White Party Palm Springs 2013 is now in the record books.

According to promoter Jeffrey Sanker, this year the event is once again on course to set an attendance record, with estimates already exceeding last year’s tally of just over 30,000.

It is spring in Fallbrook, Calif., the sweet breeze season. Fruit tree blossoms fill the air with the anticipation of nectarous things to come. Songbirds do violent battle over choice aeries. Scarlet camellias bloom, then drop blood petals to the ground. And into this convergence of life and death and nature’s magic, Fallbrook author T. Jefferson Parker launches his new crime thriller, The Famous and the Dead, the sixth and final novel in his bestselling Charlie Hood series.

The Kennedy family is as close to royalty as this country gets. So when in 1973 the “National Enquirer” reported that Jackie Onassis’ aunt and cousin were living in squalor in their dilapidated East Hampton estate with “52 stray cats and a few rabid raccoons,” it was news. That the women had, shall we say, lost touch with reality was not a surprise; they’d led rather strange lives before this.

Stephen Sondheim may be the only composer in the world who would consider the attempted assassination of U.S. presidents a fitting subject for a musical.

But as a panelist in a writing lab, he read Charles Gilbert’s script about the topic, secured the rights and wrote “Assassins.”

It opened off-Broadway in 1990 and in London’s West End in 1992. The “ick” factor and the events of 9/11 conspired to delay the planned 2001 Broadway opening. The show didn’t open on Broadway until 2004.