CA: day three

today we went to the park with my cousins. it's a fun park, with these giant sandstone boulders that you can climb around on and pretend you're king of the world. it was fun when i was six, and it's still fun today. interestingly enough, while i was at another area in the park, a newspaperman came up and took a whole bunch of pictures of my sister and cousins climbing. he was doing a human interest thing on that neighborhood, so they're going to be in the paper tomorrow. isabel pretty much summed it up when she said, "this town loves me." we visit for a week, and she gets her picture taken for the local paper. arg.

this evening we went down into hollywood to see a play. "All in the Timing," we saw it in this tiny theatre called the Elephant Asylum. it was pretty cool, except mom was freaking out because we left our car unattended for more than two minutes in hollywood at night. and we wanted to walk around, since we got there 45 minutes early, but . we walked like a block with mom cowering and making horrified "we're all going to be slaughtered" faces, and wondering how much of the car has been stripped so far. so we turned around. she makes things no fun sometimes. anyway, the play was grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat (as tony the tiger would say). very very funny.

two fun short anecdotes from driving around trying to get back to the freeway after the show:

1. driving along in a pretty ratty-looking part of town, and we see a sign for a shop. "'Crazy Cuts'... is it a butcher? or a hairdresser? I don't know..." Later, we saw another crazy cuts on a different street. also on the sign were the words "hair" and "nails." hmmm... butcher, or hairdresser? i STILL don't know... :)

2. i saw one of those moments that seem to have more significance than meets the eye. there's this big building, two stories and a block long, with shops on bottom and a row of windows on top. all of the windows were dark, except for one. a second after my eyes came to rest on the lighted window, it clicked off, and all the windows were dark. there's something oddly american and familiar about that. reassuring? maybe. it was a "moment."

3. i lied about there being two anecdotes. there's three. but this one's really short. when we came out of the theatre and onto the street after the play, i vaguely thought, the play must not have been very long, it's still light out. when we got into the car, i looked at the clock. it said 11:02. and i realized that LA has lights. lots and lots of street lights, traffic lights, neon signs, etc. where i live doesn't have street lights. they would mess up the observatories. when we moved there from CA, we thought, "MAN this place is a dark dark hole."