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We hope you have a fabulous New Year’s Eve tonight — and if you’re out celebrating, make sure you look up your options for a safe ride home.

To close out the year, we’ve got a personal remembrance of Donald Moffat, an actor whose name you may not have recognized when his obituary appeared recently, but whose face you might know from dozens of movies.

For Kevin McKenna, our deputy business editor, Mr. Moffat wasn’t simply another character actor. He was a working dad and, despite coming from England, someone who helped make up the fabric of Southern California life. Here’s Kevin:

I had known Donald and his family for decades, since his daughter Lynn and I were high school debate partners in Southern California.

Donald’s westward odyssey began almost on a whim. “We said, Let’s go for the summer,” his wife, the actress and director Gwen Arner, recalled. It was 1969, and Donald had a part in a French farce at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. They rented a house in Manhattan Beach. “And at the end of the summer,” she said, “we decided to stay.” They bought a home in Hermosa Beach that they never gave up, the surf audible from its windows.

While his onscreen credits grew, Donald didn’t want to leave theater behind. Many actors took parts in local stage productions “because it was something you would do to get an agent” rather than “something you do because it’s worthwhile,” Gwen said. As an alternative, their friend Ralph Waite founded the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater in the mid-1970s. The company lasted only a few years, but it produced Donald’s favorite stage role, as Estragon in “Waiting for Godot,” half of a comic pair that The Los Angeles Times described as “practically perfect,” with Gwen directing.

Some of Donald’s screen roles reflected California’s social upheaval. One was as an alcoholic trying to maintain his sobriety on Fifth Street in Los Angeles — the city’s longtime Skid Row — in “On the Nickel.” Another was as the advertising executive Edgar Halcyon in the mini-series of Armistead Maupin’s San Francisco saga, “Tales of the City.”

My favorite was his turn as Vice President Lyndon Johnson in “The Right Stuff.” L.B.J.’s raucous “Welcome to Texas” event, ostensibly in Houston, was filmed at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Donald didn’t think he looked right for the part, his daughter Wendy told me, so for the audition he got some vintage eyeglasses from a Goodwill store in Torrance and put wads of Juicy Fruit gum behind his ears. It worked.

California Online

(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.)

• A difficult, complicated story about what happened when a Catholic parish in San Diego started quietly welcoming gay Catholics. [The New York Times]

• Senator Kamala Harris wrote an Op-Ed about how her mother’s death has informed her work on the American health care system. [The New York Times]

• Wanda Johnson has warily embraced a macabre sort of celebrity since her son, Oscar Grant, was shot in the back by a BART officer not long after 2008 became 2009. His death sparked protests years before “Black Lives Matter” gave a name to a movement. [The San Francisco Chronicle]

• And 20 years ago, the Riverside police shot Tyisha Miller, a young woman who they were told was unconscious with a gun in her lap. Though few people outside the community know her name, experts say she left behind a legacy of change. [The Press-Enterprise]

• The California D.M.V. has been struggling to maintain the public’s trust after a series of recent missteps. Now, it’s under scrutiny for issues with its Real ID protocols. [The New York Times]

• On Jan. 1, California will become the first state to ban the sale of dogs, cats and rabbits from pet stores unless they are rescue animals. [Time]

• Also, here’s a helpful way to learn about all the new laws going into effect tomorrow. [The Los Angeles Times]

• Here’s why legalizing marijuana hasn’t decreased drug-related crime in areas where the crop and the cash it generates are in large supply. [The Atlantic]

• The places where the Southland’s homeless people make shelter are as varied as their stories. [The Los Angeles Times]

• “Mid-Market is a critique of America in a kind of way — this is who we are, but we don’t want to admit it.” [Curbed San Francisco]

• Here are seven ways to age well in 2019. [The New York Times]

And Finally …

I’d seen an article about Millennial Lotería a little while ago, and I was intrigued. I didn’t grow up playing Lotería, but I loved the idea of something traditional updated to reflect a changing culture. (I’m also just a sucker for anything that can poke fun at millennialisms without blaming us.)

Instead of a card like “El Paraguas,” the umbrella, Millennial Lotería has “El Safe Space.”

“La Dama,” the lady, is now “La Feminist.”

My colleague, Jose A. Del Real, talked to Millennial Lotería’s creator, an Angeleno named Mike Alfaro, who described wanting to see his own identity as a young Latino reflected — not flattened.

“We’re fighting Hispanic stereotypes and we’re winking at millennial stereotypes at the same time,” he told Jose. “I wanted to make something that does these things with this little wink, a little joy, with some nostalgia to it.”

And with that, I’ll leave you until next year. We’ll be off tomorrow and back on Wednesday.

California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: [email protected].

California Today is written by Jill Cowan and edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

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