Cinespia screenings on the side of the mausoleum at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery have been staples of Los Angeles summertime since their first screening in 2000. Still, I was too afraid to attend until last summer. I thought watching icon filled movies amidst the sleeping corpses of the icons themselves would be too tempting to their ghosts. Would not an actor or director or musician—narcissistic by trade—want to take a final curtain call? Wouldn’t the music of applause be enough to wretch their resting spirits from eternal slumber? So I left the screenings to burgeoning hipsters and longtime cinephiles and chose to rent classic movies at Vidiots instead.
I now love the screenings, so last Saturday when my friends asked me to join them at the cemetery to watch Elia Kazan's Cain and Abel classic East of Eden starring the James Dean, I said yes. However, like the great films themselves, going to the Hollywood Forever screenings is quite a production.
“All that matters is that you jump.”
For a long time, I wasn’t writing because I was swept away by a passion that completely eclipsed my love of food and cooking. There’s something about losing weight that makes me start thinking about clothes again. I speak not of the utilitarian Mom Garb that tends to be stretchy and sexless, and purchased for the dual purposes of comfort and covering up body parts which are too awful even to contemplate. I mean fashion. I mean I start reading “Vogue,” and “Allure,” and “InStyle” and (my personal favorite) “Lucky” and scheming about where to get a faux Chanel jacket and whether I can get away with a pair of the 4-inch Gladiator shoes that are essential for the transition from summer to fall this season. I cooked, I worked, I kept my kid in clean Abercrombie jeans, but my mind was usually far off in the land of boyfriend cardigans and vintage Diane von Furstenburg wrap dresses. I had nothing to write, unless it concerned the preparation of food that would not leave a stain on a Prada jacket, or how to pick an outfit and accessories to coordinate with one’s dinner. (Hint: a large Mabe pearl ring is a delightful tongue in chic accompaniment to a plate of oysters on the half shell).
The “Sunday Styles” Section of The New York Times recently ran a front page story on the evolution of the noun Charlie Sheen into a verb, as in sheened and sheening, meaning, among other things, partying or making bad decisions (Laura M. Holson, “When Your Life Becomes a Verb,” March 6, 2011). Apparently the first cited/sited reference appeared in Urban Dictionary, and more recently posters on Twitter have offered their definitions.
Los Angeles is a contradiction: a paradox of urbanites that crave the outdoors and yuppies that eat vegan. Fancy jeans, successful
lunatics, poor rich people, and other oxymorons splattered across
Sunset Boulevard, a street with beaches on one end and mini skyscrapers
rising up on the other end. I love LA. It satisfies my needs for
culture and nature simultaneously.