As someone who aspires to write for film and television, every time I visit Los Angeles what I’m really doing is asking myself if I could ever live there. The difference between New York and Los Angeles, the pros and the cons, is a constant topic of interest debated among my friends. I find the cities so fundamentally different I’m actually fascinated anyone manages to successfully transfer from one to the other without significant psychotherapy. By New York, most people mean only Manhattan, where everything is an easy cab or subway ride away. I walk the majority of places I need to go. Everything’s so close together I have in one evening zoomed from Tribeca to the Upper East Side, to Chelsea to the Lower East and back home again with out even breaking a sweat. In Los Angeles, getting from one place to another is what I imagine the ancient practice of Chinese water torture must of felt like. Hours passed trapped in a car where the only physical activity allowed is foot on break-foot on gas-foot on break-foot on gas. I found I could only indulge in one activity a day, since getting anywhere required such unreasonable chunks of time. I’ve never understood how such a large metropolis is able to function when every singe resident over age sixteen owns and drives a car. How does that work? How is there enough space? The answer is there’s not. I saw traffic on Wilshire, Sunset and the 405 I’d thought only existed in Al Gore’s most stress-inducing nightmares. Eight lane highways packed with cars not even managing a crawl but fully stopped. How do the natives tolerate this?

Let’s put a pause on my rant and preface this entry by saying I have a lot of friends who love LA and I have nothing against the city personally (besides the fact the automotive industry there is slowly disintegrating our planet and at this rate my children will be wearing oxygen masks when walking to school and fresh water will become a commodity valued higher than oil…sorry, sorry, I’ll stop). Everyone should rock out in LA. It’s a great place. It’s just not for me. And no one can say I didn’t do the city right. I stayed at the infamous Beverly Hills Hotel i.e. “The Pink Palace” and had I never left the premises would’ve been happy as clam. The hotel is one of the most beautiful establishments I’ve ever been in, a true oasis in Beverly Hills. My room was fantastic, the service impeccable (should be for what you’re paying, but still – I was blown away) and the pool and gardens are exactly how I envisioned the Garden of Eden. Poolside breakfast was heavenly. You’re seated in huge comfy booths ideal for people watching, and surrounded by potted lemon trees and the soothing sound of a trickling fountain. My personal favorite amenity was that while swimming underwater in the pool you hear classical music. I fluttered around in my red suit and goggles enjoying Mozart and feeling I’d come as close as physically possible to enacting my childhood dream of becoming the Little Mermaid. I also got a great work out since I wanted to be underwater as much as possible, lest I miss a note of Beethoven’s Fifth.

I knew I had landed on a planet far from my little island of Manhattan when sitting for breakfast in the Polo Lounge on my first morning there. A lanky “woman” arrived with a long face and a prom-like up-do held in place with industrial strength hairspray. I put “woman” in quotes because for me, she was more like a creature than an actual human being. She belongs to a species of women I call Skelatrons. She was dressed head to toe in designer apparel that her frail body barely managed to support. I feared that at any moment her skirt might fall to her ankles, simply because she had no hips or waist to hold it in place. Her skin was paler than mine (a challenging task) and she had coated her face in a white foundation that made her look like a hybrid between a geisha and a cross dresser. To top it off, she had absurdly long jet-black fake eyelashes. I thought she might slump over the table and die just from the weight of them. Skelly was by far the most frightening Los Angeles woman I saw, but there were many rivals for second place. I saw woman so face-lifted they looked like aliens, so tan they looked like snakes, so plasticized they looked a flotation device and so blonde that I swear they must have been wearing wigs.

Coming up, celebrity sightings and the LA nightlife scene (and yes, a run in with the princess of disgrace Paris Hilton…)

To Be Continued…