Pretentious moi?

When I first got out to Los Angeles, wet behind the ears, green as a nerdy non flip flop wearing Brit, I was keen as mustard to get myself down, out and rubbing shoulders with the cream of who L.A. had to offer. Yes, the type of people who had once shared a taxi with Kim Kardashian, been at a party with someone from Saved by The Bell or crashed in a hotel room with LiLo.

Surely, I would meet and make friends with such skinny, high voiced, curled-haired extension wearing partygoers?

But unfortunately, perceived trendiness was never my forte. At school, my first act of rebellion was probably trying a cigarette at 17, and managing to lose my voice after the first few drags.  As a teenager, my main admonishments from my parents were a) reading too much and not getting enough fresh air b) leaving my homework too late on a Sunday night.

So I deliberately shunned trendy, although, as a side note, these days, it’s equally as hard to fit in with the geeks, who have become so cool, they are painfully fashionable.

Living in Los Angeles would surely give me the chance to embrace my inner trendy self, I thought. This inner happening groovester was clearly just itching to get out and embrace the most happening, hot places in a city like never before.

Well, I did try.

I tried to fit into the places where the entrance corridors are padded white, like some kind of loony bin, policed by impossibly handsome men with clipboards and ear pieces, places where you have to take an elevator to a bar, while trying not swoon to the stench of Dior Homme.

I tried to match the smooth haired girls who could walk in platform heels without losing control of their ankles, who could convincingly swarm around men with wallets as deep as their tans.

I tried, but just couldn’t find it in myself to gyrate alongside them, arms akimbo, narrow hips swinging to random R& B tunes, while men with designer facial hair produced credit cards to purchase a couple of $1000 bottles of vodka needed to secure that coveted trendy table.

Dear reader, I failed.

Unlike these hipster masses, I would arrive in inappropriately comfortable shoes, a skirt which ran longer than mid thigh and hair which I’d failed to adequately blow dry.

I found I had an inability to restrain myself from leaving the string of designer berries INSIDE the cocktail after drinking it, instead sticking my fingers inside the glass and polishing off the sodden fruit with a degree of relish.  

I also failed to muster that innate and much envied confidence needed to outmaneuver the sharp men posted on the door and was once sheepishly ordered to walk about two miles to ‘the other’ entrance of the bar, like an obvious non celebrity.

I would try to HAVE A CONVERSATION in these places. But no-one actually talks, at least not much. Girls dance, look beautiful and sip their cocktails with sugared rims, while the men wear sunglasses and cross their white trouser clad legs over miniscule ‘cube’ style bar seats.

It is a silent paradise of thumping neon.

So, nowadays, I’ve had to give up the comfy white couches, views of unused swimming pools and downing booze-laden berries in favour of windowless bars with grimy fairylights, sawdust laden floors and dirty rock and roll on the jukebox.

And you know what?

I kind of like it.

Cadbury's Flake

Last week, I texted my friend Frank about meeting for a coffee. I hadn’t seen him for a while and thought it would be nice to meet up.

He texted me back almost immediately with “Hi how are you? Yes, coffee next week – maybe Tuesday - would be great.”

Next week arrives and I still hadn’t heard anything from Frank, who may I add is a friend not a potential anything-more man. So I text again: “Hey, are we still on for coffee this week?”

No response.

Hmmm. He does have my CD which I’d quite like back. Do I harass him further? Will he think I’m a stalker if I insist on a coffee/CD return date? Do I immediately and cold-heartedly dismiss him as the friend who got away?

The answer, as I have realised after three years of living here in Los Angeles, is just to give up, and have a coffee by yourself, because at least you have a guarantee of your own company.

Because Frank, like many people living in Los Angeles, is a ‘flake.’

These people are the types who tell you we really must do lunch. That they will of course ‘drop by’ to your birthday party, see that movie with you or call you back in ’45 minutes.’

They never do.

Of course, the next time I see Frank, he will be perfectly charming, look like he is genuinely pleased to see me and tell me that we really must meet up soon.

Flakes in Los Angeles are under the illusion that they are your very good ‘friend,’ that they really do want to see you, but are just ‘too busy’ to get in touch with you.

Because these days, we 21^st century ladies and gentlemen have such limited options of communication - text, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, instant message, or even that old fashioned phone call, that we cannot possibly take time out of our busy schedule to drop someone that two word reply.

It’s more common than unusual to invite people out somewhere and receive no response. Party invites go unreplied to, so you never know who, if anyone, is coming.

My friend Heather and her then boyfriend once invited their friend Christian round to a party at their house. He had vaguely said he would come, which means in Angeleno speak, if he could be bothered, or was not invited to a party at someone’s house who once had bit part on The Hills. 

As 11pm came, Heather texted him to see where he was, No response.

Frustrated, as many women get by a lack of a reply, she called him.

“Oh sorry,” he said. “I had you on delay. I’m at another party.”

Loosely translated, he was waiting to see if he got a better invite before responding to Heather.

Apparently he did, and was even prepared to admit it.

So can living in L.A. turn you into one of these crumblies?

A Canadian friend of mine told me in hushed tones that she believed she

had become a ‘bit of a flake’ during her Los Angeles years. 

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, because everyone else is,” she replied, adding that she no longer expected replies from people. Hopefully, they would turn up anyway.

When I first arrived in L.A., a European couple in my apartment building decided to throw a ‘Get to know your neighbours party’ in the courtyard. TC, a businessman, made a great effort to get everyone’s e-mails and even put flyers in the elevator to let everyone know about the event.

Out of 52 apartments in the complex, he received three replies. One was from me. One, I believe was from the building’s manager.

In the event, there was a good turnout. It was a Sunday night after all, and maybe those happening parties in the Hills were perhaps a little bit rubbish.

Welcome to the jungle

For a 32-year-old girl dangerously veering towards Bridget Jones territory, Los Angeles is a tricky place to get a date.

Not that ‘dating’ in the American context of the word is an easy thing for Brits to get their heads around.

Back in Blighty, meeting a boyfriend or girlfriend usually involves a drunken snog in the corner of a dingy pub or club, and making a hungover decision the next day whether to see that person ever again. Granted, the odds are a bit stacked against you, but if you do miraculously find someone you like, then you stick to that one person. Hard part over. We Brits leave our fates up to Dionysus.

I’ve realised dating across the pond is much more of a minefield. Americans do not, firstly, seem to drink as much, so the useful drunken snog situation is usually out of the window. Instead, you are left with an awkward conversation, sometimes in the cold sobriety of daylight, when a random person asks you for your number. For a typical reserved Brit, this can be a little tricky. If you’re not really interested, it can leave you feeling a bit impolite and trying to find a way to reject someone who has been, let’s face it, pretty brave.

But say, miracles did occur and that business card passed through the window of a car at a red light (seen it happen) reaps dividends and you do manage to get a date. Chances are, that spark of chemistry might not last, as you have to impress your man or woman more than every other person they happen to be dating at the same time. From what I can tell, this casual polygamous soup continues until you decide you like each other at least say, 75% more than any of the other potentials. At which point you can be “exclusive.” i.e. monogamous.

Well hallelujah.

Granted, this American system seems a lot more orderly, casual and a bit less pressured – see someone and tick off your own personal checkbox. However, I hate to admit it, but the sentimental side of me misses the chaotic British way of doing things. Men getting drunk, making a lunge, doing that weird jellyfish nightclub dance behind you for about half an hour before giving up, spilling their 15^th pint over your toes as they leer at you in a crowded bar. Oh happy days!

Getting a date over here seems to me, more and more like a job interview. I had a browse through some dating websites and saw several men talking about wanting to meet someone ‘ambitious and determined to achieve their personal goals.’ What does that even mean?

Sorry but I cannot date you because you are not near your personal goals. You have not reached your $100,000 salary target, have no interest in running a hedge fund, and have failed to understand War and Peace. Next!

At the risk of sounding like Carrie Bradshaw, who, much as I love Sex and The City, is a terrible writer, I am wondering if we all pursue our own personal ideal of perfection to the degree that we look past what is great about a person, so we only see what’s wrong rather than what’s right? Is this why many people my age are on dating websites, where they still dismiss those who are too short, too fat, too thin, not pretty enough, with the wrong ambitions, as being not ,good enough’ for them?

So…as no-one in this world is perfect, my advice to those poor people in this messy, stagnant dating arena is to have a lunge at someone. You never know how it’ll go… 

The stars have lost their glitter...

Living in this sun-spangled town, you don’t often feel a sense of history. The glut of cars, modern buildings, and sea of neon create a feeling of modernity in a place which is constantly pushing forward at some pace. Whether it’s technology, movies, or TV shows, Los Angeles has its eye on the future and its finger on the proverbial pulse. Even its people are constantly on their phones thinking about what they’re doing next week, next month, next year. But a few weeks ago, I got a rare taste of Hollywood history.

Turner Classic Movies, a popular movie channel in the U.S., held a weekend-long festival showcasing classic films on big screens in Hollywood. Interjection: If you think you’ve seen Some Like It Hot or Top Hat on TV and feel you don’t need to see it with an audience - think again. Watching a film on the big screen gives a movie an added dimension. You notice things you’ve not seen before. You laugh in different places. You appreciate the acting, the drama, and the film’s direction. Movies are made for this and believe me, it is not the same in your living room.

Anyway - TCM held a red carpet premiere for the restored version of the Judy Garland/James Mason classic 1954 musical film A Star Is Born. Sadly, many of the stars of the movie are long gone, but some of the remaining actors whose films were showing at the festival attended in a salute to Hollywood’s past.

There were many. Tippi Hedren, who was famously attacked by Hitchcock’s Birds; Tony Curtis, who once compared kissing Marilyn Monroe to ‘kissing Hitler,’ and Lorna and Joey Luft, Garland’s children by her third husband Sid. Eva Marie Saint won an Oscar for the Eliza Kazan masterpiece On The Waterfront, where she worked opposite the late, great Marlon Brando. She was also directed by Hitchcock and starred alongside Cary Grant in the iconic North by Northwest. Yet here she was, smiling, cheerful, complementing me on my eye colour, confiding memories, jokes. Ann Rutherford was there – she acted with Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister in Gone with The Wind. Martin Landau worked with Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Elizabeth Taylor. They had no movies to plug. Yet, here they all were, happy to talk. Pleasant, charming and interesting. Long forgotten relics of a happier era.

Some of them must have remembered those Hollywood days where crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of them, photographers rushed to take their pictures and people recognised them wherever they went. But the movie industry is transient much like L.A. itself. However successful you are and however much botox you have, eventually you have to let time win and fade into the mists of time and history.

And history in Los Angeles has always meant movies. It may be whimsical or sentimental, but to me it was thrilling to see stars who had touched these icons. Whose beauty and stature had been captured on celluloid forever. Stars who I wouldn’t otherwise speak to or see in the flesh. People who had starred alongside legends, spoken the lines of movie history. It was special to walk into Grauman’s, a legendary theatre built in 1922, and sit in an audience filled with long forgotten Oscar winners watching a lauded classic film. And that, to me, is what Hollywood is all about.

Hair today...

“The good thing about girls out here,” confided Jim, British paparazzo, successful, funny. “Is that they look like they’ve been dunked in a sheep dip from the waist down.”

For those of you who don’t know what he means – and why would you? Jim was discussing the rise and rise of the female Brazilian bikini wax – which, depending on who you talk to, is the removal of all hair in the bikini area. It’s a worrying trend for women with high pain thresholds, and it’s taking over Los Angeles like a Malibu bush fire.

According to Jim, the eight-year-old girl look is a winner for men due to the fact that “It’s easier to find things down there.”

Really? How lazy do these boys want to be?

Having hair down in your nether regions hardly prevents men from finding or indeed figuring out how the more sensitive parts of the female anatomy work. Or is this just a handy excuse for a male who doesn’t want to admit they are attracted to a vagina which resembles a child’s?

Not all waxers agree it’s a good thing to go totally bald, despite making big bucks from the trend. Ukrainian Lara, bemused by hairless un-European look, told me she was shocked when her 16-year-old son and his friends said they wouldn’t date a girl with “hair down there.”

Wow. At 16, teenage boys have already decided that along with perfectly hairless arms, legs, armpits, upper lips, nipples and toes, they expect a girl to dilapidate her vagina to the smooth gaping welcome of a porn star. If she chooses not to, she will be reduced to the shameful high school status of un-dateable pariah.

Then, waxer Michelle from Oregon told me with a shudder that she had been taught growing up that “having hair down there was unattractive.” She added that “men should keep it trim too.”

It’s true Hollywood males seem more meticulous than their UK counterparts when it comes to grooming, and I’ve heard there are a high percentage who won’t let their pubes get anywhere near the state of a redwood forest. In fact, I know at least a couple of men who get rid of it all, although I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s becoming de-rigueur for men too, to begin disposing of body hair, although I don’t think I know any ladies who wouldn’t date a man because he had a few pubes.

Which brings me to my final point – what next? If ladies’ hair reduction has now reached an area where the sun don’t shine, could it be that in the future, men, porn or society dictates that ALL bodily hair, head hair included, should be disposed of?

As I ponder this, I get a vision of the 22nd century woman resembling a hairless, smooth, soft baby. Her face botoxed of all wrinkles; her teeth white, filed down, small and childlike, and her body lipo-sucked to within an inch of its adult skeleton, like some kind of terrifying Monty Python sketch. Will we all end up walking around looking like children? If so, I’m not sure we will be better for it…

“Have you ever felt so used up as this. It’s all so sugarless. Hooker waitress model actress” Celebrity Skin – Hole

With work out here being a tad hit and miss of late – I have become a bit of a lady who lunches. And this lifestyle can, in Los Angeles, be a little tough on the self- esteem, due largely to the population of beautiful employees moonlighting in hipster cafes, restaurants and bars of as they wait for their shot at the big time.

In their own towns and high schools, these beauties were the most talented, the most special, the most lauded by their parents and peers. But when they get to Hollywood to wow the studio execs, casting agents and directors with their acting, singing, and stand-up comedy skills, they find themselves in a city full of their small-town American equivalents and it seems to be pretty tough. Living here, it’s not that unusual to see your neighbour turn up in a guest spot on your favourite TV show, as I did once when I saw Carson from Texas in a five-second stint as a male hooker in True Blood. I asked him about it a few weeks later when I saw him in the elevator. His parents, he said, with a slightly sarcastic smile, were ‘really proud.’

There are only certain places the beautiful people will work though. I never see them in the local Rite Aid pharmacy, in an unfashionable stationary store or greased up in a burger drive-In. The beautiful are found in upper-end bars - the lower-end dives are for rockers and grungers - or waiting tables in places where people bring their Chihuahuas, have shoulder blades like razors or wear sunglasses which obscure most of their wide, perfect cheekbones.

But this sheen, like every type of gloss, does start to wear off and you get a little tired of all these Los Angeles beauties who blend into one dazzling ten-headed zombie. There are days when you yearn to catch a glimpse of cellulite, an unsightly bit of stomach bloat, or even, God forbid, a crooked tooth.

The plainer Janes like to console themselves with the idea that the beautiful aren’t as bright, are positively arrogant, or can’t make conversation. And this can be smugly satisfying when you meet someone who conforms to the stereotype. I recall being with three girl friends in an L.A. bar eyeing up a particularly stunning male who was strutting his stuff by a pool table. One of my friends started up a conversation and told him she was from the UK.

‘You’re English,’ exclaimed Mr Handsome. “My friend over there is from Germany.”

“Really?” enquired my female friend. “What part of Germany?”

“Austria,” he replied, unblinking.

Cue four ladies losing interest almost as quickly as it arrived. And so now, with my tongue firmly in my cheek, and a few firm strokes of my keypad, I reduce all these beautiful people in Los Angeles as being no better than Hitler. It makes me feel better anyway…