When I moved to LA from New York four years ago (back when the only masks we wore in public were the ones THAT GRIN AND LIE!) I didn’t expect to hate it, but I didn’t expect to like it, either. I’d lived in Los Angeles before, for nine months right out of college, and most of my memories of that time consist of being stuck in traffic and eating Jersey Mike’s, or if my fellow NBC pages and I were going big that night, Island Burgers. Like the chain establishments we incuriously frequented, my previous LA stint was fast, casual, and at times, diarrhea-inducing. When I decided to return, I did it for the same reason I’ve done anything major up til now: someone offered me an opportunity, and I couldn’t think of an obvious reason to turn it down. I know that opportunity don’t grow on trees. But is it possible that they used to?
Point is, I’ve never felt emotionally attached to LA. And yet, yesterday, as I wandered around some botanical gardens at dusk with my husband and two small children, I felt something akin to love. Sure, the months of unseasonable rain we’ve had are a harbinger of climate annihilation, and sure, all that moisture has helped spawn a superrace of mosquitoes reminiscent of those Nazi cows, but DAMN is everything green! The cherry blossoms were bursting, the lilacs were beginning to perfume the air, the camellias were hanging on because they weren’t ready to leave the party. It was nature’s rave, and me and my family were its balls-tripping guests. I thought to myself, I’d like to live here forever.
Of course, some of my favorite parts about of living in LA run counter to the complaints you usually hear about this city. I am never in the car, which makes the fact that I’ve still managed to get into two car accidents all the more impressive, right?! I’m not stuck in the office til all hours because the only work I do with other people is over Zoom. And while someone told me that Anthony Kiedis lives in my neighborhood, the only person I’ve seen wearing nothing but a sock on his penis recently is my four-year-old. My version of LA doesn’t feel like LA. It just feels like a nice, sunny place where any given spring day you can walk into your backyard and find a couple of Cooper’s Hawks freeloading in your pool. Pretty dope, right? At least it WAS pretty dope, until recently.
A month ago, Hollywood came to town. By that I mean that a sitcom decided to film on my block. Suddenly, people couldn’t find parking because of the giant production vans lining the street. A man in a security jacket set up a folding chair twenty feet from my front door. I felt like some country bumpkin angling for a starlet’s autograph every time I had to leave my house to pick up my kid from daycare. I’m not here because I’m interested in your stupid art! I wanted to scream at all the people in black, wearing sleek little headsets I’d kill a man to be wearing. I’m here because I have nowhere else to go! I expected to find my neighbors similarly miffed by the fact that we were being colonized by industry insiders, especially because, refreshingly, almost no one on my block works in entertainment. But last weekend, while gathering in a neighbor’s backyard for cocktails (isn’t that delightfully quaint?! I love LA!), the conversation found its way to the goings-on on our block, and not only did my neighbors, nay FRIENDS, express remorse that filming was about to wrap, they began scheming over ways to draw new productions to us. The whole conversation felt like a betrayal of community, an affront to me, personally, and just, I don’t know, WRONG! In short, it hurt my feelings.
Now sure, any armchair psychologist could chalk up my anger to envy that a group of creative people were getting paid to make their very own show right outside my door while I was not. But if we left it at that, I couldn’t tell you about all the specific details I’ve latched onto to obscure my own pettiness from myself! For example, a highly reliable source (whose identity I choose not to reveal because then I’d have to kill you, and while this newsletter doesn’t have a substantial following exactly, the amount of blood I’d have on my hands is more than I have soap for) told me that while this production was paying a handful of my neighbors $750 a day to use their driveways for tech and craft services purposes, this VERY SAME PRODUCTION also had a second shooting location in West Hollywood, where they were paying residents $1000 a day for the use of their driveways. This enraged me! It reminded me of everything I hate about this industry, and maybe every industry! There is no inherent value to the work done, the services provided. The value is simply whatever happens to be the very least that the provider of services will accept. However little you believe you’re worth, that’s what you’re worth! And you know who makes the most? The people already making the most! West Hollywood driveways are somehow $250 better at accommodating tables full of individually packaged animal crackers than other driveways in other neighborhoods. Are the driveways of West Hollywood paved with an exceptional vintage of concrete? Was that concrete poured by Michelangelo himself? I don’t think so! The only reason for the WAGE DISPARITY, if you will, seems to be that people in West Hollywood are already richer, and therefore demand more. And yes, I know it’s unseemly to harp about money, but is it really? Or is that just what we’re conditioned to believe so we won’t start flapping our lips and stumbling on information they don’t want us to share? Which is why I soldier on.
Moral Outrage #2: the production that filmed on our block chose this location because of a particular home two doors down from mine. This home is a newly built monstrosity that was completed a little over a year ago, after which the developers hosted an open house with a valet and a signature cocktail named after our street. The current residents bought it for multiple millions of dollars more than any other house on our block has sold for, and they did it because, as the realtor described, they’d been “priced out of the west side.” A tragedy indeed! What could we do but open-heartedly welcome these Santa Monica refugees?? Honestly, I don’t know these people, but they seem nice. What aggravates me is the $7500 a day they were paid for the use of their very fancy home, a day rate that accumulated to over $100,000 all told. $100,000 just for already being rich enough to own a big house! I’m so tired of being reminded that money and opportunity are magnets for more money and opportunity, that the only answer to getting what you want in this world seems to be already having it.
Why am I taking this all so personally? Well, like I said before, jealousy! For so many reasons! For instance, we were ONE house away from getting paid for the simple act of having a driveway! I would have taken the $750 without a peep about West Hollywood, I swear. Full disclosure: it’s not like I walked away completely empty handed. We were given a $100 gift certificate to the pizza place at the end of our block for tolerating the production company’s presence. But it’s also worth noting that there is a lady living in a tent outside that pizza place, while half a block down, folks are happening upon hundreds of thousands of dollars like it’s change in their couch cushions. So I guess I’m trapped in one of those it’s-morally-bankrupt-and-I-wish-I’d-gotten-more-out-of-it situations. But let’s not spend too much time on that, because something else is sticking in my craw, something that inspires sadness more than anger. When I was a wide-eyed, television-obsessed eight-year-old growing up in Denver, CO., the beer company, Coors decided to shoot a commercial on my street. I remember showing up one summer day with a baseball-sized jawbreaker (RIP Mister Bulky’s) and a literal childlike sense of wonder. I spent all day watching them shoot that commercial, and I still have the jawbreaker scars on my tongue to prove it. When production wrapped, I was so taken with the experience, I wrote a letter to Coors headquarters. They sent me a purple Coors hat, which was kind of a weird gift for a little girl, right? Yet for months, I wouldn’t take it off my head. I wonder what happened to that hat. Gone the way of my childlike wonder, I suppose…
My kids loved the excitement production brought to our block. They loved the armloads of fruit snacks a burly PA gifted them. They loved the pizza dinners we bought with that $100 gift certificate. The day after the vans packed up and left, my two-year-old kept looking for them, pacing up and down the street, eventually throwing himself on the sidewalk in confused agony. How could I help but project my lost innocence onto him? When I was a child, witnessing the magic of television firsthand shook me awake to a lifestyle I never knew existed, it let me dream of opportunities, of different versions of what my future could become. Decades later, all I seem to be able to draw from it is the opposite. I can only see how few chances so many of us are fighting over, and how even if you score one, it probably just means you get to write a stupid movie about, like, Gak, or something.
How can someone live in LA for the rest of one’s life, when opportunity is slim and only gets slimmer as you age? (Must be nice, OPPORTUNITY!). I honestly don’t know. But I find comfort in getting to know LA as more than just an incubator for Marvel movies. I find comfort in knowing that a nature rave is as much a part of LA as a film shoot. It feels like an analogy meant to make me understand that we are more than just what we do, that the person wandering around a garden with the man I married and the kids we made is as much me as the person struggling to write anything good, struggling to sell anything at all, struggling to control my envy for the people who get to make a television show on my street while I struggle.
And also, there was this: in one of the trucks parked outside my house every day, a teamster was making use of the hours paid to sit in the cab of semi by teaching himself to bugle. The weather was sunny but not sweltering. The windows were open to catch the breeze and the smell of the jasmine exploding in our driveway (which coulda been yours, sitcom-on-my-block, but you playin) filled our living room. This guy played Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” over and over for most of one afternoon. For what is a man, what has he got?/ If not himself then he has naught/ Not to say the things that he truly feels… My husband, who knows more about music than me, said this man’s bugling was very bad. But, I dunno. I kinda liked it.
hahahahaha "must be nice OPPORTUNITY!"
A bit of philosophical comedy. Fun!