfect for barbeques. Still, everyone seemed to like to congregate at Bette and Tina’s house more than anywhere else. It didn’t really matter what day it was; we could usually go over any night we felt like it and they’d invite us to stay. It became a sort of routine that we did at least an evening or two a week.

We went to Helena’s sometimes, too, but her house, while grand, was never really a popular meeting point. The youth center she was developing was, though. Once the tables were in there and even after the kids started to congregate there after school and on weekends, Alice and I could usually find at least a few members of the group hanging out there. The same was true of the Planet. Alice and I didn’t usually go for breakfast anymore since it was a bit of a chore to get the kids up and ready to go, but we did go for lunch and in the late afternoon a couple days a week.

It was a little hard to talk to everyone the way we’d used to; we’d gotten fairly domesticated, but I didn’t think it was a in a bad or boring way. One of Alice’s greatest fears was being a boring parent, and being a boring person as a parent. So we tried really hard to keep ourselves aware of what was going on with our friends and fought not to isolate ourselves within our family, which was relatively easy considering that we were always going out to do something with one or more or them, either separately or together as a family.

Alice decided to write several articles freelance for LA Magazine, and that helped. I was trying to get my tennis arm back and was collaborating with lots of fundraising campaigns for cancer research, and we were both fairly busy. Sometimes I would worry that we were neglecting the children, but in retrospect we did spend a lot of time with them.