A Time for Mourning, a Time for Sales Opportunity

On a street corner in Sherman Oaks, Jamie DeMatoff, the self-described “King of All Vendors,” resurfaced with his disaster wares. DeMatoff, a former disc jockey who lives in Hawaii, was visiting his parents here when disaster struck--and opportunity knocked again. He quickly ordered up 1,200 “Attack on America” T-shirts and went to work.

Zelig-like, DeMatoff has turned up on the fringes of our communal nightmares. We first encountered him in January 1994 selling souvenir T-shirts outside the collapsed Northridge Meadows apartment complex, where 16 tenants were crushed in their beds during a 6.7-magnitude earthquake. A couple of years later, during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, we ran into him at the sidewalk sideshow outside the courthouse in downtown L.A. He made a killing--$30,000--peddling one O.J. trinket at a time. His most popular souvenir: a watch with a second hand featuring a Bronco being chased by a police car. We still have one, although it stopped ages ago.

And now, DeMatoff, 37, and his company, Disaster Wear, are cashing in on the worst nightmare of all. He spent the weekend hawking his shirts at a Union 76 gas station on Ventura Boulevard. He said he chose a patriotic theme, “The U.S. Stands United in the Face of Terror,” and promised to donate some of the money he makes to a charity for the victims’ families. After selling about 500 “Attack” shirts over the weekend, he added American flags and another T-shirt with the Stars and Stripes emblazoned on it. “I’m selling them like hotcakes,” he said.

Quiet on the Set

Quietly, somberly, production has resumed at television studios. Cast and crew at “The West Wing” and “Judging Amy” offered prayers before going back to work. Hollywood people stranded in New York looked for a way home. We’ve heard of two, actress Penelope Ann Miller and Tom Werner of the TV production powerhouse of Carsey-Werner, who rented cars and drove cross-country.

Grief

Author David Kessler counsels others on how to cope with grief. When his time came to mourn a friend, actress Berry Berenson, he found comfort in her advice.

Berenson agreed last year to break her long public silence about the 1992 death of her husband, actor Anthony Perkins, from AIDS. She cooperated with Kessler and the book he wrote with fellow grief expert Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: “Life Lessons: Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living.”

“Berry said, ‘I want to talk to people ... I want to help,”’ Kessler told us. “She never could have imagined that she would be at the center of so much grief, that she and so many other people would be.” Now her words serve as an epitaph. Kessler’s voice trembled as he read them aloud from his book:

“The most important thing is to talk about it and find ways to get your anger out. As someone who has gone through it, I can tell you, it is one of the toughest things you will ever do. The more anger you can let go of, the more forgiveness you are going to have.”

Kessler, a member of the Red Cross Aviation Disaster team, was headed to LAX on that terrible morning--was it just one week ago?--to counsel crash victims’ families when his phone rang. A friend was on the line with bad news: “You know one of the passengers.”

“I did not want to believe it,” Kessler said. “I made numerous calls and kept asking, ‘Are you 100% sure?”’

Berenson, 53, had just completed a book about fashion designer Halston. She was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when terrorists smashed it into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Kessler remembers Berenson fondly as an energetic fund-raiser for Project Angel Food, a Hollywood charity that prepares and delivers meals to AIDS patients. He’s a co-founder of the nonprofit group.

Quote, Unquote

“New Yorkers are a resilient and fast-thinking people ... They came together quickly in massive community support and silent determination. There has been no over-panicking. Over the next few days, the calm may surely turn to anger. But today there is just numbness, a horrible silence.” -- David Bowie, on his Web site.

“If that stuff really bothers you so much, you should go do regional theater. Go do Chekhov in Iowa. No paparazzi will be following you.”

--Actor Edward Burns’ advice to colleagues annoyed by gossips, in the New York Times.