In John Milius' surfing cult classic, Big Wednesday, Chicagoan-Sally, played by Patti D'arbanville; declared the difference between her new Southern California home and the rest of America when she stated: "back home being young is something you do until you grow up. Here, here it is everything." Every other year I make my trek to "everything" to attend our annual Christmas party as a member of the Greater Los Angeles Writer's Society. As a three year member I always anticipate it as a calendar jewel when it gets too frigid at home here in Alabama. It is a time of book sharing, open mike reads and connections that may just land a book deal, agent connection or your best sitcom spec or screen play getting a look over if possible.
But, this year my adopted west coast community offered me something so much more intrinsic. Sure, I passed all the same haunts such as Venice's Muscle Beach, Pacific Palisades Park, Venice Proper and Santa Monica Pier; I had visited as an eleven year old with my dad and brother so many summers ago. True to form even taking a full body dip in the world's largest swimming pool. In summer it is chilly enough. In December it turns you as blue as the smurfs you used to watch on Saturday mornings as a child. But, wetsuits and care were out the window as I knew it was a weekend that would bring what this town eventually brings to everyone. A lesson that can change perspective if one hears loud enough.
Air BNB was the wonderful service that kept me from making the same seedy, over priced Sunset Boulevard mistake I had made two years before. So, honoring another Tinsel Town cliché I slept on someone's foldout. Candace and Zack, a young married couple both from Las Vegas, had moved into a bungalow off of California Avenue in Santa Monica. True to a script only written by Hollywood they met after they had moved to town, not back home. They both shared a love for film production, particularly slanted toward the horror genre. After showing me five minute Tarantino style vignettes via You Tube of their project "Sandwich Head." I showed a vignette I had starred in, made to cheer up children and drive away any chance of me ever finding a well balanced wife, it did not make Cannes. Zack surprised me with the information that Candace was the actual producer. Surprising, in that she spent most of her week cultivating "everything" by gardening, making medieval novelty items and producing ghost tours all over town. Zack, of course bartended in Venice Beach while not in production. How did he or especially she have the time. In reality they really did not! But, somehow made it. A life so LA! A life on the surface that appeared exasperating. A life, that by taking a closer look was exactly what Sally had described in Big Wednesday.
With rented bike in tow I finally made my way to Abbott-Kinney library in Venice. I read my short story about southern life featuring childhood vacation jaunts on the Florida panhandle, and about a boy and his father swimming out into the Gulf of Mexico to encounter manhood. One based off of my experiences with my family. On the way back to Santa Monica, I took the beach path past all the things I may have observed with my father and brother that July morning so many years before. Squelching the temptation to speed up I stopped, slowed down. Because like Zack and Candace, I was learning about this place. I was heeding the lesson that here, it is EXPERIENCE over VERDICT. And while VERDICT is a goal, especially for those in the "Industry," it always answers to PROCESS. That process being creativity is the ends. No matter who approves or disapproves. Expression and illustrating it in ways the rest of America sees as mundane, can be carried out during the most minute obligations in life. And loving that expression so much it brightens the shade of ordinary. It being the purpose why you do the mundane and like Zack and Candace and do it to exhaustion.
As I write this piece here snowed in at Midway Airport in Chicago, I already see a part of Zach and Candace in what bleeds out in the present. Now, a logic to complain, has transformed into a session of ingenuity. Eight more hours of waiting alone has offered fortuity. A willingness to know how we can take a little bit of Hollywood into our customary. For with southern syrupy accent I left Him with humidity. A southern sinew so actual it comes on garb. He, that being Hollywood, left me with reflection of what Sally said. I hope as I sit here, Chicago gets it? I hope the rest of America gets it? Because being alive here, it is EVERYTHING! EVERYTHING should now stand for ANYWHERE! It should now stand for ANY AGE! City of Angels I will be back soon!
