It’s been a month since I’ve seen the Thinker. The time was spent luxuriating in thought and activity. They became days of resurrecting my business, writing, and staying at home, where my fantasia of comfort welcomes me. Above my bed, I hung an umbrella. A vintage peach faded Parasol. One day, while I was searching for a place to store my ribbons, I looked up and watched the light sprinkle through the Parasol. So that is where I stored the ribbons. When I am in bed during an afternoon nap, I see abstractions of figures: dancers, faces, gods, and gorillas. The Thinker noticed the abstraction. I think he said, ” Wow, this is incredible. Do you see the legs? And there is the face.” He took everything in and profited from imagination. He had a thousand virtues, that regrettably did not serve him. 
I don’t know why. You know I want answers, that is why I write.
LUELLEN SMILEY ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS
Where Gaps of Expression are Liberated
ABOUT
Luellen Smiley is a creative nonfiction writer, author, columnist, and historian whose writing is deeply rooted in a controversial personal history. She is the daughter of Allen Smiley, a close friend, associate, and business partner of notorious Las Vegas gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Her father was sitting only feet from Siegel when Siegel was murdered in Beverly Hills on June 20, 1947.
That extraordinary childhood history became the foundation for Smiley’s first book, Cradle of Crime: A Daughter’s Tribute, published in 2017. The memoir explores what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a man connected to organized crime while trying to reconcile her love for her father with the secrecy, fear, and criminal world surrounding him.
Smiley’s work has appeared in publications including the New York Post, MORE Magazine, Southern California newspapers, and Authorlink. She wrote the newspaper column Smiley’s Dice—Adventures in Livingness, which earned a Blue-Ribbon Award from the California Newspapers Association for her Growing Up With Gangsters columns.
Her interest in her father’s history also led her to become a researcher and commentator on organized crime history. She has participated in television, radio, and documentary interviews.
Smiley’s next book, Gaslighting Greta, will be published this year. A personal story that reads like fiction. Her own website describes the project as exploring a woman whose life is destabilized by gaslighting and psychological manipulation.
Her writing career reflects a recurring theme: using personal experience and research to uncover the truth behind complicated relationships and extraordinary lives. From the secretive world surrounding her father and Bugsy Siegel to the deeply personal territory of Gaslighting Greta, Smiley’s work transforms difficult experiences into stories of survival, discovery, and ultimately reclaiming one’s voice.
Luellen Smiley is an author whose life has given her an unusual perspective on secrecy, manipulation, family loyalty, betrayal, and survival—and she uses that perspective as the raw material for her nonfiction storytelling.
5 responses to “DROPPING OF THE THINKER”
Good Post…..the comment from Blair couldn’t have put it better.
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Okay…” Breaking up is hard to do”…. But dump this schmuck already and understand that YOUR material is your genius NOT his inspiration!!! he wasn’t and isn’t…Moving on in YOUR mind is the questions and the answer…Leave him out of it all…He came…he went..YOU are better for it. he has no worthy residue here!!! Xoxoxoxox
Sent from my iPad
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I DID DROP HIM. I’M TRYING. EXAMINING WHO WE CHOOSE
TO COMPANION IS EYE OPENING. MORE ON THAT IN PRIVATE.
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I am not there yet! Still looking for loopholes to luck.
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There are no answers. Only questions. You forget that you know that already…
XoBee
On Tue Dec 02 19:53:13 CST 2014, ODYSSEY OF LOVE
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