For a moment, the Bubbleman, a female boxer, a recovering alcoholic and others shone in our pages. Here are updates on their remarkable lives.
Whether you thought of it as the first year of the third millennium or the last year of the second millennium, 2000 was a rich time for purveyors of feature stories. Today, Southern California Living publishes postscripts to the tales of some we’ve profiled in the previous 12 months. Together, the stories give a glimpse of the startling range of life that has been chronicled in these pages.
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For Tim “the Bubbleman” Dillenbeck (“Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble,” Nov. 14), trouble still bubbles just below the surface as he feverishly works to catch up on his bills.
Dillenbeck, a fixture on the Santa Monica Pier with his Rube Goldberg-esque bubble-making machines, has brought joy to beach-goers but headaches to authorities who have repeatedly cited him for blowing bubbles during restricted hours for street performers. After four years on the pier, Dillenbeck had accumulated more than a dozen misdemeanor violation tickets, spent weeks in jail and was nearly broke.
After a story in The Times about Dillenbeck and his obsession, he received numerous orders for bubble machines, which he constructs from scratch and sells for $200. But despite the outpouring, Dillenbeck says he still faces a Catch-22 situation because he often does not have enough money to buy some of the more expensive parts that make up the self-designed apparatus, slowing the construction process to a crawl.
On most days, Dillenbeck is still out on the pier. But this time of year is traditionally slow for street performers, so he is receiving a limited amount of tips.
“I’m trying to generate an income as best I can with what little I have. It’s a constant juggling act of what bills to pay and when. I’ve got to work a lot of hours to catch up.”
Dillenbeck has received only one ticket in recent months, but he still owes about 50 hours of community service after pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges of blowing bubbles after hours. According to Dillenbeck, there just haven’t been enough hours in the day to keep up with his bills and sweep sidewalks as part of his community service.
With three shiny, new, partially constructed machines atop a shelf in his cluttered shop in North Hollywood, Dillenbeck sits among piles of tools, parts, hardware, wires, boxes and indescribable bric-a-brac, patiently soldering a tiny transistor to a switch that controls a bubble machine’s motor. It’s an arduous process. Like his life, his work space is chaos. But he persists and eventually attaches the part to a machine. Moments later, his tired eyes brighten, followed by a brief chuckle as the motor spins. Another machine is nearly ready to soften thousands of hearts.
