The Beverly Hillbillies
While son Thomas is here this week we want him to have the opportunity to see everyone he can. Therefore, we planned a day up in L.A. even though I am always intimidated to drive up into L.A. traffic. Intimidation isn’t really the right word, but I definitely don’t like L.A. traffic. And L.A. sits like a massive lump in the middle of the state. It extends east/west from the beach at Santa Monica all the way to Riverside and San Bernardino backed up against the Angeles Crest mountains and from Santa Ana in Orange County in the south to Simi Valley and San Fernando to the north. That is a swath of 10,000 square miles if you just count L.A. and Ventura Counties, and it pretty much stands in the way of almost any north/south travel in the state unless you are willing to go way out in the desert and follow Old Rt. 395 up along the eastern spine of the Sequoia National Forrest or up through the San Joaquin Valley on Rt. 5 once you go out through Palmdale and Victorville along the Pearblossom Highway immortalized by David Hockney.
We wanted him to be able to visit with nephew Josh and Haj and their little ones, JJ and Leila and about the only way to do that was to drive up to Pasadena and have a play date in their driveway, the same way we have seen them for the last fifteen months of COVID. We’ve done that enough to know that the attention time limit for the little ones is probably a max of two hours in the yard and driveway. After that, as happened today, they needed the break of some screen time on TV. Since it takes two and half hours (conservatively) to drive the 120 miles through the chicane of suburban Los Angeles, that means that it takes five hours to get two hours of visiting, so it makes sense to try to build in another L.A. activity and visit to round out our day. Luckily for us, Gary & Oswaldo are very fond of Thomas (and vice versa) and are always up for a visit. So we planned a lunch visit with them in L.A. proper, to be followed with a visit out in Pasadena.
We left it to Gary & Oswaldo to decide where we should go for lunch. They live in West Hollywood and it is clearly their town when it comes to food and drink. Whenever we drive up to visit Gary & Oswaldo, we tend to take the 101 through downtown until we get to Santa Monica Boulevard. We then head West through Hollywood until we get to their neighborhood. That stretch is not the prettiest part of the City. I don’t know if it is technically part of East L.A. that you hear about as the place of the Bloods and Crips and the other six big L.A. gangs that number over 100,000 members, but it is a pretty gritty area the further East you go from West Hollywood. When we get closer to Kings Road it feels much better. I am always amazed how close good areas, even affluent areas are from bad areas. It happens that way in Manhattan. When I lived in Rockville Centre on Long Island (a lovely town), I was always amazed how close the bad parts of Hempstead were to us. Even go up to Greenwich, Connecticut and cross over into the seedy parts of Portchester on the one side and South Stamford on the other. The boundaries between good and sketchy areas are almost imperceptible.
Gary & Oswaldo chose a casual Italian restaurant called Il Fornaio on North Beverly Drive. It is one of their go-to spots for lunch and it is right in the middle of Beverly Hills, one block off the swanky Rodeo Drive. Rodeo is the place where Kim first worked when she came to L.A. after college. She worked at the Elizabeth Arden Salon, the eponymous symbol of the pampered matrons of affluence. it was there that she once nervously served Audrey Hepburn, selling her some lingerie. She still has a shopping bad memento of that meeting. What Audrey Hepburn is to Kim as an actress, Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham and Junk Bond fame was to me in those days of the 1980’s. He was the 1980’s God of modern finance (until he got indicted and convicted of a breach of Securities regulations) and I once met him too on Rodeo Drive in his famous fortress there. My memento is less fashionable. It is the cover story in the Sunday Business Section of the New York Times that has me going head to head with the great man himself over the subject of Latin American sovereign debt. My superiors and peers in banking thought me nuts for doing it, but at least it is now an interesting memory.
So you see, Kim and I probably have no business being in Beverly Hills except that anyone can have lunch at a place like Il Fornaio and no one is the wiser. This was, after all, not our first Rodeo. We may be Beverly Hillbillies to the rich and famous that live there, but a day trip north from our little hilltop, is, as it should be, available to anyone with the price of a plate of pasta and the desire to experience the wonders of the Platinum Triangle, as it is called.
From the Hills of Beverly (actually we were only in the flats this trip) we zigged and zagged our way to Pasadena and settled in for our driveway visit. There were a few subtle differences between Pasadena and Beverly Hills. First of all, Betty was able to pee on a dirt pile in Pasadena and with the simple kick of some dirt on it, it was all just fine. Just try that in Beverly Hills. We were also able to play a game of PIG on the basketball half-court in the driveway. The nearest BBall court to Beverly Hills is probably in Compton. The closest we got to PIG in Beverly Hills was the pancetta in the pasta at Il Fornaio. I just can’t imagine ever wanting to live in Beverly Hills. It really isn’t because it is so damn expensive or that its too fancy, because it really isn’t. It’s just that I don’t think I could write a story about doing home projects on my house in Beverly Hills. I am very comfortable talking about my little hilltop in Escondido, but I could barely say the same if I lived in La Jolla or Rancho Santa Fe, much less in Beverly Hills.
I think I could have said I live in West Hollywood or Hollywood Hills, and I know I could say I live in Pasadena, but might have to add that I prefer the north part of town instead of the tony southern mansions. I guess when it comes right down to it, Kim and I are not so different from Jed and Ellie May. Even if we had the money to live in Bel Air or Beverly Hills, it would all still be a big cement pond thing for us, “Well doggies!”
I’m glad that Kim grew up in a regular town like Wabash, Indiana and that I lived in enough places like Poland Spring, Maine, Ithaca, New York and Middleton, Wisconsin to be regular people that do not rely on our address for our validation. When we were living in Staten Island I bought Kim some special calling cards. As a private banker I was forever being given calling cards from people who put their multiple addresses on them so that they would say things like Fifth Avenue, Greenwich, Palm Beach and Aspen. I gave her calling cards that said Staten Island, Ithaca and Escondido. That was the way we liked to roll. Once a hillbilly at heart, always a hillbilly.