Elena Jarvis once stayed up all night with Kris Kristofferson, the country legend who wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” and starred in the 1976 film A Star Is Born with Barbra Streisand, which Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper remade in 2018. With the tape recorder running, he talked about Janis Joplin and played songs until the sun came up. She sat in David Letterman’s beat-up truck, the one Johnny Carson wanted off his street, while he talked for an hour without once looking her in the eye.

If they were a major music act in the ’70s and ’80s, Elena probably interviewed them. She even interviewed Madonna, then taped over it because the future Material Girl got on her nerves.

These days, her mornings belong to Lucy, her 28-year-old horse; two 7-year-old dogs, Shaka, a blue heeler, and Honey Bunny, a husky-wolf mix; and whatever wanders over from the wildlife refuge next to her three acres in East Central Florida.

Getting there took decades. She was an entertainment reporter and editor who built entertainment sections from scratch at three newspapers, back when nobody considered music a real beat, and freelanced for a slew of magazines.

She went on to spend decades teaching journalism and advising student media, and by her count she taught well over 12,000 students.

Now, about to turn 74, she is a writer with more material than time, and a lifetime of tapes, letters and records looking for a home.

“I mark my life by different songs,” she says. “I’m one of those annoying people who talk in lyrics.”

It all started with a lot of moving. Her father was a career military officer, and the family never stayed put for long. Elena was born in the Bay Area, then lived in California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and Florida, back and forth, with all her siblings born in Florida along the way. Then the family moved to Panama.

“I grew up in Panama, in Central America, and then moved back to Texas, and then my dad retired in Florida,” she says.

All that moving made for a lonely kid. She didn’t have many friends, so she read.

“I thought, wow, if you can read this book and it can transport you into a better world and make life more bearable, that would be a very noble thing to do as a living.”

Then she read writers’ biographies and rethought the plan.

“I said, I don’t want to suffer and live in a garret and starve to death while I’m waiting to be discovered.”

The answer came from the funny pages. Brenda Starr, the glamorous comic strip reporter, made journalism look like an adventure.

“She was so glamorous, and I thought, well, there you go,” she says. “I’ll become a journalist.”

The music came from her father.

“My father was an alcoholic, but he was a very big music fan,” she says. “All different kinds of music, from Harry Belafonte to Sinatra. He loved Steely Dan.”

That rubbed off.

“I’m not a music snob,” she says. “All forms of music have something to commend them.”

Her sense of social justice came from her grandfather, a Methodist minister. Put the two together, and you get a girl who believed music was the most powerful way to reach people, and who started writing for newspapers at 13.

When the family returned to Florida, she joined the high school paper. Her advisor was Florence Graves, who Elena said went on to break the Bob Packwood sexual harassment story and to start the investigative reporting program at Brandeis University.

“Just a phenomenal person,” Elena says. “She was my mentor.”

At 14, Elena won first place in the state of Florida for opinion writing. The plan was to become a heavy-duty investigative writer. She was good enough to get into Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, one of the country’s most prestigious journalism programs. She couldn’t afford it.

“I didn’t have the money to go out of state, so I went to a college in Pensacola.”

She brings it up more than once, not with bitterness exactly, more like someone who has spent 50 years thinking about the road not taken.

“If I had gone to Medill, I never would have become a rock and roll reporter,” she says.

Instead, she went to the University of West Florida and became an editor, which meant doing every job nobody else wanted. Big names were coming through campus, and one of them was B.B. King.

“I’m trying to make the assignment, and nobody wanted to interview B.B. King,” she says. “I said, well, what the fuck? I’ll interview B.B. King.”

After that, she interviewed everyone who came through town: Jimmy Buffett, Albert King, Freddie King. And Kris Kristofferson.

“I spent the night with Kris Kristofferson,” she says, and then, before anyone gets any ideas: “Not in that sexual way. I stayed up all night interviewing him. I still have it. I digitized it. It’s four hours long.”

Those campus interviews got her foot in the door. An older classmate, back in school to finish his degree, helped her land a job at the Pensacola News Journal, a Gannett paper. Her title was music reporter. Her actual job was music reporter, obituary writer, weather writer, consumer action line, copy girl, and gofer. The paper wanted young readers, the way papers always do, and figured Elena could bring them in. So she helped build its entertainment section from scratch.

In 1974, entertainment wasn’t considered a legitimate beat. Elena was one of four women in the newsroom. The other three were society writers. Her column went into syndication through Gannett, but it did not translate into income.

She also freelanced for several music magazines, including Goldmine and Rolling Stone, where she wrote for the “Random Notes” column.

“Did I make more than my $65 a week? No,” she says. “But I got to go to all the concerts. That was the payback.”

She adds, “There were no medical benefits, no pension, and one week of vacation after ten years. Overtime? Are you kidding me?”

The concerts were worth it. She covered everything from New Orleans to Panama City. Southern rock was king, and she spent plenty of time with Lynyrd Skynyrd, not her favorite, and the Allman Brothers, whom she loved. But she also went where the real blues was. This was the Jim Crow South, and the great Black artists played the Chitlin’ Circuit, not mixed clubs.

“If you wanted to see true blues, you had to go where it was,” she says. “I would go to the Black side of town, where I was the only white face in the whole club, and see people like Bobby “Blue” Bland and Aretha Franklin.”

She describes Abe’s 506 Club, a segregated nightclub in Pensacola’s historic Belmont-Devillers neighborhood, as if she were there last night.

“Top-of-the-line musicians, everybody dressed to the nines, a cigarette girl in a little leopard pillbox hat, working the room,” she remembers. “They were so classy.”

Being a woman on that beat came with its own baggage, some she still carries.

“Even today, when people find out what I did for a living, they say, ‘Oh, you were a groupie,’” she says. “They would never say something like that to Cameron Crowe.”

She shakes her head. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a groupie. They support the arts in their own way. But that was not my way.”

That reputation opened doors. She was the only woman allowed backstage at the Mobile Municipal Auditorium the night she interviewed Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart. The sisters were dating their guitar players at the time, and right in front of them, the boyfriends started hitting on her.

“They’re saying, ‘Oh wow, you’re the best-looking woman reporter I’ve ever seen,’” she says. “Right in front of those girls. I was so disgusted, and told them so.”

She and the Wilson sisters became pretty good friends after that.

“Even the women in rock and roll didn’t get any respect,” she says. “And I’m not sure it’s all that much different today.”

Off the clock, she was just as fearless. She did a lot of crazy stuff, and she doesn’t regret any of it. At her first job in Pensacola, she overheard the older reporters clucking about how terrible LSD was.

“I said, well, I’ve done it 1,000 times, and look, I’m okay.”

The craziest story goes back to 1976. She and two other reporters went to Mexico to interview Americans locked up on drug charges, and she ended up stranded in Nogales, Arizona, with no money and about 100 miles to go to get to a friend’s place in Bisbee. A guy at a gas station offered her a ride after his shift, and she waited at his mother’s house until he got off work. As they were leaving, his mother mentioned he hadn’t been doing that great since he got out of the mental institution. Halfway across the empty desert, Elena noticed him fingering a huge lug wrench wrapped in silver duct tape. Then he pointed to a Penthouse Magazine on the floorboard and asked her to read him the sex letters.

So she talked. And talked. Somewhere along the way, she figured out he knew her friend in Bisbee, and she made sure to mention that her friend was expecting them both. When they pulled into town, the friend took one look at the driver and told her to get that lunatic out of there.

“If I hadn’t been such a blabbermouth,” she says, “my bones would still be moldering somewhere out there in the desert.”

She doesn’t regret that one either.

“It’s all material,” she says.

Material didn’t pay the rent, though. After six or seven years in Pensacola, she couldn’t get a raise or a promotion, so she left for Colorado Springs and built another entertainment section from nothing, this time as entertainment editor at The Gazette. Jazz ruled there, and the city had a big classical scene, so she leaned on people who knew more than she did.

“I’m not an expert on music,” she says. “I always thought you had to be a musician to be a true expert.”

She knew how to do her homework, and she preached it to her students for years.

“Read the books. Know the history. You won’t get it all from Googling.”

Colorado went the way of Pensacola.

“I couldn’t get a raise, couldn’t get a promotion, couldn’t get nothing,” she says.

So in 1984 she moved to Ventura, California, to join the Ventura County Star, the daily newspaper for all of Ventura County, acquired by Gannett Co. Inc. in 2016.

“I was ostensibly sent to cover the Olympics,” she says. “I was covering the kayak racing in Lake Casitas.”

The VC Star became home for years. She wrote about 35 feature stories a month on music and the arts, plus social justice stories she cared about, and she made her own assignments. She says that freedom was the real gift of missing out on Medill.

“If you go to work for the LA Times and you’re writing about music, that’s all you’re writing about,” she says. “I was able to write about whatever I felt like writing, which was a blast. Was it profitable? No. But it was a lot of fun.”

All that writing left her with a mountain of tape, somewhere around 2,000 interviews on cassette. Some still stand out. The Kristofferson tape, of course. Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who played her songs during the interview. And the obscure ones she loves most, with blues players nobody remembers, like Willie "Ooh Wee It's a Miracle" Hightower.

Then there’s the one that no longer exists.

“I had a good interview with Madonna,” she says, “but she pissed me off, so I taped over it.”

It was a phone interview around 1983 or 1984, when Madonna’s first record was coming out.

“She’s going on and on about how she’s gonna be a big star. Okay, fine, great.” Elena rolls her eyes, then concedes. “Hey, you can’t argue with success, can you?”

The Letterman interview, on the other hand, she earned the hard way. It was the ‘80s, and she was buried at her desk in Ventura when the owner of a little motor speedway in Oxnard called. He told her David Letterman loved racing miniature cars. He was coming that day, and he’d agreed to do an interview.

The rookie at the next desk told her to just wing it.

“I said there’s no way in hell I’m going to wing an interview with David Letterman. Have you ever seen him interview people?”

So she went to the library and spent two or three hours reading everything she could get her hands on. Then she drove to the track, and sure enough, there he was.

“I said, ‘Hi, I understand you said you would do an interview,’” she says. “He says, ‘I never said any such thing.’ I said, ‘Well, here I am.’” She grins. “And he said okay.”

They sat in his old pickup truck and talked for about an hour. That refusal to look at her, Elena thinks, came from the woman who had been stalking him at the time. In her experience, almost every comedian she interviewed turned out to be depressed and withdrawn in person. The exceptions were Bob Hope and John Cleese.

“John Cleese is funny, and he’s an upbeat personality,” she says. “But not David Letterman.”

Still, Letterman gave her a great story. He and Johnny Carson were neighbors in Malibu, back when everyone was waiting to see who would take over Carson’s chair.

“He tells me, Johnny’s really mad at me because of my old beat-up pickup truck,” Elena says. “He doesn’t like me parking it on PCH in front of my house because it’s bringing down the neighborhood.”

So Letterman went out, bought the most expensive car cover he could find, and threw it over the truck. Peace was restored.

“Every time I drove up PCH,” Elena says, “I knew exactly where David Letterman lived. And Johnny Carson too.”

For all the rock stars, the story she calls the most important of her career has nothing to do with music. She wrote it for Defenders of Wildlife Magazine, about the Barstow-to-Las Vegas motorcycle race, thousands of motorcycles revving across the Mojave Desert. To cover it, she got up at 2 a.m. and drove to Barstow through fog so thick she couldn’t see the hood of her car.

“I was so afraid I was going to die,” she says.

The story earned rave reviews from the LA Times and helped pass the California Desert Protection Act in 1994.

Somewhere in all of that, she also became a journalism professor. She started teaching at a community college in Ventura County, north of Los Angeles, while she was still at the VC Star, partly because she needed the money. But people in the newsroom kept griping about the new hires.

“They were saying, ‘What are they teaching them in college? Because they don’t know shit about decorum or discretion or reporting,’” she says. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can help. Give other people a leg up, because I’ve been through the same thing they’re going through.’”

Later she went all in. She earned her master’s while freelancing at the LA Times, and in the middle of it all, she was divorcing her husband of 14 years, a musician. She left the newsroom and took over UCLA’s media publications program. Part of the reason, she admits, was pure fantasy. She’d been writing 75 to 100 pages a week for a newspaper and wondered what she could do with a book.

“I thought, if I got into education, oh, I’ll have all this free time,” she says. “I’ll have all the summers. All I have to do is go in there and teach a class or two, and the rest of the time...” She throws up her hands. “Oh, fuck me, right?”

Teaching and advising student media turned out to be even more all-consuming than journalism, and then life made its own plans. When her mother developed dementia, Elena left UCLA and her house by the beach and moved to Florida to take care of her. It became a 17-year ordeal. She spent 20 years at Daytona State College, teaching five classes of 30 students a semester, plus extra classes to pay for her mother’s assisted living.

Through every move, the other half of the reason she stayed in the classroom was what kept her going. Elena went to community college and a state school, not an Ivy, and built a career anyway. She wanted her students to see that.

“Look what I was able to make out of my career,” she says. “If I can do it, you can do it. There’s nothing to hold you back.”

Some students, she says, heard that as bragging. Plenty of others heard permission, and they still talk about her that way. She calls it paying it forward.

“I owe the people who helped me,” she says. “You turn back and help the people behind you. Let’s face it, journalism is the only link to reality we’ve got. We need journalists with compassion and heart who know what it is to struggle.”

That conviction comes partly from what she saw at the top of the business. She freelanced for the LA Times for four years and met plenty of wonderful people there. She also met elitists. She remembers one hire at The Star who arrived with a Harvard divinity degree and a string of Ivy League credentials.

“She could not write her way out of a wet paper bag,” Elena says.

Elena says we need journalists who know the struggle.

“We need people in the media who know what it’s like not to be able to pay your rent if you put gas in your car. I didn’t even have a telephone in college. Whenever I wanted to call someone, I had to go to the 7-Eleven, use the pay phone, and have them call me back there. How we communicated is beyond me, but we did somehow.”

For all that, she hasn’t given up on the business. She believes journalism will emerge from this upheaval stronger and more necessary than ever, even as corporate owners chase shareholder profits, and she sees real openings on platforms like Substack for independent voices. In a world drowning in misinformation and AI slop, she says, credibility is everything.

“It’s like drinking water out of a fire hose,” she says. “The journalists who make it will be the ones who can distill that flood into what people need.”

Her advice to students who are dead set on the field anyway is blunt.

“It’s a war of attrition. It’s always been a war of attrition,” she says. “Just keep trying. Network. Be open to people.”

She says perseverance is the number one talent a journalist needs. When she got her first job in 1974, the country was in a recession, and everyone told her she’d never work in journalism.

“But I got a job in journalism,” she says. “And now there are more outlets than ever.”

Her own war of attrition ended somewhere much quieter. Today, the wild is right outside her door. She has cared about the land since she was a kid in Panama.

“You’re surrounded by all these natural wonders,” she says.

It makes sense, then, that she ended up where she is. Her three acres sit on the edge of a wildlife refuge.

“I see bears every day,” she says. “Every time I go out in my yard, I have a nature encounter. It might be a bird. It might be a raccoon. It might be a possum.”

The writing has been slower lately, but she is working her way back. She is 150 pages into a novella about a man named Jason, built around a painting the artist Henry Taylor made of him at Camarillo State Hospital, long before Taylor got a retrospective at the Whitney. Elena bought one of Taylor’s paintings for $250. Auction houses have told her it could go for $150,000. She’s not selling, at least not until she finishes the novella. She hopes to finish it by February or March.

There is also a biography of Michael Balog, the Ventura artist who took his own life with a rifle in the summer of 1987. The research is done, along with a 50-page proposal, chapter outlines, and sample chapters, waiting on an agent.

She writes every day, but says it’s sometimes more like journaling.

“I haven’t really written anything of substance for about a year,” she says. “It’s such a chaotic time in our world. There are bigger fish to fry.”

And then there’s the stuff, a lifetime of it.

“I spent my whole life, as writers do, collecting material in hopes of being able to write about it later on,” she says. “Well, now I find myself running out of road. I have much more material than I have time to write.”

The inventory reads like a museum catalog. Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 albums, CDs, and cassettes. Mix tapes. Bootlegs, including a Little Feat show from the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. About 2,000 taped interviews. Personal letters from musicians and other celebrities. A file cabinet full of press kits and promo pictures. Books, sheet music and posters.

“I think that would be a fine addition to somebody’s collection,” she says.

She wants it to go to a university or a student radio station, someplace scholars and students can actually use it. UCLA has a fantastic music library, and she used to see Bob Dylan going in there, but they’re full. So she is writing letters to other music schools and waiting to see who bites.

“It’s a huge endeavor,” she says.

Meanwhile, she writes, looking out at the refuge where the bears wander. She used to say there was no point in writing if nobody read it. She’s changed her mind.

“If you get joy out of it, you like what you’ve written, then hey, mission accomplished,” she says.

At 73, she doesn’t waste much time worrying about getting older.

“I’m just fortunate that I am old,” she says. “I’ve done some crazy shit in my life.”

There was a version of Joanne who existed before all of this, before the caregiving, the quiet rooms, the slow, patient tending to someone else's decline. That woman printed photographs of men she'd met online and pinned them to her office wall. She flew to Alaska once, to spend a week on a boat with a man she'd never met. She cancelled a 250-guest wedding just weeks before the event. She was, by every account, including her own, too much. Too loud, too opinionated, too scary. She still is, in flashes, when a story calls for it. But mostly now she is something else: patient in a way she never used to be, present in a way life eventually demands of anyone who loves hard enough. Devotion did that. So did time. And, finally, some hard-won wisdom.

She dreams of a future that combines her wild passion and her newfound peace, but for now, all of that other life waits. Her own story sits on a shelf, dusted off mostly in daydreams, while she tends to her mother’s instead.

Joanne is turning seventy this year, and she does not look it. She has shoulder length dark hair now, not the long, center-parted mane she wore in high school and through her twenties, when strangers used to stop her just to say she looked like Cher. That comparison belongs to a younger version of her, the one caught in old photographs. What she has now are dark eyes that miss nothing and a beautiful smile, one that can flip mid-story about her wild days into something almost sinister, like she is deciding how much of the truth you can handle.

She is still, unmistakably, a good-looking woman, and she carries a raunchy sense of humor that can reduce her best friend of more than fifty years to tears, the kind of laugh that makes you cross your legs. She calls herself a strega, the Italian word for witch, and it fits her better than any resemblance to a pop star ever did.

She is Italian in every way that matters. Her blood tells a longer story, one that starts in a town in the Campania region near Salerno called Giffoni Valle Piana. Her family came to the United States through Ellis Island into the Bronx, and finally out to Burbank, California, chasing a rumor her grandfather had heard about a good life out west. Her mother had five siblings, three older sisters, one younger, and an older brother who later became a public defender.

Her father was Cherokee, Irish, and Scottish, a Korean War veteran, and the son of a closeted KKK member. After his father died, he found the hood and burned it. That is her father's story in miniature: the old hatreds knocking at the door, and someone deciding to set them on fire instead of wearing them.

Joanne remembers her grandfather differently than his history might imply. She said he was gentle, the kind of man who would put her on his lap under a big tree and read book after book to her. It instilled in her a love of reading.

Joanne grew up in a family surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles, a house that was always loud, always full, always Italian even when the last name on the mailbox said otherwise. That kind of house makes a certain kind of woman, one who loves loudly, fights loudly, and feels everything at full volume, and Joanne is that woman through and through. She is the oldest of three sisters. Mary is two and a half years younger, and then Teri, eight years younger than Joanne.

Growing up, the fights between the three of them are the stuff of family legend now, the kind of stories that get retold at every holiday table. Joanne once got into a fight with Mary and threw a ceramic mug that opened a gash in her forehead deep enough for stitches. Joanne was eighteen at the time and Mary was barely sixteen, which meant the hospital reported it as assault on a minor. A deputy showed up at Joanne’s work to look into it. Luckily, he had siblings of his own and let her off the hook. Another fight with Mary involved a tube of toothpaste squeezed into Joanne’s hair. Her parents were tired of the shenanigans and made her go to high school that way.

Physical altercations were simply a normal part of growing up. Their father hit them too, not beatings exactly, but what Joanne calls “reactive hitting.”

“He once chased me over a mile to a friend’s house to give me a punishment, but he never caught me,” Joanne says. “He could pull out a belt faster than anyone.”

It is the kind of childhood that either breaks a person or toughens them into someone who can survive almost anything. Joanne became the second kind. And being the oldest meant she went first into everything else too.

First into kindergarten, where she remembers being terrified and teased. First into junior high, where three girls she'd believed were her best friends in the last part of elementary school, right before they were all supposed to move on together, sat her down and told her, with ice-cold cruelty, that they were no longer her friends. She never learned why. She only learned that it hurt in a way that stayed. Interestingly, two of these girls invited her to lunch when they were all in their fifties, to apologize. Joanne still didn't get an answer, just the two of them blaming each other.

It got worse before it got better. A fight with two older girls she’d trusted, over nothing, ended with Joanne coming home with a black eye and a split lip, and her parents deciding, in the way of that generation, that this was simply the street teaching her a lesson she’d have to learn alone.

“This wasn’t New York,” she says now, half laughing at the memory. “This was fucking Burbank.”

But something in her calcified that night.

“I think it made me really work on being nicer to people,” she says, “because I know what it was like to not have people be nice to you.”

One of those random acts of kindness is a story her best friend still tells. This girl who had just turned sixteen, wearing hot pants, walked into a Burbank High School classroom fresh from Miami, having left every friend she’d ever had behind. Joanne was the first person to talk to her. Like Joanne, her new friend came from an Italian family, and the two have been inseparable ever since. It is one of the very few times Joanne let herself trust a woman completely, and that trust has never wavered.

The funny thing is, that same friend was jumped by two girls in her first two weeks at the new school, putting her in the hospital with a concussion. Joanne, who had known her only a couple of weeks, sat with her at the hospital the whole time. She never once mentioned that something almost identical had happened to her just a year before.

“Maybe it was too soon,” she says. “Or maybe it’s just a case of moving on. I don’t like to go back to the bad times.”

That may be true, but Joanne admits it’s also self defense, a way of not revisiting the moments that changed her. Her junior high betrayal, she says, set the groundwork for not trusting women, a caution that would follow her for the next fifty years, surfacing even in friendships she wanted badly to believe in.

“It always surprises the hell out of me when I believe somebody, and then it turns out that they were lying to begin with,” she says. “And in the back of my mind I know they were lying, and I just keep saying to myself, ‘No, Joanne, they wouldn’t lie to you.’”

Her parents’ marriage was its own education. Her father strayed, and her mother stayed, the way a lot of women of that era stayed, not out of ignorance but out of some inherited belief that leaving wasn’t an option available to her.

Joanne understood divorce. Plenty of her friends’ parents had done it. What she couldn’t understand was why her own mother didn’t. When she finally stepped back and looked at it clearly, she saw a woman who had been told by her own sisters, in no uncertain terms, that you stay with the man. No further discussion. As for her father’s restlessness, Joanne says there’s always a why.

“I think it’s because of where my father came from. He was an independent man who ran his family’s household by himself, and then he becomes the grand master of his own family and becomes smothered.”

Joanne likes to say she turned out more like her father than her mother.

“I’m more like him—impatient, impulsive, capable of a certain hardness and tenderness,” she says. “He taught himself patience late in life.”

If you want to understand the shape of Joanne’s twenties and thirties, understand that she was, by her own description, easily swayed by men, and not without reason.

“I had the look,” she says. “I had money because I worked. I didn’t have the education, but I was independent.”

She was engaged in her early twenties and called it off weeks from a wedding with two hundred and fifty guests, walking away from the enormous machine of it because something in her refused to marry a man who didn't understand her commitment to family, and who, when it counted, wouldn't go to bat for her.

Then came Barry.

“He was so good looking,” she says. “I was gaga in love with him.”

They married six months to the day after they met and stayed married twenty years, though they only lived together for ten of them, which tells you something about the particular dynamic of that love. They had two sons together, Evan and James, and Joanne adopted a third, Preston, her husband’s boy from before, whose mother was fighting a brain tumor and eventually signed away her parental rights so Joanne could raise him properly. Joanne had been mothering him since he was three years old.

By the time Preston’s mother recovered, she had remarried, and Preston was over eighteen and in the Navy.

Before Evan, there was a daughter Joanne lost in her fifth month of pregnancy, a loss she still carries the way you carry anything that never got the chance to become a memory of its own.

The marriage to Barry cracked slowly and then all at once, undone by money, which, according to Joanne, “seems to be the standard in my fucking life with men.” And then there was the kind of fighting that left neither of them anywhere to stand. They tried therapy, but it didn’t take. She remembers the fights now as things that should never have been tolerated by either of them.

“I really was very much in love with Barry until that marriage became so fractured and broken,” she says.

Her son Evan, now thirty nine, had a front row seat to it all. James was too young to remember.

“Unfortunately, Evan has a photographic memory,” she says. “He should never have had to witness this.”

What remains, decades later, is something rarer than most divorces produce: a friendship. She talks to Barry nearly every day.

Joanne sees now how much of that fighting in her marriage with Barry was simply a replication of what she grew up with.

“I can remember my mother throwing a glass of milk at my father at the dinner table, but he didn’t fight back,” she says. “I think my father was afraid of my mother’s family. Very much like The Godfather.”

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Joanne built an entire career out of nothing but instinct and nerve. She rose to senior vice president in the aviation industry, a woman who could tell you what a plane could land on and what it couldn’t, the design limits of the plane, and everything you need to know about cabin safety. She counted Steve Jobs and the Clintons among her many high-profile clients, and was once on call around the clock for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s household.

“I think it was miraculous how far I went up the corporate ladder,” she says.

She is proudest, though, not of the title but of the people she pulled up with her, like the single mother working at an AT&T sales desk who Joanne spotted and mentored into a real career in aviation.

She was also, in those years, a single mother in Los Angeles doing what she now describes without flinching as some very wild things.

“I did very daring things in my forties and early fifties,” she says. “Very promiscuous things. I was on the quest for a boyfriend.”

Tuesday nights were date nights. She printed photographs of the men she met on early online dating sites and pinned them to the tufted walls of her office like a woman building a murder board. She says she mainly did this to entertain her young staff who were always interested in anything that had to do with dating. She also saw this as a safety net. The staff knew who she was with and where she was going.

“Of course, the morning after a date, the staff wanted to know all the gory details.

There was the man in Alaska, who she says resembled Grizzly Adams, a federal forestry agent who wrote and produced a documentary on brown bears for National Geographic.

“I was too citified for him,” she says.

There was the judge who handled mental illness cases and brought his golden retriever on every date with Joanne, which is ironic, given his line of work, since bringing a dog along felt a little unhinged. He'd had several dogs over the years, and always gave them the same name: Mattie.

There was the one with the gorgeous online profile who turned out to be living out of a van at a campground rather than the mansion he’d described, a man Joanne’s son Evan nicknamed Johnny Red Corn on sight.

And there was the one she obsessed over for a while, tall, older, funny, in the entertainment industry, with real kindness buried underneath. She even lived in his back house for a stretch. They were never quite compatible but remained friends.

These days, she's given some real thought to why she picked the men she did.

“Sex in my house growing up was a taboo subject,” she says. “It was never explained to me that a rational adult in a real and committed relationship means love and monogamy. For me, sex was just about getting off; giving your body to someone.”

She thinks she picked up a more male perspective of sex from watching her father navigate his marriage, and the woman who stood by and watched.

“I carried that through my entire adulthood,” she said.

That perspective found its clearest expression in an affair, one that has resulted in a different kind of reflection than the rest. He was married, older, and showered her with expensive hotel rooms and dinners. At the time, she thought it was love. Looking back now, she says it gave her something different, something more like a high.

“At no point in time did I ever think he would leave his wife,” she says. “And he never did.”

She wasn’t waiting for that ending. She understood, even then, what she was choosing. What she contemplates now isn't the affair itself so much as the arithmetic of it, a man's whole deception, the wife, children, and grandchildren he'd built a life around.

“I looked at that man more so than the wrongdoing on my part, and think, ‘How could you? How could you live like this?’”

It is a way of reasoning she’s honest enough to name for what it was: a cop-out, telling herself the sin belonged to him because he was the married one, and she wasn’t.

“It’s a cowardly cop-out,” she says now. “You can only live like that for so long before something horrible happens, or something wonderful happens.”

For Joanne, it turned out to be the second thing. Stuart, a former screenwriter, producer, and director, walked into her life, and the affair ended the way most borrowed things eventually do: for good. What drew her to Stuart was simple.

“He was tall, funny, kind, smart, and Jewish, and he could always make me laugh,” she said. He came into the marriage with two grown sons, Miles and Max, both of whom Joanne has grown close to.

They have been married sixteen years now. He is the one, out of everyone, who understood her most completely and loved what he found there without trying to change her. He came from a world so different from her loud, squabbling Italian family that it took him years to understand it, and longer still to love it. He studied at USC School of Cinema, and Occidental, worked alongside icons like Fellini, Lily Tomlin, Christopher Guest, and Tim Conway, wrote the 1987 hit comedy film Summer School, and was nominated for several film and television awards before turning his life toward helping people fight their way out of addiction.

Stuart’s own recovery decades ago set the foundation for that second career. He was on the cutting edge of therapies for heroin addiction, and his former clients will tell you the thing that stood out most about him was never just the expertise, but the compassion.

Joanne watched him build something out of other people’s worst days for years. But the rehab industry has changed, grown corporate in a way that pushed a certain kind of person out of the profession, and that shift is ultimately what drove him to leave it behind. He is a little broken now, the kind of breakage that comes from losing the very thing that gave your work its meaning, and Joanne knows it, even as her attention is pulled elsewhere by the person who needs her most.

Her mother is ninety two, deep in the fog of dementia, her hearing nearly gone. To care for her properly, Joanne rented out the beautiful home she and Stuart own, and moved in with her mother, trading her own independence for a smaller, quieter world with a very small footprint. It is the kind of sacrifice many Italian daughters know intimately, the assumption nobody ever has to say out loud, that you do not put your mother in a home. And being the oldest daughter brings the greater share of the responsibility with it. Her sisters each come by once a week to help, but Joanne is the one there around the clock, feeding her, bathing her, dressing her.

“It’s like taking care of a toddler all over again,” Joanne says. “My mother is incapable of making executive type decisions, so she resorts to being a child and not communicating her feelings.”

Joanne is, by her own word, housebound most days unless she can arrange care long enough to leave. The mother she knew is mostly gone.

“Ditch the ego and the anger,” Joanne tells herself, “and be compassionate to someone who is really not my mom anymore. She’s not the person that raised me and loved me.”

What she misses is specific: “I miss her laughter and her jokes, and her camaraderie. Let’s go shopping. Let’s surprise so and so. Let’s gossip. Let’s drink wine.”

What she values most these days is her relationship with her boys, one that has survived some genuinely rocky stretches and come out the other side.

“My relationship with my oldest son, Preston, is loving, though I don’t get the face time to hug him, to smell him,” she says.

Preston lives with his wife and children in the Pacific Northwest. Joanne wishes she could visit more often. Her other two sons live nearby.

“Evan and I have had our challenges throughout life, but he’s the one most like me, and the closest to me. He’s the most intuitive with me. James and I are lovingly respectful to each other. He’s the calm one.”

Then there are the grandchildren, four of them, who make her want to live forever. Two are Preston and Vanessa's daughters, both beautiful and smart. The other two are Evan and Ashleigh's: a three-year-old girl who greets her with a running list of pointed questions, like why her hair looks different today or whether what she's eating is healthy, the kind of unfiltered noticing only a small child gets away with, and a five-year-old grandson who loves her more quietly, plain and unguarded. “Nene, I love you,” he tells her, and something in Joanne softens completely at the name. The nickname came from her sister Teri, who, as a baby, called her Nene and it stayed.

Joanne and her sisters are close, and these days their only fights are over who bowled the highest score when they get together at the local bowling alley, one of the few outings their mother can still enjoy. Dementia has taken a lot from her, but not her spirit of rooting for the underdog.

This slower season has left room for digging, and Joanne has done a lot of that through therapy. It started after a violent fight with one of her kids pulled every bit of ugliness and rage and confusion in her straight to the surface.

“I never wanted it to happen again,” she says. “It was something out of an alien. I knew I needed help so I started therapy.”

Joanne’s therapist told her to look for the messages. It has become something close to a mantra.

“How the fuck am I here?” she asks herself. “Where’s this big message I’m supposed to find?”

She thinks she already knows part of the answer, watching her mother fade: “Do not end up like this. Do not be this person. Do everything possible, by every means, to fight it."

She watched her own father fight to the very end, holding his hand as he took his last breath at ninety two.

"He did not want to go," she says. "And that's the way I want to leave this earth — not wanting to leave it."

So now Joanne waits, and thinks, and reflects. She still wants the whole rest of it. A house by water somewhere with a garden, something entirely her own. To be madly and passionately in love again, and to do the things she loves—swim, hike, garden, and maybe, she says, even that stupid bungee jump exercise thing.

“I want to be known as that seventy year old that can and did,” she says.

After nearly seven decades on this earth, underneath all of it, is the girl who sat under a tree on her grandfather’s lap while he read to her, the one who fell in love with books before she fell in love with anything else. She still reads constantly, and she is always the first one to tell you about whatever she just finished. Her favorites are Charlotte’s Web and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and she laughs at the fact that both are stories about someone living on a farm surrounded by animals.

Joanne loves her pets the way some people love their own children. Her pit bull, Eddie, recently crossed the rainbow bridge, and she still talks about him like family.

“He was a human in a dog suit,” she says. “He was a son. He was my cohort in crime. My drinking buddy. The protector of my chickens. The protector of me.”

These days there is Kiwi, a cockatiel who imprinted on her the moment he tumbled out of a box of six siblings and has been devoted ever since.

“He can hear me drive up in the driveway,” she says.

And there is Charlie, her most recent rescue, a mixed terrier who leapt into her arms the first time they met and has not left her side since.

“There’s some underlying message I give out to these animals,” she says. “It’s a cherished gift. I’m a steward of their lives.”

That description fits Joanne perfectly, well beyond the animals. She takes in everything that needs taking in, stray chickens, stray dogs, and more than a few stray people. She has lost count of how many of her sons’ friends have landed on her couch when they needed somewhere to go. Her best friend still tells the story of the time she was going through a divorce and Joanne handed her a set of keys to her house and, as she puts it, carte blanche to all the salami and wine inside.

“I guess I just like helping people,” Joanne says. “I like having people around the house.”

As for that girl under the tree, she never really left. And neither did the wild one who came after her.

“Before the kids, I was just a big kid,” she says, and something in her still is, somewhere underneath the caregiving and the worry and the small rooms she now moves through. You can hear it when she talks about her son Evan’s fearlessness on a skateboard when he was younger, because she recognizes it. It was hers first. James, her younger son, gave her something different.

“I’ve learned through James mostly, about boundaries and respecting people’s decisions that I don’t necessarily align with,” she says.

He is the gentler side of her, the one she is still learning from. As for what her kids think of Joanne's decades of learning and growth, she has her own take.

“I think my kids would describe me as a never-ending adventure,” she says.

Recently, her son Evan told her that their life was confusing, their house was confusing, but that she did her best. She was holding down everything, providing for her children, all while working an incredibly stressful job.

“I must have done something right because my kids are amazing young men with amazing families and in relationships that are healthy and sound,” she says. “They’re not afraid to dig in and get shit done, and they’re always there when I need them.”

One lesson she keeps returning to is: “Be careful how you live your life, because sometimes things that you think are just for you really aren’t. They have a domino effect. And the things that you think bring you joy can sometimes be devastatingly hurtful to someone else.”

So she keeps moving, one more chapter, maybe two or three, badass enough to still believe it’s coming, looking for the message hiding inside whatever comes next.

There is a moment, if you spend enough time with Brigette Lugo, when you stop listening to her words and just watch her. The way her hands move when she talks, like punctuation marks with a pulse. That gorgeous smile that gives no warning for the laugh that follows, a laugh so big and loud you can't help but join it. And those long dark signature curls when she turns her head.

Her parents named her after Brigitte Bardot, and people have been telling her she looks like Salma Hayek for most of her adult life. In her own humble eyes, she has never quite lived up to either. Everyone around her would strongly disagree.

What she will own, completely and without hesitation, is this: she is a lot.

It started in kindergarten. She remembers chasing a girl named Ashley around the playground. Ashley would later recall that Brigette was wearing a Barney shirt and kept asking, “Will you be my friend? Will you be my friend? until Ashley finally gave in. They stayed friends through high school and what Brigette remembers from those early years is not so much the friendship, but the feeling around it: the secondhand embarrassment she could see on other kids’ faces just from being near her.

“I’ve always been that way,” she says. “There’s not something I can pinpoint. I was just desperate to have someone there with me.”

The report cards said it all: Talks too much. Every year, without fail. It wasn’t malicious, she’ll tell you. She wasn’t pulling anyone’s hair. She was just being social. Her father eventually developed a signal for restaurants, a quiet gesture that meant you’re too loud. She would look at him with dagger eyes, thinking, How are you trying to control me when at home you have the loudest laugh, the loudest sneeze, and you think everything my mother says is hilarious. She laughs telling the story now. She learned, over time, to modulate in public, but with her people, she lets it go.

“They know that’s part of who I am,” she says. “We’re at a restaurant, we’re laughing, we’re having drinks, and I’m the loudest every time. They just think, ‘This is her.’”

She also shows up in every city she visits before the sun is fully up, hunting down the best menudo she can find. She has strong opinions about craft beer, loves The Clash, and is a die-hard fan of The Smiths, whom she discovered as a teenager. It was the melancholy, the emotion of the lyrics, that resonated in a way little else did at that age. She still loves the music, but Morrissey, she’ll tell you, is a piece of shit.

For the record, Brigette does not walk into rooms calculating her effect. She never has. She was the girl getting teased for her unibrow in elementary school, and she’ll turn up today in sweats with not a second thought about how she looks, which makes what happens next all the more bewildering to her.

Guy friends’ girlfriends don’t want Brigette around their boyfriends. She says it with a laugh that doesn’t quite cover the hurt underneath it. In her late teens and early twenties, learning this would break her heart, finding out through mutual friends that women who smiled at her face were talking about her behind her back. She lost quite a few male friends over this.

“It would get under my skin,” she says. “And now I just can’t care about it, because it’s who I am. I’m sorry that there are things going on for you personally that have nothing to do with me. Your insecurity isn’t mine to fix.”

The women in her life now whose husbands and partners genuinely love her like a sister, have one thing in common. Brigette identified it herself: “They’re secure in themselves. That’s all. That’s the whole difference.”

Security, she has found, is the price of admission. And for those who have it, what they get in return is something most people never find, someone who will go to the mat for them. She is fiercely loyal, and she has said it out loud in rooms full of people.

“I’m a ride or die. I don’t have a choice,” she says. “If you’re my person, I love you, I care about you, and that person who made you feel disrespected? They’re dead to me.”

The price of having Brigette is accepting all of her. Most people, she has found, want a discount.

To understand her, you have to understand where she comes from, two places that shaped her in ways she is still discovering.

Her father was born in Granada, Nicaragua, one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the Americas, its colonial architecture rising in ochres and blues along the shore of Lake Nicaragua. His mother, Brigette’s grandmother, brought the family to the United States during the political turmoil of the Civil War years. Her father went on to build his own production and promotion company from their garage, creating Spanish-language television shows for Salvadoran and Guatemalan communities. He is 6’1”, good-looking, strong, and deeply Nicaraguan.

Brigette’s mother is from Chiriquí, a province in western Panama known for its lush highland country, coffee plantations climbing toward picturesque mountains, and above them, the Barú volcano. She is a beautiful woman, and one look at her tells you where Brigette gets it. She’s been a caregiver for the elderly since Brigette was thirteen, and every one of her clients' families says the same thing: your mom's an angel.

Between these two people, Brigette was made, and eighteen months later, her brother Brian. The two have always been close, raised inside culture that never left the house. Their grandmother’s recipes. Their father’s sports idols, boxer Alexis Argüello and Pittsburgh Pirates baseball player Roberto Clemente, and his loud pride in everything Nicaraguan.

When Brigette finally went back to Panama three years ago, after twenty years away, she partied with her uncles like she’d never partied in her life.

“They know where to go,” she says. “We stay with them and we go to the countryside. It’s beautiful.”

She has started a notebook where her mother describes how her late grandmother made dishes like arroz Valenciana, a Nicaraguan hodgepodge of mustard, ketchup, peas, ham, and sausage over rice that no one has ever quite replicated.

“I’m really trying to not let that die,” she says. “I’m unapologetically Nicaraguan and Panamanian. I wear that culture on my sleeve. I don’t want it to die with me.”

That same urgency lives in the stories she tells. Her drive to find the people whose voices were never amplified didn’t come from a classroom. She felt the injustice of erasure before she had language for it, and when she found journalism, she understood immediately that this was the tool. This was how you pushed back.

By the time she arrived in the journalism program at Mt. San Antonio College, something in her was already sharpened. She walked in hungry, and quickly became editor-in-chief of the program’s award-winning magazine, Substance, and editor of the student news media sports section. But the work that mattered most to her didn’t exist yet, so she created it. Somos Gente LA, a Latinx student media platform, was built to tell the stories that weren’t being told, among them, a Latinx all-female surf club, and Ranflas y Recuerdos, a deep dive into the Zoot Suit Riots when American servicemen turned on the Mexican-American youth and minorities who called Los Angeles home. She also penned a column called Imma Rant Real Quick, her unfiltered take on issues affecting women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community.

She was never quiet about any of it.

At a journalism conference in Sacramento, when her team was struggling to find a story, she spotted a Hispanic man working on a riverboat and asked if she could talk to him. He told her to come back in half an hour. What he gave her, in a borrowed theater with no one else in the room, was a story about nearly being deported, a detention, a harrowing journey that mirrors everything happening in this country right now. From there she found a busboy from Honduras who’d been smuggled across by coyotes. He sat with her for twenty minutes, no tears, speaking calmly in Spanish about things that should have undone him.

“When you actually talk to people,” she says, “and you’re part of that culture, and you can communicate, and empathize, they trust you. And you learn stories that would otherwise never exist.”

She and her team called that piece, The Invisible People. It won several first place multimedia awards from local and national college media organizations.

“I always knew who I was fighting for,” she says. “That part was never the question.”

The question that took longer, the one that would cost her more than she ever expected to pay, was who was fighting for her.

Here is what people think they know about Brigette: that she is invincible. Too strong, too loud, too smart, too Latina to be fooled by anyone, broken by anyone. She is not the kind of woman something like this happens to. The truth is: It happened to her.

He hit her. More than once. More than she told most people.

She married him when she was twenty-three. He was an artist. They were bohemian, free-spirited, and in love, or what she thought love was supposed to look like at that age. She made excuses and did the mental gymnastics. She told herself it would get better, that this time she could talk him out of it, that if she changed something in herself, he wouldn’t do it again.

“There is so much that goes into why a person stays,” she says. “Things other than finances, or kids, or the Stockholm syndrome of knowing this person for years while he’s beating the shit out of you. There are so many reasons, and I wish people would understand this without it needing to be their daughter or their sister. How about just having empathy for all women?”

There was a night she came close to losing consciousness. She left. What followed was a particular kind of cruelty she hadn't anticipated — the silence of people who didn't know what to do with a woman like her inside a story like this, as if surviving abuse were a reward reserved for the quiet and the meek.

“Everybody holds you to this standard,” she says. “You’re this bad bitch, outspoken, you don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks, and all of a sudden you’re at the hands of this man and no one understands why. There is a shame that comes with it. Your self-confidence is already shaken, and then it’s like, how is this even possible?”

She called the domestic violence hotline from inside her marriage, more times than she can count, just to talk to someone. She shares those resources publicly whenever a story about abuse surfaces, because she remembers what it was like to need them and not know they existed.

“I will post those links every time a story like this comes up,” she says, “because if there’s just one person who clicks on it, one person who says, ‘Oh, this is why women stay,’ or ‘There’s something I can do to help someone I know’, then it’s worth it.”

She doesn’t use the word survivor as a descriptor when she’s first getting to know someone. Not because she’s ashamed, but because it reduces her to a single chapter.

“It’s not one of the first things I share at an intimate level,” she says. “I’m proud, but I don’t want it to be the headline of who I am.”

And yet, when she finally told that story of domestic violence, in her own words, it won every local and national journalism award it was eligible for. The women who reached out afterward were too many to count.

"If I can help one woman get through a situation like the one I found myself in, I've done something I'm proud of.

Trusting men doesn't come easy, and she'll tell you that plainly. The ones who approach her rarely make it easy either, and they do approach her. Often, they disappoint her, wanting the idea of her, the energy, the fire, without the full weight of who she actually is. She knows what she wants now in a way she couldn't at twenty-three: someone who pursues her without it tipping into obsession, someone stable, someone funny, not arrogant-funny but genuinely funny, what she calls Curb Your Enthusiasm funny. Someone who, when she says she's sick, sends soup.

“I haven’t mentioned roses,” she says. “I haven’t mentioned Valentine’s Day stuff. I want somebody who’s going to make me laugh and who will Uber Eats me soup because I told them I wasn’t feeling well. Little things like that.”

She watches her parents, married nearly forty years, still cackling at each other at 7 a.m. and knows exactly what she’s looking for.

“I used to think I needed to be less,” she says. “Now I think they need to be more.”

She wants children too. She has always gravitated toward kids, and they toward her. Her father beats around the bush about it when they talk, asking if she’s seeing anyone. She gives him the look. He wants what she wants, but most of all, after everything, for her to be happy. She wants that too.

"A partner who loves me, children, and doing work that matters," she says. "That's the whole dream."

If you want to find Brigette now, you can find her ringside.

At 37, she found herself working as a multimedia journalist for Xicana Boxing, connected by Andres Soto, a college media colleague turned sports journalist whose credits include ESPN, the LA Times, and USA Today, and who never forgot how talented Brigette is. When he crossed paths with the site’s creator, he thought of Brigette immediately. A DM, a couple of beers at Highland Park Brewery, and a piece Brigette wrote holding boxer Tank Davis accountable for domestic violence, led to the publication’s creator asking to publish her story.

One thing led to another and what followed was a working partnership with Xicana Boxing where she assisted with running their social, covering fights in real time, writing for the zine, and interviewing boxers and wrestlers with the same fearless curiosity she once brought to Sacramento.

Her favorite part of the job, she said without hesitation:

“Interviewing fighters in Spanish. We can make reels where I ask, ‘What’s your favorite salsa?’ and these guys just light up. There are people in media circles who speak no Spanish, and we’re churning out content that’s bilingual, that’s Spanglish, that’s actually for the community. There’s nothing like speaking to a fighter in their native tongue. They trust you.”

She trained in boxing herself for two years with a high school teacher turned mentor who believed in her enough to train her without charge. She never sparred, but once or twice, may have seen her ex-husband’s face on the punching bag, which she says with a small, hard smile.

She watches the fighters she covers take punches that would end most people, climb off the canvas, and keep going. She sees herself in that. Not in the hitting, but in the getting up, in the part where you have no reason to keep going and you go anyway.

“I never pictured being here, period, as in, being alive,” she says. “What I went through, I saw every day that I might not survive. I look at these fights and it’s hard not to see a parallel. I used to take hits because I saw myself as weak, and I was stuck.”

And now she’s ringside, credentialed, microphone in hand, no longer stuck. Her latest venture is covering fights for Boxing Scene.

While she continues to shine as a multimedia journalist, her personal relationship goals are simple.

“I want someone who actually puts in the work to get to know me, and who likes me as I am,” she says. “That sounds so basic, but that’s what I want.”

She pauses, then laughs.

“I know I’m too much. I’ve always been too much. And I’m done apologizing for it.”

She throws her head back, wild curls flying, and that laugh comes out, the loud one, the real one. You can’t fake that. You either have it or you don’t.

She has it.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. You can also chat online at thehotline.org.