Los Angeles

As I have mentioned, I am a teacher in the LAUSD and this year the budget cuts cost me dearly. I lost the auxiliary class I have taught for the last nine years, and though this class added the stress of an extra preparation, it also padded my wallet, which made it a little easier for me to inure myself to teaching four one-and-a-half-hour classes each day with only two scheduled breaks, twenty and thirty minutes each. Gates and locks define the boundaries of the campus and these gates and locks are not to be opened until the school day ends, so this means that for the last nine years, I have been almost literally chained to my desk.

Not once in nine years have I ever “met a friend for lunch” or gone off campus to “grab a bite.” Since there is really no time to do anything but teach my classes, answer student questions, and make small talk in the bathroom line, I practically live in my little isolated realm. I have packed my little island with the essential modern conveniences like a fridge stocked with berries, Greek yogurt, organic peanut butter, whole grain bread, cheese, water, juice; a kettle to boil water for my coffee and oatmeal; and my iPhone so I can enjoy the promise of at least some contact with the outside world during those two luxurious breaks I get.  A colleague of mine once asked whether I was hiding a Murphy bed in my book closet.

Food in New York.  I used to know it so well.  When I lived there during the ’80s and ’90s, and worked in the food business I knew every place there was to know, and I went to most all of them.  It’s been a very long spell since I lived there, and too long since I’ve been able to really visit.  A big void has been left in my New York City food knowledge.  So when I first heard about Magnolia Bakery and how everyone was raving about it, I had no frame of reference.  It was just food-iverse white noise.  (I apparently missed its appearance in both ‘Sex and the City’ and in an SNL sketch.)  I quickly got up to speed when they announced they were opening a shop in Los Angeles on one of the busiest streets in L.A.: West 3rd Street.  With everything that had been written I understood that this was a very popular place.  I wanted to go check it out.  Some of the stories (in the L.A. Times and on the Internet) were about how owner, Steve Abrams, was met with complaints from the neighborhood and other businesses about how his business would impact parking.  The area was already saturated.  Parking places were impossible to find.  I knew this to be very true.  So instead of driving, and battling parking: let’s take the bus!

I’ve always loved a good field trip.  Like most Angelenos I live in my car.  This is not a good thing.  Planning and taking the bus was fun, educational and in a small way helped the environment.  We jumped onto the #201 at Brunswick and Los Feliz Blvd., changed to the #316 at 3rd St. and Vermont, and arrived at Magnolia a little over an hour later.

My husband and I are lovers of the grape, so we rarely indulge in hard alcohol, especially since it’s usually more costly and the bars in Los Angeles don’t exactly cater to our age range. It’s hard to find a place with a classy atmosphere that’s not blaring hip-hop and filled with half-exposed 20-year-olds.  How they find the money to buy $12 martinis all night is a mystery to me.

Dave would be content to never leave our house and watch ESPN all night, but I work from home and every once in awhile, I need to get away from my computer and experience the real world. Being a compulsive planner, I always have a few places I’ve found from my Internet travels I’d like to indulge in. Enlisting the excitement of a friend, I recently convinced Dave to take us to the Edison Bar in downtown Los Angeles. Usually, this would be a wholly unacceptable destination on a weeknight, but because we could take the subway – which cut our travel time in half and allowed him to drink – he agreed to the excursion.

It's sort of hidden.  You can't see it from the street and it's beneath a hotel that doesn't seem nearly as nice, the Hotel Carmel, that is.  It's called Chloe, the Westside complement to Laurie Mulstay and Ron Marino's stable of hot spots which include The Bar and Magnolia.  And it's not quite full.  But it's elegant, and hip, and calming in a way that makes you think you could go there to meet a business associate or a bed mate, and either would be a success. 

The Pimm's cup is the refreshing favorite. And the Lavender Gimlet is like a perfumed elixir that I swear makes you more beautiful with every sip.