In the City of Angles

On any given day in L.A., several thousand people are sitting around trying to figure out a way to make everyone feel better.

Not feeling better by looking better, although that too has become a kind of cottage industry in the City of Angles.

We’re not talking fanny tucks and breast implants here.

We’re talking emotional health. We’re talking smile, man, and hum a little tune, woman, though you might be overweight and flat-chested and, God knows, that nose could use some work.

We’re talking don’t worry, be happy.

What brings this to mind today is Friendpower, the latest means of simultaneously enhancing your feeling of self-worth while making a little money for the guy with your happiness at heart.

Friendpower is the idea of Allan Colman, a former Fresno County administrative officer who has come south in an effort to crash L.A.’s booming feel-good market by taking us back to a better place in time.

He isn’t alone. I hear from feel-good people all the time from Bellflower to Malibu, and I generally give their efforts a try.

I have squeezed sponges, floated freely, hallucinated and marched around the living room to mind-bending music in an effort to make myself feel better.

Always, however, I am hounded by reality. The last effort I made to feel better ended with the 6 o’clock news telling me our milk cows take drugs and our oat bran health cookies are useless.

If you can’t trust milk and cookies, what’s left?

Allan Colman and Friendpower are left.

What struck me first about Colman is that he is very clean. This may not seem important to you, but when you’ve been around as much scum as I have over the years, you come to appreciate a person who is well-scrubbed.

Colman is so clean he glows. I like that.

Also, I was impressed with the simplicity of his notion. All you’ve got to do is remember something good and it makes you feel a little better.

He calls it a “self-guided reflective tour.” It’s a term applied in order to establish Friendpower’s credibility. No one’s going to pay to attend a self-help seminar advertised as Remembering Something Good.

Colman is 48 and the holder of a doctorate in public administration from New York University. As Fresno’s chief administrative officer from 1979 to 1983, he was responsible for 6,000 employees.

At first, he says, he was a typical boss. When someone had a problem he’d tell him, in effect, to shape up or ship out. As such, he was not unlike most employers who, with characteristic insight, would respond to a worker’s stress by canning him.

Then, however, he began to discover it was more productive to get his people to relax than it was to throw them out a window, an idea that continues to elude the mass of those on a supervisorial level.

Colman discussed this with a psychiatrist friend who had been using the memory of pleasant events to alter current moods. Combining that with his own experience, Colman came up with Friendpower.

He describes it as a series of techniques that will “bring a little fun back” from the past and put it in the future, using, among other memories, those of former friends. Hence, friend-power. Get it?

The precise nature of those techniques are, of course, what you will pay to learn at his seminars.

After my discussion with Colman, I decided to give my limited understanding of Friendpower a try by recalling pleasant events with pleasant people.

Colman uses recollections of young love to relieve stress. He remembers his first boy-girl party, when they held hands and toasted marshmallows. Not at the same time, of course, but at the same party.

I tried, but I don’t think we bothered with marshmallows or hand-holding in East Oakland. All I can remember is Gloria Mack under the bleachers at Castlemont High.

It was said that Gloria knew things about the human body they weren’t even teaching in biology yet. She was far ahead of her time.

Gloria Mack isn’t her real name, by the way. For all I know she may be teaching biology at Castlemont today.

Back then, she used to hang around the bleachers after school waiting for football players to run by, like a moray eel looking for stray fish.

I didn’t play football, but I sauntered by one day and Gloria pounced.

I fled in terror after she explained in some detail what she had in mind. I wasn’t ready for all that. I don’t think I ever have been.

Thinking about Gloria put me in a cold sweat. Allan Colman was right in one sense. While I wasn’t necessarily feeling any better, I sure wasn’t worried about whatever came on the 6 o’clock news.

I can’t even remember it.