June 2009 Archives

It's Sunday, and the fourth time in as many years that I've come to this dance recital in Santa Monica. It's a family obligation--my husband's 12-year-old niece has been part of this dance school more than half her life --but it's also an obligation I don't mind. I love dance. I love the synergy of music and movement, even if it's not professionally done. I did the dance-school thing myself as a little girl, a version of it--weekly classes at a public park, nothing my parents had to pay for, and in Inglewood, not Santa Monica. Here, the costumes are elaborate, and the parents man booths outside the auditorium that do brisk business selling studio photos of the dancers, bottled water, post-performance bouquets. It's impressive, if overindulgent.

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Going to Boston last week made realize how strange it is being an out-of-towner from L.A. rather than in L.A. I can't say that I like it; I feel thrown off my game as host of just about the most unreadable city in the country, if not the world. Here, I get to explain to people where L.A. begins and ends and begins again, how to get to Hollywood in a straight line, where to find Rodeo Drive (not Rodeo Road--big difference), why and how there are two San Vicente Boulevards. But in Boston, the most east coast of east coast cities, I'm a rube. Geographically, I'm at a total loss. The vast but simple grid of L.A. is replaced with a complicated, concentric web of streets and highways and roads that curve into and away from each other and don't bother with names. The entire layout is like an extended family that all know each other and treat each other tolerably well, but if you're on the outside of the family, woe unto you. Find your own way.

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Earthquake, cop shooting, a once-golden U.S. company filing for the biggest bankruptcy in our history on top of the unseemly, increasingly desperate acts of a once-Golden state--all this gives new meaning to term June gloom. It's come right on schedule, gray skies, hard drizzle (or is that hard skies and gray drizzle?) and all. The kind of scenario that has the tropic-minded tourists circling their hotels in shorts and sandals and feeling totally ripped off. And what's worrying me the most this morning? You got it. Lost dogs. One in particular named Sadie.

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