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Jen Frankel Blog Entry March 30th, 2007Adventures in Lalaland
Today is the day I set up the circumstances for a good friend of mine back to want to kill me.
Seriously. Funny story.
Here I am, standing in line in front of the Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood CA, about to see Dane Cook, my friend’s favourite comic. She’s going to kill me when she finds out. I guess I’ll try to get his autograph to soften the blow. Or maybe I should just call her from the club and gloat.
So goes life in Lalaland. Been a full day for my first sunrise / sunset in big old LA CA. Even in the night and the dark driving up from Orange County, I knew I wasn’t in Kansas (although I managed a conversation today about the big KS today as well). The palm trees, silhouetted against the freeway lights, gave it away.
I haven’t even been here twenty-four hours yet, but I... well, I know something’s up. Maybe it’s the lack of snow, or the way I keep meeting excessively nice people. Maybe it was the view from the top of Mulholland today, spiralling up the canyon roads to breathe that rarified director-shared air.
I don’t get the feeling like I’ve somehow come home precisely, not like I do when I go to Britain. But I know there’s something that connects me to this place. Maybe if Britain is somehow my ancestral past, LA is telling me that some of my future at least is here.
I got to have some stellar experiences today: contradictory legal advice, compliments that damn as much as they praise, and of course, traffic slowed by a big budget film shoot. It’s all LA as I thought LA would be.
I drove to Santa Monica and looks at the pier, jutting out into what one of my appointments today called "the Big Lake," festooned with gaudy carousel and Ferris wheel. I had a great coffee and an even better conversation over a manicure I felt I had to treat myself to with a charming Vietnamese girl called – for real – Mousie.
It was what I have to think of as a day of Pure Los Angeles, like you could bottle it and sell it to the tourists along with their Star Tour and day at Universal Studios. I took meetings, had random conversations with interesting people in all sorts of lines of work who, when you scratched just the merest bit, all turned out to be in film, and I spent a lot of time in the car. Now, I can’t say for certain I made progress. But of this I am one hundred percent certain – coming here was not a step backwards. I am in LA, the Mecca of all things story. Yeah, I know it’s not the only place storytellers hang out, but hell, it’s not a bad place to start, right?
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