Los Angeles #2

What a great day today in Hollywood. Let me do a quick recap. We were awakened to a wonderful breakfast cooked for us by Jose the incredible host, who took off from work today just to be our personal tour guide of LA, and let me tell you we would have been lost without him. He took us first to the Santa Monica Pier, where we saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time on this trip, our official destination. It was a surreal feeling to be standing on the opposite coast from which we started this journey, and the irony was that we didn't even drive to the coast--Jose did! Tomorrow we will officially be driving the coast up to San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Highway, which will make our cross-coastal trip official.

We then met up with Colleen at her job on The Lot, the former Warner Brothers Studio, and then walked to Jamba Juice (which was recommended to us all the way back in Chicago!). Jose took us to Hollywood Boulevard, where we walked and saw the Chinese Theater, the stars Walk of Fame, and some ridiculous "characters" like fat Spiderman, Elvis, and 4 Jack Sparrow's. There were way too many tourists, way too many people focused on themselves and their own personal advancement, that I dubbed the city "the cemetery for hopes and dreams." The characters just brought this kind of sadness out of me that I sensed throughout Hollywood Blvd--everyone trying to be someone they're not or something they hope to be.

We drove back along Sunset Boulevard, which is beautiful, and met up with Colleen at the excellent outdoor mall The Grove, where we ate delicious entree crepes from The Crepe Company in the Farmers Market section. Colleen and Jose then took us to the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy show where we saw the group improvise based on people in the crowd's iPods. It was fun to experience and they even played a couple of my songs, creating skits based off of them. To sum up the vacuous and self-centered souls in this town, outside the UCB Theatre the supposed former child-star "Jay Leno Child Lookalike" talked to us for about 5 minutes about his recent SAG-card grab and the shallowness of people in this city. It was an interesting way to get a perspective of the city. I remarked that if we weren't staying with Colleen and Jose, I know we wouldn't be getting the same kind of perspective of the city, and we would probably be more inclined to dislike the city than anything else.

We ended up tonight at a great Irish bar close to their apartment, where I drank an incredible White Russian and we enjoyed some great times and conversation, the five of us together, with our generous hosts here on our last night in LA.