Alice's Adventures in La-la Land, or Through the Looking Glass

As we drove closer to LA I began to have flashbacks to the 24 hours I spent there last summer. I had vacation, but Inki was working like mad as her project was about to "go live" in consultant parlance, so we couldn't get away anywhere. I love my job but don't like having to work any more than anyone else, so I figured I'd drive down and audition for Jeopardy! I passed the written test pretty easily and enjoyed the chance to visit the set and play a mock game, but they've got probably ten times the number of qualified contestants they need for any one season, and Alex hasn't called. Not once. Oh, well.
Anyway...my other memorable experience in LA that day was traffic. Yes, it is every bit as bad as you've heard. When I first arrived it was 2pm on a Thursday and everything on the freeway was stop and go the last thirty miles. No accident, no construction, no lunchtime or rush traffic, just bazillions of cars going nowhere. Dante would have approved.
So when we came in this time, we got off the freeway as fast as possible and took Decker Canyon Road, which winds slowly through the eponymous canyon up and then back down again to the Pacific Coast Highway just north of Malibu. Definitely the right move. It was a beautiful drive and though we were moving at 25 mph, it was very enjoyable. Andor (who collects stones on all his travels) took a crumbly handful of canyon wall with him as a souvenir.
I keep referring to movies and TV here as I write of California and that's probably because the whole place still seems unreal to me as a recent California transplant. I'm still not used to all the deja vu that comes with seeing places you've never been but have seen before. It's disquieting. All these places are associated with deep-seated memories I have of experiences not my own. In Decker Canyon I flashed on Jack Webb's old Emergency! show with Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe. They used to have to drive that red Station 51 truck up into these hills to help people who were trapped in brush fires or had gotten lost or hurt up in the hills and couldn't get out. I wondered if they'd come get us if we ran out of gas up there.
So just as I thought of Emergency! in Decker Canyon, I couldn't help but think of Baywatch in Santa Monica. We lunched there at Loew's resort hotel overlooking the beach with its lifeguard booths and pier, drinking cold beer and mango smoothies (not cold-beer-and-mango smoothies -- yeech!) while we watched the world go by. It could only have been better if Pam Anderson had actually run by in super slo-mo.
Then we walked down to the equally familiar and novel Venice Beach with its tattoo parlors, hemp peddlers, rollerbladers, and hippies to meet Inki's friend Brett, a SoCal native who kindly offered to show us around. We headed off (at a snail's pace on Santa Monica Blvd) to experience the shops and galleries of Rodeo Drive, where we saw amongst other things the numerous and costly oil paintings of a Playboy Playmate with recurring rabbit motif. Classy place.
Thence we drove into the heart of it all, down Sunset and onto Hollywood Boulevard with its Walk of Fame. Appropriately enough we had to make a detour because the middle block of Hollywood was blocked off for some big event in front of the Kodak theater (home of the Oscars). We were hoping for some glitzy opening; it was only the ESPY awards, however, and they weren't even to be held that night.
We headed down to Grauman's Chinese Theater to see the larger-than-life over-the-top architecture and put ourselves in the footsteps (and handprints) of Hollywood legends. Odd to think that these people were real. Odd to learn John Wayne had remarkably small feet.
My Norwegian entourage wasted no time in finding the footprints of Norway's two greatest stars: Sonia Henie...and Donald Duck. One of the little strange things you notice living in Scandinavia is that Donald, not Mickey, is the flagship of the Disney franchise there. He sells comics there by the million; Bergen's number one used bookstore has a lifesize Donald figure out in front with the price of used Donald comics in big print. Now it's up to four Norwegian kroner each, but Inki remembers when the sign offered them for one krone apiece. That sign's been up there all her life. It makes me feel better for the poor guy. Here he's an afterthought with a textbook inferiority complex. Throughout the old Mickey Mouse Show intro everyone's singing "MICK-ey MOUSE!" at the top of their lungs and he's trying his damnedest the whole time just to get a single "Donald Duck!" in edgewise. But in Scandinavia the duck has turned. Good for him.


As the sun set we walked up to the mall at Hollywood and Highland (which is the only mall I've seen which is watched over by 30-foot elephants rampant atop 50-foot stone columns. Very subtle, guys.) and watched the Hollywood sign and the rest of Tinseltown as the sun set and the lights came up.
We passed the Scientology church on Hollywood with its fifty-foot neon sign on our way back to the car. Seriously, guys, if you want to be taken seriously as a religion, you should probably put your churches somewhere besides Hollywood Boulevard. And lose the sign, too.


After some more gawking it was time to drive to San Diego, which I learned to my twitching nerves is not a drive for the faint of heart at 85 mph in the dark.