Being new in town is a little like being the new kid in school in the middle of the semester. Not only are you a stranger among friends and neighbors, but there’s already subtext going on that you don’t know about.
When I first told my friends that I was leaving Las Vegas and moving to Los Angeles, nearly everyone had the same response. “Why?” They asked, horrified. And that was the people from LA. My friends from San Francisco and New York just looked at me with great empathy and said things like, “Oh Honey, maybe you don’t have the best judgment. Think about that decision for a while. Like a year.”
But I knew, I knew in one instant when I made the decision to leave Vegas that the place I wanted to go was Los Angeles. And I can honestly say that since I acted on that decision, there hasn’t been one moment where I have regretted my decision. On the other hand, I have really, really bad judgment.
I’ve lived in the South, in San Francisco, and in the South West. I have traveled all over the country, and I can honestly say that I have friends in three-quarters of the states thanks to my day job. I know people in Sweetwater and El Paso, Lincoln, Boise, Royersford (PA) not to mention the bigger cities. On the surface, people in LA look like the rest of America, except maybe a bit thinner (‘except for the ‘burb people. They are chunky like the rest of the country.) Everyone usually plays by the same rules, but here in LA, there are different rules. When someone says, “I’ll see you at 6:00,” they mean 6:30 or 7:00, or, like some people I’ve met, 8:00. People don’t date, they “hang” which gets confusing because friends “hang” as well. “Let’s hang,” is an often used phrased. It can mean anything from “Let’s have sex,” to “Come on over and let’s watch ‘Gossip Girl.’”
Another difference: no one drinks in LA. They either smoke pot or are in a 12-step program. When I first moved here, I kept thinking my block was infested with skunks, My friend Robby gave me that sympathetic look that people give me a lot these days and said, “Oh honey, have you already forgotten your college days?” As far as the wine goes, for the first time in my life, I feel like the Episcopal at the Baptist pancake supper. I’m ordering wine while everyone else is smirking at me, drinking water, and then going outside to take hits, or, worse, 12-stepping me. That’s an actual phrase, “12-stepping” someone. I learned that shortly after I moved here and it’s a nice way of saying, “stop treating me like a drunk.” Another often used phrase is, “stop 12-stepping me, Lindsey.”
I keep telling myself that people are the same everywhere, but they really aren’t, not here. And I think that’s the beauty of a town like LA for a girl who wants a new life. Reinvention just isn’t a term for marketing flaks, it’s a personal process here. It’s a town charged with creativity where people spin their own story and everyone’s working on either a labor of love project or they are simply trying to get their big break. There are a million writers, directors, actors, etc all with day jobs, just trying to get by until they find the act that will suffice, as Wallace Stevens would say. And that’s the good thing, they are keeping hope alive.
Oh God. I hope all those people aren’t Obama supporters.
