Welcome to The Mystical Underground

 There’s a tectonic shift happening in the U.S. – and it centers on civil rights. First, on June 25, the U.S. supreme court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. This provision of the 1965 landmark civil rights law designates which parts of the country must have changes to their voting laws cleared by the federal government or in federal court. This is huge. It means that states can now redistrict to their hearts’ delight so that minorities – who generally vote democratic – are disenfranchised.

 The ruling was 5-4, with justices Scalia, Alito,  Kennedy, Thomas and Roberts citing how “things have changed dramatically in the south” in the nearly 50 years since the act was enacted. In other words: discrimination? What’s that? We don’t have any discrimination in this country.  Right. That’s why some of the black districts in Florida had to wait 6-7 hours to vote in the 2012 election.

 Yet, the very next day, this same supreme court, these same justices, struck down California’s proposition 8, which banned gay marriage.  This is also huge, in a more positive way. About a third of the states in the U.S. approve of gay marriage – which leaves a huge chunk that don’t.

 This approval, though,  has real, tangible consequences. It means that if you’re a legally gay married couple in a state that recognizes gay marriage, you can file joint tax returns, can collect social security benefits when your spouse dies, that you don’t have to pay taxes on your deceased spouse’s estate. It means you can make end of life decisions for your spouse – in other words, it encompasses all the rights that straight married couples have.

Surprisingly, the military has come out in full support of this strike down to prop 8. If your gay spouse is deployed and killed in action, the military couldn’t even notify you as next to kin about your spouse’s death under the former ruling. Now they can. Now the surviving spouse can collect federal benefits.

There were two gay couples who challenged prop 8 – a female couple and a male couple. Kris Perry and Sandy Stier  have children they are raising together and fought the ban primarily because of their kids. They were married on Friday, June 28, by California Attorney General Kamala Harris after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did away with the 25-day holding period and ordered state officials to stop enforcing Proposition 8.

 The male couple, Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo, who have been together for 12 years, were married by the mayor of Los Angeles and the marriage was broadcast live on the Rachel Maddow Show. Both of these marriages were moving, monumental.

There are people who  rail against these unions, who will tell you that the bible forbids such unions, that it’s sodomy, that it will unravel the fabric of traditional marriage, that children should not be raised by gay couples. To these people, I say: Love is love. It doesn’t care about the color of your skin, your cultural background, or your sexual orientation.

My first editor, Chris Cox, was gay. He loved his partner Bill, the curator of a Manhattan museum, without restraint, without boundaries. When Bill was diagnosed with AIDS, Chris’s world fell apart.  He cared for Bill on his own as long as he could. But when Bill began to lose his sight, his parents flew him home to Minnesota to care for him. And every weekend, they flew Chris out to Minnesota to spend time with Bill.

Not long after Bill’s diagnosis, Chris was diagnosed with AIDS. He was estranged from his family and his primary caretaking came from  a co-worker, editor  Cheryl Woodruff, and his old friend Susan Sarandon, who paid for a private nurse to tend to Chris. He called me on the day of Bill’s diagnosis and on the day he was diagnosed. He was in tears. AIDS was relatively new then, and I, a straight woman, didn’t really understand much of anything about the disease except that then, in the early 1990s, a diagnosis usually spelled a death sentence.

On the day Chris passed away, my agent, a gay woman who had formed a deep bond with Chris, called to tell me the news. Not long afterward, a day or two, Cheryl called and told me Chris had asked for me to speak at his memorial service. So Rob, Megan and I flew to New York for the service. Megan was barely a year old.

Susan Sarandon gave the opening talk, a moving tribute to her long friendship with Chris. I was next and after Sarandon’s talk, hoped that I would at least be able to utter a single word.

I thought of all this when the supreme court struck down prop 8. How can we, a country that calls itself the most democratic on the planet, have made it illegal in the 50s for black and whites to marry? Or to make it illegal in the 21^st century for gays to marry? We are supposedly a nation where diversity is welcome – and yet, when the diverse appear, we attack them, deny them rights, and it has to go all the way to the supreme court to be sorted out.

And SCOTUS  didn’t go as far as they should have. They should have made it federal law; gay marriage should be recognized throughout all 50 states.  But the ruling is a step in the right direction, and would have made a difference for Chris and Bill because they were residents of New York, one of the handful of states that recognize gay marriage.

I like to think that Chris, this energetic and brilliant man who loved life, to whom I am forever indebted for giving me my first break, is in the afterlife cheering, his fist raised, pumping at the air. Yes.Yes.

At MM 99, on our way home from the keys a week after we’d arrived,   we had our second synchro at a place called Denny’s Latin Café. It’s Cuban run, has a small walk-up window where you can order the best coffee in the keys and delicious Cuban food. Some picnic tables are set up along the side of the building, in the shade, so we usually settle in at one of the picnic tables with our dogs.

There’s a place similar to this near our house, a Cuban bakery attached to a gas station where the lure is the coffee and the Cuban food and not the price of gas! In both places,  I usually order the coffee and food and Rob takes the dogs for a walk. At home, he walks them in a wooded area behind the bakery, where he has discovered that several homeless people have set up a makeshift camp. Sometimes they come out to see the dogs and trade a few words with Rob.

At Denny’s Latin Café, Rob just grabbed a picnic table and set out water for Nika and Noah. I went up to the window and ordered coffee and lunch and then went over to the table. By then, Rob had been joined by a man with a white beard and a middle-aged barefoot woman who were loving on Nika and Noah.

The four of us  traded dog stories. In the course of conversation, we  learned he was 55, a native of Key Largo, and that she was from Georgia.  They wanted to buy the dogs some treats, but had only $4 between them. Her sandals – beach thongs – had broken apart the day before and she  was considering walking over to the Salvation Army to see if she could find a cheap pair of sandals to wear.  She sometimes slept on a sailboat at night that belonged to a “maybe boyfriend.”

To this, her companion quickly said, “I’m not the boyfriend. We’re just hanging together.” He paused. “We’re homeless.”

This admission struck me because I’ve been reading a memoir by Nick Flynn called The Reenacments, about the movie based on his first memoir  about his homeless father. DeNiro played his father and Julianne Moore played his suicidal mother. As a young adult in his twenties, Flynn went to work in a homeless shelter, where his father was later a resident.

Now here were these two homeless people, who might have stepped out of Flynn’s book. Law of attraction? “Where do you sleep at night?” I asked the man.

“Wherever I can,” he replied.

“It can’t be easy to be homeless in Key Largo,” I remarked, thinking of the endless highway, the concrete, the traffic, the tourists, the cops.

“Key West is worse,” he said. “The cops there can be brutal.”

At this point, I’m thinking of Flynn’s memoir, of the homeless encampment behind the Cuban bakery near our house and of how we’re sitting here talking to two homeless people outside a Cuban bakery in the keys. A weird synchro,  and I think the significance lies in what I learned about myself.  

I’ve never sat and conversed at any length with a homeless person. I was struck by several things: neither of them was drunk, as homeless people are often depicted to be (drunks or addicts); they didn’t ask for money; they loved dogs; they carried their life stories in the creases of their faces; and they seemed resigned to living as they lived.

I felt strangely moved and haunted by this encounter. I kept staring at the woman’s bare feet, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that she couldn’t afford a pair of the cheapest sandals and that he slept “wherever he could.” What did that mean? He slept under bushes? Under the picnic table where we sat? In the parking lot of the Starbucks next door?

There is a slice of humanity in the U.S. that these two people represent, a marginal culture denied access to…well, just about everything.   If six degrees of separation has shrunk to half of that, could I have been that woman or could Rob have been that man if some of the decisions we made throughout our lives were slightly different? If we’d been born into different families? Different circumstances? With different needs and desires?

As we were walking the dogs back to the car,  I felt choked up for the same reason I do when I see an animal that’s suffering, a child that’s abused. I grabbed my wallet, scooped out the cash I had –$20 – and walked back to the picnic table. The man nearly fell off his bench when I handed him the money. Our eyes locked for a moment.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

 “Take care,” I said, and hurried back through the brutal heat, and quickly got into my air conditioned car with Rob and the dogs and headed home to my life, and yes, I was flooded with gratitude for everything my life is.

A cynic would say I just handed them twenty bucks to blow on booze. Maybe that’s true. But when I give to the Red Cross or some other organized charity in the wake of a disaster, where does that money actually go? To administrative costs and salaries? How much of $20 gets to the people who need it? At least the $20 that I gave went directly to the people who needed it. What they do with it – buy her sandals, buy themselves a good meal, buy a bottle of vodka or buy a little hope for another day – is their business.

I’m just blown away by how this level of poverty can exist in a country so rich (and so in debt to the China) that it burns untold trillions on endless war, on less than two hundred detainees at Gitmo, on chasing some whistleblower across the planet, on culling emails and phone calls from people everywhere on the planet, on rigging elections and struggling to control women’s access to birth control and health care, on…well, take a look at the news.

I really hope that change begins one on one, me with myself, me to you, you to me, us to others, and that it then fans out,  that proverbial ripple in a pond, until it touches all borders, all shores, all people. Then that  six degrees of separation is nevermore.

Sugarloaf paradise

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The Florida keys are a string of islands south of Miami that are connected by a network of bridges all the way to Key West. Once you get out of the Miami area, the drive is fantastic, mostly just a two-lane road, the Gulf of Mexico on one side, the Atlantic on the other.  Our destination was our agent’s home on Sugarloaf Key, where we went last summer.

A hundred miles lie between Key Largo and Key West, and the easiest way to identify the various islands in between these two spots is by mile markers. They are posted every mile alongside the road. The largest islands between MM 100 and MM Zero (Key West) are Marathon at MM 54 and Big Pine Key at MM 30.

Marathon has all the usual grocery and drug stores so we either stock up on fresh produce there or at another grocery store on Big  Pine. We bring the rest of our food because Sugarloaf is at MM 15 and there isn’t any grocery store on the island, just a bait and tackle shop and a couple of family-run restaurants.  If you have to run out for milk, the closest place is Murray’s Market, MM 24, a small, crowded place with maybe four employees.

Also, this house isn’t a place from which you need a break. It’s paradise, pure and simple – sun, water, tranquility – and kayaks!

But one morning we found ourselves leaving paradise for a milk run. It was around noon, hot, maybe 94 degrees. We drove to Murray’s Market. All four of the employees were busy at the deli counter, making sandwiches for customers, so no one was at the only register. The line began to form. The woman in front of us just rolled her eyes and said, “Oh well, we’re in the keys, right? Life is more laid back here.”

The man who was first in line then asked where everyone was from. It turned out that the woman who had spoken was from our town and lives just a mile or so up the road from us!

So at MM 24, we had a synchro – a little one.  She didn’t identify herself as being from the West Palm Beach area, but from Wellington, which is way west of West Palm Beach, about as far west as you can go before you hit the Everglades. If we had extended the conversation, we undoubtedly would have found that we have friends in common.  Six degrees of separation seems to have shrunk to about half that.

I wish that we had orbs to share, as our blogging friend Mike Perry did during his recent trip to an old English village. But hey, we left Murray’s feeling that we were in the flow.

When Rachel Maddow began her cable news program Monday evening, she began with a story about a red panda named Rusty that had escaped from the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, at least for the zoo and no doubt for Rusty as well, the panda was captured after traveling about 14 blocks from his exhibit. A woman spotted the unusual creature outside of her house and called the zoo, asking if they had any animals missing.

How Rusty escaped is still a mystery. Zoo officials began reviewing security footage Monday morning to see if there is any evidence of how he escaped or whether he may have been taken by a human and then set loose. No security cameras are pointed directly at the red panda exhibit, though, and the zoo plans to add more cameras.

Maddow seamlessly shifted into a story about Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, and his efforts to evade the long arm of the U.S. justice system as he fled from his temporary refuge in Hong Kong to Russia and supposedly en route to Cuba and asylum there or in Venezuela or in Ecuador.

Maddow saw the parallels in the two stories – at least the escape aspect. But if you think about it, there are more links suggesting that the two stories, both making news Monday, form an interesting meaningful coincidence. Red pandas are native to southwestern China and the Himalayas. We tend to think of pandas and China as intertwined. But a red panda makes the creature sound even more at home in China.

So a red panda makes a mysterious escape as Snowden, the whistle blow who has exposed the secrets of the ‘thought police,’ flees China under mysterious conditions.

Also, it wasn’t any zoo that Rusty escaped from. It was the National Zoo in the nation’s capital and the zookeepers began an all out search for the rogue creature. Similarly, the Justice Department has issued an arrest warrant, changing Snowden with espionage, and calling on foreign countries to capture and extradite him.

A related synchro is that, astrologically,Pluto is in Capricorn, where it has been since 2008. Pluto is the great transformer, the planet that moves at a snail’s pace and ushers in permanent and irrevocable change. Since 2008, it’s  been about exposing secrets of those people and institutions that are in power.

We saw it in 2008 with the exposure of the banking and mortgage fiasco at the end of the George W. Bush era, and over the ensuing years we’ve seen more secrets come to light through the Wikileaks organization. Now we see the Snowden exposure of the NSA spying on U.S. citizen’s telephone conversations and Internet communications, as well as spying on foreign governments.

If Starlight News astrologer Nancy Sommers is correct, there will be one more similarity between the red panda and Snowden…and it won’t be that Snowden’s nickname is Rusty. Instead, unfortunately for Snowden, his life on the run will probably end with his capture by this fall.

In astro-speak, Nancy explains: “The August through September 2013 Neptune station square to Snowden’s Jupiter (3Sagittarius08) may bring another round of flight from reality and consequence, but that seems quite likely to by smashed by late September. Essentially, from September 17 through November 11, 2013, Snowden will be in an increasingly difficult, desperate situation, including perhaps an unhappy return to the US.”

Whether you see Snowden as a hero for  exposing government invasion of privacy that began with the Patriot Act or a treasonous criminal, it’s clear that his story is one that has caught our attention and spawned global synchronicity. Also, his name invites a synchro: snowed-in. For people who lives in northern areas, this term usually means trapped.

 Several months ago, Megan told us about a PBS series she loved: Downton Abbey. 

“If it’s about zombies, we probably won’t watch it,” we said.

“No zombies. It’s set in England in the early 1900s, on this fabulous estate.  You’ve got the aristocratic family, the Crawleys, and their servants. They…oh forget it, it’s complicated. I’ll stream the first episode and we’ll watch it, okay?”

And we did.   Rob and I were hooked.

The lives of the Crawleys – Robert, his American wife Cora, and their three very different daughters , Mary, Edith, and Sibyl– unfold with great drama and human emotion alongside the lives of the multitude of servants who tend to them. The first episode opens the day after the sinking of the Titanic, April 16, 1912, so from the start, we sense we will see how some of the great historic events will impact British social hierarchy – and the lives of their servants.

We’re nearing the end of the third season and so far, have lived through the outbreak of World War I, the Spanish influenza pandemic,  the Marconi scandal, the formation of the Irish free state. Now we’re into the rip-roaring 1920s, when the middle daughter – the only one not married – begins writing a column for a London newspaper, a totally scandalous thing for an aristocrat to do!  

The lives of the servants, though, are as intriguing and complex as the lives of the Crawleys. We see the scheming that goes on among them to be first footman or the butler who dresses Robert Crawley every morning or the female servant who brings Cora Crawley breakfast in bed. We see their love dramas, their life dramas, their conflicts and triumphs. We see the relationships that develop between them and the Crawleys. After all, if you dress someone day in and day out, it’s inevitable that a relationship of some kind develops. 

This is soap opera elevated to a new, riveting level.

The acting is superb. Maggie Smith, who plays the Dowager Countess, seems to have been born for this role – just as she was born for the role of Professor Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. As Robert Crawley’s mother, she is the family caretaker – and also quite a trickster.  She meddles in the affairs of the family and the servants in an always dignified way, behind the scenes, pulling strings. She’s got some great one-liners.

Carson, the head butler, is totally dedicated to the Crawley family. Mrs. Hughes, second in command below Carson, is a softie for the downtrodden, the vulnerable. In one episode, a kitchen maid is impregnated by a soldier staying at the abbey when it’s turned into a rehab center for wounded warriors from WWI. Even though the maid is fired, Mrs. Hughes takes her and her baby food, supplies, helps to support her.

One of the most interesting relationships occurs between John Bates, Robert’s personal valet,  and Anna, who is the abbey’s head housemaid. There’s a tense period when he’s in prison for the murder of his first wife.

One of my favorite episodes included a scene with  a Ouija board; the 1920s (third season) coincides with the rise of Spiritualism.

The series has won all sorts of awards and acclaim – Golden Globes, Emmys, even the Guinness Book of World Records because it earned the most nominations of any international TV series in the history of the Primetime Emmy Awards. By the third series, Downton Abbey had become one of the most widely watched TV shows in the world.

The writing is pitch perfect, the characters are cast exactly right, and you come away from each episode with a feeling that you’ve just glimpsed a real slice of history. You feel like a time traveler who has landed on the grounds of this magnificent estate. And you, the time traveler, knock at the kitchen door and are admitted by Anna or Mrs. Patmore, the head cook (Irish) at the abbey. Maybe you’re hired as kitchen help. Or as a chauffeur. Whatever your job as a servant, once you’re in, you become a member of a larger family.

And there are three distinct families in this show: the Crawleys, the servants, and  the estate itself, the land, the history of the place,  the physical building with its dozens of grand rooms, its spires, its intricate secrets. The consciousness about class – who you’re born to – is utterly clear. So when Sibyl, the youngest daughter, marries the Irish chauffeur, it becomes a family scandal. When Mary, the oldest daughter, marries her cousin (yeah, you read that right), because he has money they need for the estate, it’s a surprise when they actually fall in love.

In every episode, there are numerous surprises, plot twists, character revelations. And always, there’s this intriguing connection to history as it’s unfolding. Clothes, cars, and mores change accordingly. The evolving historical backdrop feels genuine.

I didn’t expect to like this show – not much that’s paranormal, no Mulder and Scully, no twilight zone. But what Downton Abbey has is humanity. It’s about how we evolve as a family, a culture, a country, nation, a world, a collective. It’s about people tossed into the cauldron of historical events and how they cope within the restrictive mores of their time. if you haven’t seen this show, by all means give it a try.

from a deck called The Cloisters

Our neighbor, Annette, is an avid reader, so whenever we have a new book published, we give her a copy. The other day, she was headed to the beach with her kids and stopped by to borrow a book. “You mentioned that Tango Key series, Trish, can I borrow one of those?”

The Tango Key series actually started back in the late 1980s, with five books that I wrote as Alison Drake. Four of those books featured a local cop, Aline Scott.  Later, in the mid-90s, I returned to the fictional island of Tango Key with another set of characters – psychic and bookstore owner Mira Morales; her partner, Sheppard, an FBI agent; her young daughter, Annie; and her grandmother, Nadine. So I gave Annette a copy of The Hanged Man, the first book in that series.

Only later did I remember that the characters don’t get to Tango Key until the second book in that series. I also remembered that Annette isn’t a fan of tarot cards, which figure prominently in the murder investigation around which the plot centers.

A few days later, Annette dropped by and said  she’s ready for the second book. “And you wouldn’t believe the synchronicity I had while I was reading The Hanged Man on the beach.”

Okay, I’m all ears. (She, by the way, had the actual book, not the ebook. That cover was not my favorite. But the publisher was afraid to put an actual tarot image on the cover.)

Annette was reading the part in the novel about the tarot deck that Mira and Nadine are using to gain insight into a vision Mira had of the murder that Sheppard is investigating. She suddenly noticed that the  woman closest to her on the beach was laying out cards from a tarot deck.

“Now, you know I don’t like tarot cards. But I was really struck by the synchronicity. I mean, there I am, sitting on the beach reading about the various kinds of tarot decks that exist, and a woman next to me is laying out tarot cards. What are the odds?”

And because Annette can strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere, she walked over to the woman and told her about the synchronicity.

Then she went swimming for awhile with her kids, and when they returned to the beach, the woman came over to her and handed Annette a three-page, handwritten tarot reading that she’d just done for her.

Annette had never heard the word synchronicity until we gave her and her twin copies of 7 Secrets of Synchronicity several years ago. The day she finished the book, she stopped by to let us know that she experiences “this stuff” all the time. She just never had a word for it other than coincidence, which she intuitively knew just didn’t quite capture the fullness of the experience.  

“Now,” she said with a laugh, “even my kids know what a synchronicity is.”

This video tugs at my heart. There’s something about “pet” birds that speaks to me. Happy summer solstice!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=O7D-1RG-VRk#!

  Ever since The Hunger Games was released as a movie, I’ve read a number of blog posts about why dystopian novels are not the blog author’s favorite type of story. But I am, quite frankly, fascinated by dystopian novels.

 First, there’s that word, dystopian. It rolls off your tongue in a weird, uncomfortable way, doesn’t it? According to dictionary.com, a dystopia  is  “usually an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.” Let’s look at some of the best ones:

 In Orwell’s classic, 1984 (yeah, he was off in his timing!)  the world is one in which books are banned – not just censored, but banned, forbidden, so there are small groups of rebels and outliers who spend their days memorizing books.

Blade Runner, probably one of Philip K. Dick’s best novels, became a movie of the same name in 1982 and was one of the first movies in which Harrison Ford played the protagonist. It depicts Los Angeles in 2019 (that’s six years from now!) in a world where corporations are king.

A Wikipedia summary: The film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in November 2019 in which genetically engineered organic robots called replicants —visually indistinguishable from adult humans—are manufactured by the powerful Tyrell Corporation as well as by other “mega–manufacturers” around the world. Their use on Earth is banned and replicants are exclusively used for dangerous, menial or leisure work on off-world colonies. Replicants who defy the ban and return to Earth are hunted down and “retired” by police special operatives known as “Blade Runners”. The plot focuses on a brutal and cunning group of recently escaped replicants hiding in Los Angeles and the burnt-out expert Blade Runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who reluctantly agrees to take on one more assignment to hunt them down.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I read this book in two sittings. McCarthy is a powerful writer and I was blown away by this book. It‘s a strange, post- apocalyptic  story about a father and son – who are never named, they are simply man and boy – as they travel through a ruined landscape in search of…well, hope. We have a heartbreaking sense of their relationship, of how the father will do anything to protect his young son. McCarthy won the Putlizer prize for this novel and it went on to become a movie with Viggo Martenson. The movie wasn’t nearly as moving as the book. I should add that Rob found this book so depressing he couldn’t finish it.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and yes, it also became a movie. It’s the first in a trilogy about a world that has suffered some terrible calamity and in its wake, North America has been divided into 12 districts ruled by an oppressive government. The Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl ages 12–18 from each of the twelve districts are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle to the death. In other words, kids killing kids.

What I found most interesting about the trilogy and the subsequent movies is that this trilogy is for young adults because the protagonist is a 16-year-old girl. That means it’s okay to show kids killing kids, but these same kids can’t swear or have sex. Really? Kids killing other kids is okay, but kids having sex or saying shit is not?

There are many other dystopian novels – Stephen King’s Running Man,  Philip K Dicks’s Minority Report, and Scott Westerfield’s series that begins with The Uglies.   A good number of them are young adult books, but for the moment let’s focus on these.

1984 made us aware of literary censorship and probably helped to spawn many of today’s anti-censorship organizations. When a book is censored, attention is brought to who and why. The American Library Association publishes annual lists of censored books and all the relevant details.

Blade Runner may actually be happening now, with the recent whistleblower revelations by 29-year old high school dropout Edward Snowden. This young man worked for the NSA through an outsourced company and you can read all about him here. Is he a version of the Ford character in Blade Runner ? Is he a hero or a traitor?

The Road is a literary journey through a world where anarchy rules, nearly everyone is dead, and the survivors are desperate.  The emotional relationships between father and son is what makes the story work.

In all dystopian novels, we are presented with a horrifying what if, a probable path,  and are invited to live it. As we read, as we watch, we are confronted with the very thing we do NOT want. We are presented with shocking contrasts. I think dystopian novels reveal the probable futures that are available to us as a species, and help us to collectively strive for something better, more positive, more humane.

These novels and movies impact us at a collective level, and often force us, individually and collectively, to evolve as human beings. They teach us things  about who  we are and hope to become.

Here’s a string of synchronicities related to a murder that involves three related men—the killer, his brother, and the killer’s son.

David Berg is a well known Texas lawyer who founded his own law firm and has won cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s also been a civil rights activist and a Clarence Darrow-style defender of the damned: disgraced politicians, grungy protesters and celebrities.

But the most dramatic case of his life, revealed in his memoir, Run, Brother, Run, occurred years before Berg became a lawyer. He and his brother, Alan Berg, were separated at a young age when their parents divorced. They reconnected when Alan moved to Houston after serving in the Navy. The two grew close and David admired his older brother, a salesman who seemingly could sell carpeting to anyone. Alan worked for his father’s carpeting company, but in 1968 he vanished.

“It’s very hard to explain except to say that when a loved one disappears you become detached from anything even remotely that could be described as a normal life,” Alan recently said in an interview on National Public Radio. “I couldn’t take an unlabored breath. My father was so distraught he would throw up. He would bolt from the middle of sales discussions and just leave and look for my brother. So it was devastating.”

David’s father finally hired a well established private detective named Claude Harrelson to search for Alan. Within three days, Harrelson reported that Alan had been murdered. The detective then asked for $3,000 to locate the body. He said he didn’t want to take the $5,000 reward already offered, because he was afraid he would be the killer’s next victim.

A short time later, police arrested the alleged killer, and astonishingly it was Claude Harrelson’s brother, Charles Harrelson.  Supposedly, Harrelson had been hired by a former employee of the carpeting company, who was starting his own business, and was in conflict with Alan’s father. But Charles Harrelson escaped conviction when testimony from the only witness, his wife, was ruled inadmissible because she was his spouse.

But Charles Harrelson would  be convicted of two other murders and he was suspected in at least 20 killings. He also once confess to involvement in the JFK assassination. He died in prison in 2007.

That’s a somewhat lengthy explanation that leads to the next synchro. In 1993, David Berg attended a Simon & Garfunkel reunion concert at Madison Square Garden. Sitting in the adjacent seat was actor Woody Harrelson, Charles Harrelson’s son.

Woody was raised by his mother and knew very little about his father until he was seven years old when he found out his father was accused of murder. That was 1968, the year Charles was accused of killing Alan Berg. As an adult, Woody often visited his father in prison and considered him a friend, more than a father – or a mass murderer.

One year after sitting next to David Berg in Madison Square Garden, Woody Harrelson starred as a crazed serial killer in Natural Born Killers. With that role, Harrelson lost his image of an actor who nice-guy roles. Possibly, his electrifying performance was abetted by his genetic link to an actual killer.