One morning my close friend and I did a long bike ride and stopped in a quaint district in Glendale to have coffee and a pastry. Across the street we spotted an adorable boutique—Audrey K. There was a rack outside with dresses on sale. My friend, Catherine, flipped over the designs and rushed into the store for a closer look.

Costume and Fashion Designer Bao Tranchi graduated from Otis College of Art & Design at the top of her class. She was immediately offered a designer job at Anne Klein in New York or work on Queen of the Damned, as the illustrator and assistant to Academy Award nominated costume designer Arianne Phillips.

With the dollar being so weak against the euro, singer/songwriter Lance Smith (Lancelot) came to Los Angeles, CA, to work with rock producer Rich Mouser, who lately had been cultivating and producing Irish talent (Paul Toal and Jaded Sun). Lancelot heard about his work and made the decision to collaborate here in L.A.

The Hollywood Hills have gone pink and they have never looked better. Men, beware. This month we take you into the hot and trendy new female-dedicated gym, Pink Iron. I invited ISSA certified trainer Angelis Casteran to come along this round for a fresh female fitness perspective on what is a girls only club, no boys allowed (except male fitness writers, of course). Upon entering, you are greeted with an energetic smile and wag of Barbell’s tiny tail, Pink Iron’s little white Maltese mascot. The fresh colors, trendy spa feel, energized staff and intimate personality of it all culminates in a smile on your face and an extra spring in your step just by walking in.

The American Cancer Society’s most recent estimates for breast cancer in the United States for 2009 tell us that 192,370 new cases of invasive breast cancer and 40,170 deaths from breast cancer occur each year. In this issue we focus on breast cancer awareness in our attempt to keep you healthy and living a long, wonderfully productive and fulfilling life.

2009 has been a bittersweet year for a lot of people. Not only did our economy take a dive, but also some very famous people left this world. As life goes on, we continue to fight and win and lose our battles. It’s pretty well known that October has been deemed Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And I am happy to celebrate those women who have fought the battle and won. Statistically, if detected early, breast cancer has a very high cure rate. And those women who’ve fought the fight and won are told if they are cancer-free for five years, their chances of recurrence are slim.

More than a million people are victims of work-at-home scams each year. Some, I’m sorry to say, had it coming. They went in with their hearts instead of their heads. Others, however, couldn’t have dodged the bullet even if they tried. The work-at-home scam was just too sophisticated for the average searcher.

You may question how the way your parents loved you as a child could dictate your love life today. After all, most of us have a hard time remembering what we did last month, including the name of that guy we found on http://Match.com, then met for coffee . . . once. But, your first step in making sense of the nonsense of 21st Century dating is to understand that your earliest family relationships programmed your brain for grown-up intimacy.

For generations, Peter Solomon, a 33 degree Mason, and his male ancestors—all of whom were Masons of the highest degree—have been entrusted with a secret that could literally change the world. Some years ago when this secret was threatened, he gave his friend and mentee Robert Langdon, the famous Harvard symbologist of past Dan Brown novels, a package for safekeeping. Now, Langdon has been tricked into bringing this package into the open.

I’ve recently moved to the desert, Palm Springs, that is. Before I moved but after I found a place, I was looking forward to taking massage therapy classes in September and maybe meeting a few friends along the way. Sadly, things didn’t work out as planned. The funding for the school fell through and I found myself scrambling to make my own ends meet.