thanksgiving, then and now

Eight years ago was my first Thanksgiving on my own, cooking the meal without a mom or anyone mom-like in charge. I was living with my friends Heidi and Tim the Lawyer (not yet a lawyer) in a cockroach-infested duplex in an entirely Spanish-speaking Van Nuys neighborhood, but Heidi and Tim were both with family for the holiday. My college friends Laurie and Matty were visiting from San Jose, and my friend Ben and his roommate were coming over. I was also cat-sitting a kitten named Miss Moneypenny for a friend from work.

I didn't want to get up early so I don't think we started cooking anything until mid-morning, and then I remember sending Matty to the store to pick up various items several different times. We didn't even remotely have the hang of timing the food so everything comes out at once, and I think we just kind of made one thing at a time. When I got to the turkey, which we had stuffed full of dressing, I had it on one of those tinfoil bans you get at the grocery store, and I kept pulling it out to check on it, because I didn't know what I was doing.

All that pulling out and pushing in eventually ripped a hole in the bottom of the foil pan, which I decided to ignore. Turkey juice and butter from the stuffing (as I recall, we accidentally put twice the called-for amount of butter in the stuffing, so it came out kind of like stuffing butter stew) ran out the hole in the pan and collected on the bottom of the oven. Where it caught fire.

I don't know how long it took for us to realize the oven was on fire, but when we did flames were licking the inside of the glass door. I didn't know what you do about an oven fire, so I called the fire department. They told me to shut off the oven and keep the door closed, and they would send a truck. I said, "Don't send a truck, I just wanted to know what to do." The woman said, "Ma'am, if you have a fire, we have to send a truck." I said, "Um, I don't have a fire. I just wanted to know what one would do if the oven caught on fire... hypothetically." She said, "Ma'am" (people only ever say Ma'am when they're annoyed) "Ma'am, if you call the fire department we have to send a truck." I said, "Tell them not to put on the siren." She said okay.

So they sent a fire truck (without the siren,) and three firemen in full gear trooped into the living room to check the oven fire, which by then had gone out. They said this was the sixth oven fire call they had been on that day. As they left, Miss Moneypenny ran out the door through their legs.

So Laurie and Matty and I spent some time looking for Miss Moneypenny in the neighborhood. We finally found her hiding under a car, came back in, and resumed cooking one thing at a time.

Eventually Ben and Aaron came over. We finally ate at midnight, sitting on the floor around the coffeetable. The turkey was slightly singed but overall pretty good.

This year went much more smoothly, probably because I wasn't in charge of anything except the sweet potatoes, which I volunteered to make, because sometimes I go to Thanksgiving meals various places, and they don't have sweet potatoes, and I just feel like, what are we even doing then?

I was going to go to the store to get ingredients (based on a recipe from my friend Brie's mom*,) but I couldn't find a parking space at noon on Wednesday, so I decided to come back at midnight, when I figured it would be less crowded. And it was less crowded, but it was also set up like an obstacle course:



And this was the line at 12:15:


I got everything I needed. The next day I tried to make them at home but realized I really should have gotten more sweet potatoes, so I gathered my stuff, picked up my faux-boyfriend Cubby (as he is now called to distinguish him from the myriad of Joshes in my life,) and set out for Heidi and Josh's loft downtown, bearing wine:


which Heidi and her mom taught Cubby how to open:


My workstation:


Josh carving the turkey:


Heidi's mom making the gravy:


My sweet, sweet potatoes! You want to eat them, don't you:


Our lovely hostess:


presiding over her lovely table:


Us:


Jeremy actually ate all of this:


After the delicious meal, we sprawled out on the floor and watched a bunch of shorts that Heidi and Cubby and I made our senior year of college at LAFSC. If they weren't on VHS, I would post some of them to show you, especially Josh-in-a-Box (brilliantly directed by Tim the Lawyer,) which is an experience that should not be missed if it can be helped. Heidi's on the SAG nominating committee, so she had a bunch of DVDs, from which we chose Wendy and Lucy, which reviews called "quaint yet gut-wrenching" but which was actually "boring yet really boring." In that way it was kind of the perfect post-turkey movie. Cubby slept through most of it. I kept drifting off, but then waking up because I thought something was happening in the plot. It wasn't.

Hero was into the scenes at the dog pound:


After the movie, we all went on a field trip to see the lights on the street:


And then we had pie. And then we left, and I dropped Cubby off. And then I drove back to my apartment, where I crawled into my bed, still wearing my clothes, and fell asleep.

*Mrs. VC's Sweet Potato Mallow

Ingredients:
2 big cans cut sweet potatoes
1 cup sour cream
2 egg yolks
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup miniature marshmallows or cut up large marshmallows
brown sugar to taste

Heat oven to 350 degrees F.

Heat yams with a bit of salt, drain off the water, then mash the warm potatoes.

Beat in sour cream.

Beat in egg yolks quickly.

Mix in brown sugar, beginning with half a cup and adding more if desired.

Pour mixture into buttered 2-liter casserole dish, top with marshmallows.

Bake 30 minutes or until marshmallows are puffed and golden brown.

fiasco!

Next time you have 23 minutes free while sitting at a computer with speakers, please take a listen (free!) to at least the first part of my favorite episode of This American Life ever. (And if you know how much I'm in love with This American Life, you know that's saying something.)

caplearing and other useful screenwriting terms

When working with a writing partner or on a writing team, it can be useful to have a shorthand for describing certain types of jokes or plot situations. I've seen a couple of lists lately that cover comedy writing or TV writing jargon, but since the last two things I've written with a partner have been thriller features, I'm more interested in jargon that serves as shorthand for dramatic situations.

One you may have heard of is the term "MacGuffin," which is the thingamajig in a movie that advances the plot or motivates the characters, without itself being important to the story. The term was described by Alfred Hitchcock in an interview:

"It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a MacGuffin.' The first one asks, 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well,' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no MacGuffin!' So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all."

Most James Bond movies have a MacGuffin. I would use an example from The Quantum of Solace, except I'm not sure I followed that movie well enough to know what the MacGuffin was. Maybe it was the quantum, maybe it was the solace. You know it's a real MacGuffin if you could switch out the Thing that Everyone Wants and make it a different Thing that Everyone Wants, and it could still be basically the exact same movie.

Tim the Lawyer and I have developed a few of our own terms that serve as shorthand for us. For your reading pleasure, a brief glossary:

Red Rum Clue: Taken, of course, from the movie The Shining, where the boy Danny keeps saying, "red rum," which later is revealed to be "murder" backwards. We use it to mean a clue that seems to mean one thing but actually means another.

Boo Scare: Fairly self-explanatory, this is when you put in cheap scares that aren't really scary at all, like a cat that jumps out at the hero when he's creeping down a dark hallway.

Smart Audience Member: The Smart Audience Member is the one who's trying to stay ahead of you in the story. The Smart Audience Member knows things like Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, which states that, "Movie budgets make it impossible for any film to contain unnecessary characters. Therefore, all characters in a movie are necessary to the story—even those who do not seem to be. Sophisticated viewers can use this Law to deduce the identity of a person being kept secret by the movie's plot: This 'mystery' person is always the only character in the movie who seems otherwise extraneous."

In order to attempt to stay ahead of this problem, our theory is you keep the audience busy by giving the Regular Audience Member one set of clues, then lay in a second, more subtle set of clues for the Smart Audience Member, when really the solution to the mystery lies in a third set of clues.

Recently, Tim the Lawyer came up with a brand new, useful term. It happened because I foolishly let him write the outline we were creating on the dry erase board, even though his printing is sometimes terrible.

Days later, we were planning to meet at our friendly downtown IHOP for a quick between-lawyer-meetings outlining lunch. Before I left home I tried to transfer Tim's dry erase board outline into my notebook. I was struggling to make out his writing, but it was coming along pretty well when I hit the point halfway between the end of Act One and the Midpoint. It said this:


Try as I might, the best I could come up with was "Caplearing." So I wrote that down and brought it to IHOP. Tim and I stared at it, but we couldn't figure out what he had written, or even what the plot point was that was supposed to go there.

And so a new screenwriting term was born.

Caplearing: When you have a spot where a plot point needs to go, but you don't know what the plot point is. And you can't read your partner's handwriting to tell you.

while doing (legitimate) screenplay research this afternoon

I came across this:


(source: www.dazeofourlives.com)

mementos

If you've ever asked me anything about my past more distant than a few years ago, you probably know that I have a terrible long-term memory. Maybe it's because I don't focus on the past, maybe it's because I'm blocking things out, maybe it's because I was a kid in the eighties.

Whatever the reason, I've come up with a few cheats to deal with this, one of which is to keep tons of random stuff in a cedar chest that my dad made for me when I was twelve. They're mementos, literally helping me to remember my life. If you've ever handwritten me a letter, I probably have it, along with the little wallet sized photo you gave me in grade school with a note like "LYLAS!" written on the back. I have the first teddy bear I was given by the first boy I ever kissed, complete with the GI Joe Ninja Force box it was wrapped in. I have a report on the Soviet Union I did in the sixth grade in Mrs. Wendell's class, which my mom stayed up until six a.m. helping me type on my typewriter. The cover has gold glitter on it, (naturally):


I have a detention slip from high school:


It's for tardiness, what a shocker, and, as my mom pointed out, it was supposed to be signed and returned, and was neither. We used to have to clean the school as detention, and I got detention all the time. In 9th grade I had a crush on Adam Curry, who used to stay after school and talk to me while I swept classrooms, so it was fine with me. And Mr. Hill, the janitor, told us stories about Vietnam and taught me how to drive stick in his pickup. (No, I don't remember how to drive stick.)

I have the piece of fake sweater I had to knit on stage when I played Reba in Last Night of Ballyhoo in college:


It's terrible knitting, as you can see. I got my grandma to teach me but I didn't pick it up very well, so I had to hold it carefully on stage so you couldn't see the holes in it.

I have the flyer I used to have pinned to the bulletin board in my office:


(It's funny 'cause it's true.)

Recently the cedar chest has become completely full, so since I would like to remember a few things from 2008 onwards, I had to get rid of some stuff. But going through it and throwing some of it away felt like deciding what I would no longer need to remember.

So I needed to come up with another way to remember things. Writing a blog is part of that. I figure if I exhaustively detail, for example, the night I missed the train to Florence and stayed up all night outside Termini Station with Heidi, Brie, and two ex-soldiers online, I won't be able to forget it.

But I also think part of it really is learning how to pay attention. One night when I was a kid, I was playing by a creek in the woods near my house, and I looked up and saw that the air was full of fireflies. In the darkness of the trees, it looked like the branches were hung with stars. I held my breath and thought, "Remember this." And, about twenty years later, I do.

What if I did that all the time? Chose moments to keep? My mom's been visiting this week. A few days ago, we went out to eat with my aunt, uncle, and grandmother. When we were leaving the restaurant, my grandma was sitting in the front seat of my uncle's car, and before I got in, I leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. It was a silly kiss, a "mwah!" kind of smooch. And she looked over at me and smiled, and said, "Thank you." Twenty years from now I would like to be able to still see her smile, hear her voice, smell the rain lingering in the air that day. Maybe I can keep a thousand of these moments, mental souvenirs, just by stopping for a few seconds to really pay attention, and reminding myself: "Remember this."

final update

OK, this is my last post about this, I promise. Just wanted to give you the update.

Ryan and I have been doing some IMDB experiments and have come to the conclusion that IMDB doesn't count votes from users who have only voted for one (or not many more than one) film because they want to prevent vote stuffing (as I have been encouraging you to do in my last two posts.)

You see here where five votes moved the weighted average five tenths of a point:


Whereas before twenty votes only moved the weighted average two tenths of a point.

In conclusion -- if you are just sitting on your couch watching Pushing Daisies tonight and you want to help me out during the commercial breaks, delete your vote for Driftwood, vote for a hundred movies you've seen, and then go back and vote for Driftwood again.

I realize this is a much bigger favor than the first request, but I'm just putting it out there. Thanks to everyone who voted so far. I won't ask for anything else, not even for Christmas.

three point four

Thanks SO MUCH to the twenty of you who voted for Driftwood. It did raise the "weighted average"... one fifth of a point.


Clearly I'm going to have to come up with some new strategery.

a plea for those with two extra minutes today

Dear friends and others who have just stumbled on this blog and want to do a good deed,

I applied for a little writing job today (nothing big, don't get excited, Mom) and was going to include a link to the trailer for my short film Driftwood on the movie information website IMDB.com.

But... this is the Driftwood page on IMDB.com:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071788

This is a little picture of what this page looks like at this exact moment, which is 9:48 am on Monday morning:


That's right. It says 3.2 stars. Three point two. Out of ten. And if you click on the little link next to the stars, you will see that it's a WEIGHTED average, meaning they use whatever math they want to, because the actual average is nowhere near 3.2 stars. PLUS there are eight "one star" votes from non-US users. Even though it essentially hasn't been screened or released outside of the US.

So here's what I'm asking: if you've seen the movie, and you liked it (more than say, three point two stars worth,) please do me a big favor and complete a free IMDB registration and vote for Driftwood. Or maybe even if you haven't seen it and you just think it might be better than three point two stars. Or even if you just like me better than three point two stars.

Here's a trailer for the movie, in case you don't want to judge just based on my blog/face/taste in poetry:

http://www.driftwoodthemovie.com/trailer

You know what... if you saw it and thought it was only a three point two stars movie, please go ahead and vote that way. At least I will know that people who have actually seen the movie are hating it.

And that is so much better.

fade in

Today it's time to start writing actual pages for the thriller idea I was researching in Louisiana. Usually I like to take nine years to write a screenplay (see: Lucidity, writing of) but with this one I'm thinking maybe we should try to keep it down to about five. And since I thought of the idea in approximately 2003, I really have to get going.

"But, Michelle," you say in disbelief, "don't you and Tim the Lawyer first need to make note cards and outline the idea while sitting on an uncomfortably hard sofa in a blue-lit coffeeshop where East LA hipsters play pool and listen to loud music?"

"Done," I say.


"But don't you guys then have to map out your three-act structure using the dry erase board that you bought in Plano, Texas and proceeded to cart around the country for no reason?" you continue.

"Done," I reply.


"But if you're so ready to start the screenplay, why are you sitting here writing a blog?" you ask in a kind of annoying voice. "Are you afraid? Just start, already. Stop writing this blog entry. Why are you still typ

no, denny's doesn't have the right feel

As previously mentioned, yesterday I was in San Francisco and stopped by City Lights Bookstore, where apparently various members of the Beat Generation used to meet.

Today I've been thinking: all those cool artist gangs had a special hangout. The Beats had City Lights, the Inklings had The Eagle and Child, the Romantics had Villa Diodati.

We (and by we, I mean you and me) are a cool artist gang, and therefore should have a cool artist hangout. How else are we supposed to come up with the artistic ideas that will define our generation?

I'm open to suggestions.

this morning i sat in the corner of a bookstore on columbus avenue and read a poem

This was the corner:


And this was the poem:

Bedcovers thrown back,
Tangled sheets,
Lustrous in moonlight.

Image of delight,
Or longing,
Or torment,

Depending on who's
Doing the imagining.

(I know: you are the one
Pierced through, I'm the one
Bent low beside you, trying
To peer into your eyes.)

"The Distribution of Happiness"
~ Robert Hass

bwessed awangements

I've always really liked weddings. They're like a party, but with meaning. A holy ritual that includes the Electric Slide. I especially like it when weddings are very specific to the couple getting weddinged.

For example, the weekend before last I flew to Ohio to attend the wedding of my friends Ben and Rene. (Who, incidentally, created this spectacular film, galloping soon to film festival theaters near you.) The wedding was in October, for one thing, which was perfect, because in Ben's ideal universe it would never be any month but October. And the rehearsal dinner had a movie theme, complete with a larger than life sized cardboard cutout of Ben and Rene, which I think embarrassed Ben pretty badly. And then the entire wedding was set to soundtrack music, which was very cool and made it seem like something extremely dramatic was going to happen at any second. There was music from Cider House Rules and Joss Whedon's movie Serenity, and Rene walked down the aisle to music from Battlestar Galactica. And then these were the wedding favors:


Last weekend, I went down to Anaheim to attend the wedding of my friends Joel and Kate (who as of yet do not have a joint project that I can plug.) The music for their wedding was also appropriate (especially the recessional, which was the Linus and Lucy rag) and their favors (Jones soda bottles with their picture on them) were very cute.

But my favorite just-right bit was the fact that the groomsmen were dressed exactly how Joel dresses, from the argyle sweater vests down to the flip flops, which unfortunately can't be seen in this picture:


Congratulations, Bays(es) and Millers. I am so happy for you. And only a tiny bit jealous.

personality crisis

I had to take a personality test the other day as part of some training that I'm doing.

This test gives you sets of four personality traits and asks you to rank each set from 1 to 4, from "most like you" to "least like you." For example:

Cheerful
Precise
Courageous
Merciful

So you have to go, like, "OK, I'm very cheerful, so that's a 4, I'm not courageous, so that's a 1, I'm pretty precise, so that's a 3, and I'm not so merciful, so that's a 2."

Except - and correct me if I'm wrong here - couldn't one person be very courageous, very cheerful, very precise, and very merciful? Or very cowardly, very morose, very vague, and very cruel? But you can't put all 4s or all 1s. You have to pick one number for each trait.

So I had a lot of trouble with the test. I think in one answer I said I was 4, very detailed, and then two questions later, said I was 1, not at all meticulous.

My results were outside of the range of any of the personality types. It said something along the lines of, "You have no personality. Come back and try again when you know who you are."

justice is what love looks like in public

Tonight Heidi, Brie, and I went to see the "rockumentary" Call + Response, which is a look at slavery and human trafficking, directed and produced by singer/songwriter Justin Dillon. The musical segments were directed by our pastor, Brandon Dickerson.



The movie is heart-wrenching, and it's impossible to watch it and not want to do something. In one scene, five or six-year-old girls in a Cambodian brothel proposition a man with a video camera posing as a client, telling him they "do good yum yum," the brothel's word for oral sex.

Gary Haugen, the head of International Justice Mission, says in the movie that it's easy to be caught in either apathy or the paralysis of despair. To be so overwhelmed by the pain of the world that you shut it out.

This is one small thing I can do today: I can tell you that if you live in one of the following cities...

Atlanta
Denver
Portland
Seattle
Austin
Los Angeles
Redwood City
Washington DC
Boston
Minneapolis
San Diego
Chicago
Nashville
San Francisco
Dallas
Orange County
San Jose

...you should go see Call + Response. (100% of the profits from theatrical release, DVD sales, and soundtrack are going directly to efforts to stop human trafficking. The website is www.callandresponse.com.)

I promise you will not regret it.

This is not my voice
This is not my choice
This is somebody's baby
They don't know my age
They don't know my name
They just call me
Baby

~"Baby Blue"
Lyrics by Justin Dillon

things i learned last sunday night

1. Babies do make cute accessories. (This particular piece is called "Avery" and is available on loan from Josh and Erin.)


2. If you want a do right all day woman, you apparently have to be a do right all night man.


3a. You should check the lyrics of karaoke songs before you get on stage; and...

3b. The lyrics for "Wait" by Huffamoose are dirty.

babies are the new black

One accomplishment I didn't mention in my list was the creation of life. This particular achievement is no less spectacular for its (increasing and worrisome) popularity in my group of friends.

Today I met Haven, daughter of Karla and Aaron, six and a half pounds of finger sucking adorableness. I like babies. But I'm a little scared of them. I think when Bethany was small my parents spent an inordinate amount of time warning me about her "soft spot" and telling me I was "going to pull her arm out of the socket." I used to have a recurring nightmare that I went to pick her up and ended up with just a little baby arm in my hand.

I made Aaron hand Haven over very slowly and explain to me what to do, like I was a little kid who had never held a baby before.

I didn't get any pictures, which is too bad, because I look good with babies. I'm thinking of carrying one around as an accessory. Maybe with one of those cushiony tutus.

l'enfer, c'est les autres

The thing about coming back to Los Angeles after a long time away is that everyone has been really busy doing incredibly interesting, productive things.

As I sit here in my 90 degree apartment wearing boxers and a tank top and feeling totally languid and kind of worthless, I'm watching the season premiere of Chuck (edited, by the way, by my friend Matt, who worked a shot of our church into one of the establishing aerial shots) and thinking about all the impressive things my friends accomplished this summer while I was eating shrimp po' boys and having a romantic relationship with a mouse.

The following is a partial list:

- My friend Justin finished his short film LA Actors, which got into Palm Springs Shorts Festival, a festival that has personally rejected me more times than I care to count. I met Justin a week or two ago to watch a screening of the film at the Santa Monica Film Festival, which also, I'm pretty sure, has rejected me in the past.

- My roommate Stephanie had two pieces of her artwork on display at the "Untitled" art show in the warehouse district last weekend. Which I attended with Steph's brother Jason. We walked around and had deep insight into the photographs on display.

- My friend Terence produced an independent feature film (you thought those didn't exist anymore, but they do) starring Hal Holbrook this summer in Tennessee, and not a single person died of heat stroke.

- Tim, younger brother of Stephanie and Jason, got a job with Roadtrip Nation while he was living here in my room this summer, and is, as I write this, embarking on a cross-country road trip in a big green RV. FOR MONEY.

- My friend Katie, after raising funding and putting everything together herself, went to South Africa for five months and taught a film class for a group of South Africans, and is now co-directing a documentary about the film school. I will be writing more about this later.

- Last week, Katie drove down to San Diego with me, to attend a screening of Short Term 12 at the San Diego Film Festival. Katie cast the film, and I produced, and the uber talented Destin Cretton wrote, directed, and produced. Despite the fact that the film played without sound for about five minutes, restarted, played without sound again, and finally restarted and played with buzzy, blown-speaker sound, the screening was great. I hadn't seen the new cut of the film yet, and I thought it was incredibly good.

The star of the film is Brad William Henke (whose movie Choke came out in theaters this weekend.) He plays a staff member at a group home for teenagers. One of the cast members is his daughter Phoenix, who lived in a group home about a year and a half ago, before she was adopted by Brad and his wife Katelin (also in the film.) Destin rewrote the part for Phoenix, who is amazing in this, her debut performance.

Tania Verafield, Destin Cretton, Phoenix Henke, Katie Taylor, James Hansen, Brad William Henke, and me:


Here's the trailer, and you can check out the website at www.shortterm12.com:



After the screening, we celebrated with ice cream at Ghiradelli's. Brad Kester, the 1st AD, Destin Cretton, and Brett Pawlak, the DP:


Brad's making that same face in every picture I have of him.

You may think that I would be discouraged by all this rampant accomplishment. I'm not. Even though the only thing I've managed to accomplish so far this week is to get my iPhone to actually sync with the calendar on my computer. And to finally see Dark Knight. Because what you don't know is that Tim the Lawyer and I are meeting tonight to work on our outline for the Louisiana script. AND WE HAVE INDEX CARDS.

Plus I'm learning French.

home again, home again, jiggety jig

The next morning, we had breakfast in Holbrook, Arizona, at Joe and Aggie's Cafe. Brie got an omelette, and I got a burro, which is like a burrito, only more donkey-sounding. We kept looking at these two guys in another booth dressed like cowboys and debated asking for a picture with them, but decided not to.

It was nice to see Los Angeles finally showing up on the map:


Near Joseph City, Arizona:





Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona:


Near Flagstaff, The Walnut Canyon National Monument has preserved cliff dwellings built by a 12th century tribe referred to now as the Sinagua people, probable ancestors of the Hopi. It was incredible to stand on the edge of a canyon that's 600 feet deep and imagine what would it be like to live in one of the homes built into the steep cliffs hundreds of feet above the canyon floor.


Unfortunately, the trail leading down into the canyon and past the dwellings themselves was closed, as a huge boulder had fallen on the trail and crushed the little path and the rails. Instead we walked along the beautiful rim trail above the canyon:



After Flagstaff, we stayed on Route 66 where it diverged from the interstate, and drove through miles and miles of empty desert. A couple of times, we saw a series of Burma Shave signs. The first batch said, "TRAIN APPROACHING/WHISTLE SQUEALING/PAUSE!/AVOID THAT/RUNDOWN FEELING/BURMA SHAVE." The second said, "YOU CAN BEAT" and then "A MILE A MINUTE" and then:




Outside of Peach Springs, Arizona, we pulled over and climbed on top of a roadside mound of dirt to catch a glimpse of the Grand Canyon in the distance:




It was evening by the time we reached California and the Mojave Desert:


And night by the time we reached the official end of Route 66, at the corner of Santa Monica and Ocean. Driving into Los Angeles on a Saturday night after three months on the road, mainly in the South, and a week on an old road through tiny towns, was a lot more overwhelming than I expected it to be. There are so many people! And so many cars! And lights! And ads! And skinny jeans! I kind of wanted to pull a blanket over my head. But we mustered the energy to make it to the end of Josh's 30th birthday party and I wore a dress and pretended to be from Los Angeles, and it was nice to be home.

A couple of days later, I walked to the Grove shopping area near my apartment to buy a gift for Bethany's birthday, and I stopped on the way to watch the fountain in the middle of the Grove. The streams of water are choreographed to music. There was some teeny song playing, with a chorus like, "Let's dance," and when it went into the faster-paced chorus, the fountain streams went crazy, like little water sprites rocking out to Miley Cyrus. It was really amusing and impressive. I looked around. A few people walked by, concentrating on their cell phones or their shopping, not noticing. But the fountain just kept dancing, putting on a show for no one.

I walked back home, trying out the New Orleans custom of saying, "Hey, how's it going?" to the people I passed on the sidewalk. They just looked at me blankly.