Salt, Coffee, and Cell Phones

Saturday. One official week since my landing here on the coast Pacific. What has happened? Sleep, driving, drinking, and lots of traffic and coffee. Got eleven spider bites (if these spiders were casting directors I would SO be cast in a show right now. They love me.) Courtesy of my current host, I went to the Hollywood Bowl for a staged reading of the screen play for Sunset Boulevard, complete will a full orchestra playing the entire score of the movie under the reading (fabulous!). Signed up for Central Casting - which is basically like signing up for a temp job in the world of camera acting - a strange, funny, totally LA-ish experience. And right outside the doors of Central Casting I met the Scientologists. Nice group. Good hair.
Today is my good friend Lindsey's birthday. It's an important birthday and I regret not being in Denver so I can take her to dinner and flatter her and give her a smidgen of the attention she deserves.
Everyone here seems to speak only of the work they are doing and most of the work is "industry" based. This can be boring and intimidating - just walking down the street or waiting in line at Kinko's, I hear well-groomed people yell and whisper into their cell phones about crazy sums of money and big name projects - but serves as a reminder of just how serious the business of show can be. I was introduced to a wonderful program on Bravo called Slings and Arrows, an hour long dramedy set in a Canadian regional theater. I'm blown away. It's a beautifully detailed series of love notes to the theater and while watching it I was filled with jealousy and exhilaration.
Santa Monica is stunning. I'm transfixed by the Westerly horizon - the ocean fading upward, outward, and melting into the sky. Sail boats skating parallel with the horizon across a hazy wall of water. Salty, sleepy air dancing through the palm and cypress trees. Not that I don't see the sea of tourist and homeless crowding this area, but the backdrop they move against sort of outshines them. Drove Mulholland the other day - beautiful. I will, occasionally, get that creepy, David Lynch feeling while walking or driving around in California. You know, like a mysterious, shapeless, and un-spoken-of monster is gonna slink out, at twilight, from behind a wall of rose bushes and consume some poor pedestrian then disappear back into the bushes and the extra dimension it came from. Its a very Stevie Knicks/Hotel California kind of feeling.
I'm still scared and confused and I take long drives at night, but here I am, working it out, getting my scene together, breathing salty air. I've had some great meals out here. If you're ever in town check out Violet (yum to the eee)!
Okay, not a glamorous first report, but it is, as the say, what it is.