The first time I visited Los Angeles was in 1983. With a frame backpack, bed roll, Hollywood hostel. I remember listening to the LA Philharmonic rehearse for that day’s evening concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Lovelorn, I teared up in a big-house cinema watching the sentimental Jersey love story by John Sayles, “Baby, It’s You;” Remember chatting up a pretty girl at a bar, when I told her I was from Ontario, Canada, not Ontario, California, she looked past me, a million-mile stare. Clueless before “Clueless.”
“Who needs to learn to parallel park when everywhere you go has valet?”
That’s a “Clueless” moment quoted by daughter Kate, who was eight years old when the movie was released, and will soon take her driver’s test in Los Angeles. (She tells me you don’t have to parallel park for the test, only show that you can comfortably back your vehicle along a street curb without going up on it.)
Then, in the summer of 1988, I was back, but only at LAX – and then south to Orange County, the land of laundry room notices for alien abductee support groups.
Twenty-five years later, I returned. On Jesse Street in Boyle Heights, the new neighborhood of my transplant Angel, K. I was there for only a short, awesome weekend.
Some thoughts:
• East LA is a real world away from Hollywood and West LA. And not like Manhattan’s West Side vs. its East Side. Let’s leave it at that.
• Pink grapefruit is five times as tasty as Brooklyn market ones. Color: Red-pink
• California rolls are HUGE, with REAL crabmeat.
• LA Kings-Columbus Blue Jackets hockey game Friday night: diverse fans, courteous and fun-loving; K and I only hear the word "suck" screamed twice, near the end of the game
• Skid row is SKID ROW; others are pretenders
• East LA is home to magical bridges that link raw riverside warehouses, lofts.
• This past weekend the river was a river (not a dry concrete roadway), where from some vantage points the homeless have Jay Gatsby-like views of downtown and the surrounding mountains.
East LA banishes those shop-worn clichés of Los Angeles. I won’t be thinking of it in that reductive “Clueless” way ever again.
Next: Running for Your Life: Mix It Up
