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Paula Poundstone - 2002
WTF, Alice-In-Wonderland?
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By Bettijane Levine
Dec. 18, 2002
Times Staff Writer
...
On Dec. 11, after her children had spent 18 months in foster care, Poundstone regained custody. They were removed from her home after she pleaded no contest to a felony count of child endangerment and misdemeanor infliction of injury on a child. The endangerment charge involved drunk driving with children in the car.

Now her lawyer and manager are on a campaign to put the comedian back in circulation, to get her face in every magazine, newspaper and TV show possible -- including People magazine, “Larry King Live,” and now The Times -- in an attempt to refurbish what they consider an unfairly tarnished image.
...
Toshia, Poundstone’s 11-year-old daughter, has joined the party. How are you? the visitor asks. “I’m happy,” she answers in a soft voice. What do you want for Christmas? “Whatever I want, my mama will get me,” she replies sweetly. She walks toward her mother, and drops unsteadily into a chair beside her. “She’s just stopped using her crutches,” Poundstone says.

The attorney is aching to explain. When Paula and Toshia leave for the kitchen, he whispers: “She has cerebral palsy. Paula takes her to therapy a few times a week, and does exercises with her every night -- and now she’s walking without crutches.”
...
Poundstone explains that she’s known Toshia since she was 10 months old and became her foster mother when the child was 4. “When I told her I was going to adopt her, I said, ‘I want you to take my last name so we sound like the family we really are.’ But I didn’t want her to lose the middle name she already had, which is Marie. Or the last name, because that is part of who she is. So I told her we’d push those names into the middle. And I said since we are going to see a judge to do this right, you can also choose one more middle name if you want to. So her full legal name is Toshia Marie Alice-In-Wonderland Johnson Poundstone.”