The Republic blasts the county probate court

Laurie Roberts' long-running jihad against the court gets vindicated today with a front-page investigation by Robert Anglen and Pat Kossan.

In a series of columns Roberts has contended that the court essentially colludes with private law firms assigned to oversee assets, and allows the firms to drain the funds with excessive legal fees.

She’s been doing individual cases. The report today is a massive overview, and worth reading.

Here’s the beginning of the main story](http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/09/24/20100924maricopa-county-probate-court-main-0926.html):

Outside of being imprisoned, no action in the American justice system deprives a person of so many rights as being declared incapacitated in Probate Court.

First, a judge rules that you can’t care for yourself. Then strangers can be given control of every aspect of your life. All that you’ve worked for and love – your savings, property, even your ability to contact your family – can be taken away and given to professionals to manage, at enormous expense to you.

Wills, trusts and powers of attorney may not matter.

Probate Court is meant to be a safe harbor for people in crisis because of advanced age or illness, a place where a judge helps protect their assets and well-being.

But an Arizona Republic investigation has found that Maricopa County Probate Court allows the assets of some vulnerable adults to become a cash machine for attorneys and for fiduciary companies, which manage their affairs.

The fees charged can drain the savings of even wealthy individuals in less than a year.

Full report here.

More about Laurie Roberts, on whom PHXated has a big ol' journalistic crush, here and here.

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Of course, this being the Republic, the presentation online is seriously flawed. The layout in the paper makes visual and narrative sense; online, it simply lists a bunch of stories. When you get the the end of one, there’s no indication there’s another to be read in the series.

Sigh.

Tania Katan: "Who said I was gay? Who said I'm grown up?"

PHXated is talking with local performance artist Tania Katan, whose one-woman show, Saving Tania’s Privates, open at the Littel Theater at Phoenix Theater tomorrow night.

You can get tickets here.

Katan’s website is here.

And you can see the entirety of the PHXated team’s strange infatuation with Katan here.

Yesterday, in part 1,Katan discussed her writing technique and her intimate involvement with Mormons.

Today she discusses growing up gay and coming back to Arizona, and makes an obscure reference to hair-care products.

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PHXated: What brought you back to Arizona?

Tania Katan: Jan Brewer, running into people I went to high school with at Trader Joe’s, hot car-door handles, housing market. What was the question? Oh, um, because my partner got a really great job.

[Katan’s significant other, artist Angela Ellsworth, teaches at ASU.]

PHXated: What was it like growing up gay here?

Tania Katan: Who said I was gay? Who said I’m grown up? What kind of scandal are you looking for, Bill? Why are you so PHXated on my sexuality? Is it because you have a not-so-secret crush on me? Look, I’ll share hair product information with you, but that’s where it stops, buddy!

PHXated: What’s your favorite album of all time? What was your first concert?

Tania Katan: I do have a picture disc of Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers, which would have to be my favorite album of the early 80’s—I mean, “Church of the Poison Mind,” with Helen Terry belting out her deep vocal moans and then “Karma Chameleon,” “Miss Me Blind”… come on, this album is genius!!! But my FIRST favorite album, without a doubt, Harry Chapin’s Verities & Balderdash, I was 3 years old when it came out and listened to it over and over again and loved ALL the songs, not just “Cat’s [in the Cradle].” I also loved Don McClean’s American Pie! I remember both of the album covers sitting on stacks of albums in the small living room of my parent’s more-than-modest New York apartment. Thinking about both of these albums now, these storytellers set to music, and remembering the covers of the albums; both men are looking at you/me/their audience and holding up a finger, with Harry it’s his index finger, like he’s implicating you, like he’s asking you to be an active listener or participant in the stories he’s telling and with Don, it’s his thumb with the American flag painted on it, like maybe everything in the country will be alright or maybe it’s the irony that if the flag of America is painted on a relaxed hippie’s thumb, well, we might be in more trouble than we thought or probably some combination of the two and some other innovative ideas too.

First concert, like very first, Harry Chapin at Gammage. After the show, my mother knew how much I loved him, so we waited around to say hello, he was sitting on a stool casually signing autographs, I was about 9 years old and when we finally got to say hello to him, my mother told him how much I loved him, so he leaned down from his stool and gave me a kiss on the cheek, which I promptly and dramatically wiped off, letting out an audible, “Yuk!” He and my mother laughed. Shortly there after he died. When I was an adult, my mom used to joke with me, saying that maybe it was because I wiped off his kiss that he died.

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Katan’s show run through Oct. 10.

Part 1 of the interview is here.

The unbearable rightness of Tania Katan

(Tania Katan [right] with Angela Ellsworth)

At the recent edition of the Southwest Arts Conference at the Chandler arts center, PHXated was sitting with an old friend from high school.

Now, you don’t get to choose your oldest friends.

As it happens, she’s a Mormon, and once or twice we’ve exchanged some words given her active opposition to gay marriage.

She thinks it’s a threat to what she calls traditional marriage, and that Mormons are being persecuted for their beliefs on the subject.

I’m a bit more reality based; I know that both of her contentions are ludicrous, and that history will rule that she, and her church, were bigots.

Call PHXated a radical, but he finds it hard to understand religious groups that go around persecuting minorities.

You’d think that members of these ostentatious religions would for appearance’s sake if nothing else institutionally be on the side of the opppressed, the despised, and the vulnerable.

But no.

Still, as I said, friends are friends.

Anyway, we were chatting at the conference waiting for the lunchtime entertainment, which was going to be a monologue from the local performer Tania Katan.

Katan manifested, suddenly, on stage and began speaking in rapid-fire fashion. She’s short, and almost wiry; but her tousled hair, outsized glasses and manic energy create a compulsively watchable presence on stage.

She immediately started talking about Proposition 8, the Mormon-funded, anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative in California.

The setting, again, was Chandler, close to heart of the Valley’s Mormon center.

I’m paraphrasing here, but Katan said something to the effect that after Prop 8 passed she felt like going to the nearest Mormon temple, flipping it off and yelling fuck you.

But then she decided that such an approach was counterproductive.

“So I married a Mormon girl.”

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I’ll always be thankful to Katan for that perfect moment.

As it happens, she did, in effect, marry a Mormon girl; her partner is Angela Ellsworth, the noted local artist.

Katan’s one-woman show, Saving Tania’s Privates, opens at the Little Theater at the Phoenix Theater on Thursday. It’s the first time the show has been staged in Phoenix; previously, she’s taken it to Edinburgh, Seattle and Philadelphia.

It’s a memoir about a lot of things, but mostly about her two battles with breast cancer, the first at the unfathomably early age of 21.

PHXated has been carrying on an email exchange with Katan. Part one is below; the second will be posted tomorrow.

You can see Katan’s web site here.

I’m including a video preview of her show at the bottom of this page.

Figuring out how to buy tickets on the Phoenix Theater’s site is a chore and a half. Here’s where you need to go.

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PHXAted: Can we talk about writing for a bit? What were your earliest favorite writers? Was there a point at which you decided that’s for me? What’s the first thing you wrote?

Tania Katan: My academic career started at [Scottsdale’s] Tonto Elementary School. And when you attend a school named after the stereotypical sidekick of a masked white man, well, just surviving is rigorous enough, but reading, no, I didn’t do any of that.

I spent most of K-4th grade in Learning Disability classes, where reading wasn’t encouraged as much as shutting up. So instead of losing myself in the world of Huck Finn or Little Women, my connection to text and escapism was found through television and films. Woody Allen, Gilda Radner, Joan Rivers, and Tracey Ullman were some of my favorite writer/performers growing up.

I think it’s when I saw Gilda Radner jumping around on a couch as the spastic Girl Scout from London, England, with no shame, like she was proud to be in Learning Disability class, like her being different was what granted her total freedom; that’s when I realized that I desired to have that kind of freedom, that I wanted to express myself like that.

My first large, comprehensive piece of writing was a book, a novel, based loosely on my own story entitled 16, Dateless and Jewish. I wrote it when I was 16, dateless and Jewish. I just found the entire manuscript, in a folder that has BOOK written in fading blue ink with doodles that I made and quotes written all over it.

The manuscript has beautiful misspellings, white-out smudges, fading typewritten letters. For some chapters I used an even older method of writing—that’s right a feather and ink. When I’m super famous I’ll have the whole thing published as is.

PHXated: What’s your writing process? What was it like originally? Has it changed? Particularly in your current genre, the memoir, it’s an intensely personal effort, isn’t it? Do you work with someone to shape ideas and improve the theatricality?

Tania Katan: The initial process of writing memoir involves vomiting up as many memories/ideas/ themes as I can, then picking through the vomit to find chunks of clarity, stories, and threads that start to connect the pieces, make them part of a larger whole. Yeah, puking, that’s the biggest part of the process, good thing I get motion sickness.

I have a posse of friends who are authors, screenwriters and visionaries, that graciously read my work and offer honest and clear feedback.

PHXated: You are so mean to Mormons.

Tania Katan: Um, I think you’re projecting. I’m the one who married a Mormon. I love Mormons!

Seriously, I have two types of women that I go crazy for: Mormons and Jews. Any woman who plans her next meal before finishing the meal she’s eating, is, well, sexy. Whether she has a one-year supply or just eager to eat her next meal; I like my ladies hungry and prepared.

(Part two is tomorrow.)

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Here’s the trailer for her show:

Jon Talton: How did they screw up our economy?

The former Republic columnist, now a Seattle-based author, continues his must-read meditations on the Valley and its discontents, “Phoenix 101.”

In his most recent post, he describes the diverse economy the area once had, ranging from vast swaths of agriculture to tech firms:

[B]y the late 1940s, Phoenix’s leaders knew the city must attract new industries or it couldn’t sustain its growing population. Stewards such as Frank Snell made aggressive efforts to attract “clear industry.” It paid off with AiResearch, Hughes Aircraft, Sperry Rand, General Electric and especially Motorola. Makers of automobiles and tractors were lured to establish proving grounds to test under desert conditions. (Between the mines, railroads and construction, membership was very high statewide in trade unions).

In other words, as Phoenix emerged as a populous city in the 1960s, it had an strikingly dynamic and diverse economy, with well-paying jobs — especially for a place so isolated and relatively new. Of course real estate and construction were big (along with tourism). Maryvale and Sun City were new. The groves of Arcadia were being turned into subdivisions. Land fraud was rampant — I remember vividly one man who defrauded my grandmother, a real estate agent, being sent to prison; the Arizona Republic’s martyred reporter Don Bolles earned his chops on exposing such schemes. But real estate was a consequence of the real economy. Real estate wasn’t the economy.

You know what’s coming:

Much changed from when I left in 1978 and returned in 2000. By that point, the Phoenix economy, while still containing the remnants of the old chip makers plus Intel, had degenerated into a massive real-estate Ponzi scheme plus some call centers. Everything depended on adding 100,000 more people a year. Aside from this, the metro economy couldn’t match up to the diversity, quality, dynamism or incomes of its peers. Arizona, after tracking the national average in per-capita income as late as the 1980s, consistently lost ground, a trend that continued during the 2000s “boom.”

The balance of his very long and persuasive post details meticulously how that change happened.

You can read it here.

The complete Phoenix 101 archive is here.