LA en vie

Hurricane Gustav bears down on Louisiana

I'm a bit distracted right now. Gustav is heading straight for a lot of people and places I love.

Most of them are evacuating. One of them just wrote to me, "I'm sure we'll have more news for the family newsletter in a few days!"

The Jewish mother

"Mom, didn't you say we have Jewish ancestors?" L asked me. I'm the genealogy expert in the family.

"Well, we do have someone named Salomon, who married a Catholic ancestor around 1750," I said cautiously. "I can't prove she was Jewish. Why?"

"Oh, I've just been telling people my mother is part Jewish," said L, who works for a studio. "It's really helpful in Hollywood."

Don't know much about geography

"Wait a minute. Are you saying New Mexico is in America?" said the pretty teenager behind me, of friend of A's who goes to one of the top schools in Los Angeles.

"Well, yes, it is," I said over my shoulder, trying to make her feel better. "A lot of people make that mistake, though. A magazine there even has a feature column where New Mexicans write in their stories about how everyone thinks they're foreigners."

"Wow. Since when is New Mexico part of the U.S.?" the girl said.

I tried successfully not to snap. "For about a hundred years."

"Americans are terrible at geography," said A. "Mom, remember that guy who didn't know London was a city?"

"London is a city?" said the girl. "I thought it was, like, a country."

Paris hometown

"America is my country, but Paris is my hometown." A character in a movie we were watching quoted Gertrude Stein, and I felt a pang.

"That's us, isn't it?" said D.  The others nodded.

We just rented out our Paris apartment for two years.

The 405: Land of the Free?

V.I.P.

On Friday I had lunch with an old friend who is now a HPP-- Hollywood Power Player. He is one of the good guys in Hollywood.

I think he really did want to see me once I moved to Los Angeles, but his office had canceled three or four times. Finally the day came, and it was my turn to want to cancel-- it was inconvenient for several reasons. I called up my own junior HPP (one of my kids) to ask for advice, and received a hissed, "Don't you dare cancel!" So I showed up at the restaurant for lunch, not having seen the old friend since a long-ago wedding in New York City.

We had a really pleasant lunch, laughing and reminiscing and talking about poetry and our families. He had visited my family while driving across country, years ago, and said he still remembers how stunned he was at the number of toothbrushes in the one shared bathroom we had back then.

The food was delicious. He introduced me to someone from our college who walked in, and pointed out the head of one of the biggest television networks, across the room. He knew just about everyone there. They were all dressed in jeans.

Then he said goodbye, and in spite of all the good will, I have a feeling that that was it, unless we meet by accident again some day. He is in the upper atmosphere now, and I breathe the air of ordinary mortals.

My first visit to Los Angeles

It was long ago when I was young. I was living in San Francisco, and people there were snobbish and rude about L.A. and its people: "shallow" was the S.F. consensus.

San Francisco was beautiful and chilly, and when I lived there, before Silicon Valley, it was very much a stronghold of vegetarian/gay/New Age/hippie culture. People would say they were witches, and you were supposed to nod. When you applied to be someone's roommate, they would ask, "What sign are you?" Until then, I had not realized how Southern I really was. I found San Francisco cold and alienating.

My mother had a conference in Los Angeles, and I went down to meet her. I was surprised how much I liked it. It was February and there were flowers everywhere, and good-looking people cycling in the streets. Bright, snow-capped high mountains hung over the city, startlingly close, and the ocean shone in the sun. In the morning I had visited an old roommate who was Mexican-American. She gave me a whirlwind tour of East L.A., where she was loving her work in a health clinic. There were parks with colorful murals and dangerous areas where she warned me not to look anyone in the eye. She was forgetting her English, and introduced me to her husband's parents, who could scarcely say "Hello" and "Goodbye"; their family had lived in Los Angeles since the 1700s (if not before-- they looked very Indian).

A friend from college picked me up then and drove me around Beverly Hills, with its high palm trees along wide empty streets lined with Spanish colonial houses. In the afternoon, I got to see a Bel Air mansion with a screening room in the basement, a white grand piano, and a sweeping spiral staircase worthy of Scarlett O'Hara.

My day in L.A. was the perfect introduction to this wonderful, diverse city.

Daytime television

It seems odd that I am still feeling like an outsider a year and a half after arriving in California, but maybe the truth is, living in another country was just my way of disguising my own sense of being different.

I have a new dentist who has televisions in all his rooms, positioned where you can see them as you lie back in the dental chair. The woman who was working on my teeth had the TV tuned to an animals channel, and I found it relaxing to watch puppies doing tricks and horses being rescued from abusive owners. But then I was moved to a new room where another woman had a celebrity news channel on. The tone of the announcers was urgent and aggressive. This news was important-- that's why the voices come so loud and fast, with images changing every couple of seconds! This news is mean-spirited, cynical and funny! And this news invades real people's privacy and makes them and their families miserable so that someone watching daytime TV is entertained for a few seconds!

"Yeah, it's terrible what they do," said the complacent woman cleaning my teeth. She left the TV on though. I longed for the gadget I carry in my purse, a TV-B-Gone.

What year did public humiliation of other people become entertainment to Americans?

Bad girls are good business

Ads on the side of Los Angeles buses for Gossip Girl (a television show about rich high school kids in New York City).