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Once upon a time, a man moved from Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, to Los Angeles, the city of every man for himself. Elliott is a doctor; he's attractive, well-educated, and a gifted conversationalist. He met Julie through JDate, the leading network for Jewish singles on the web. They went on several dates and soon Elliott was regularly spending the night at her place. He liked Julie. They were getting close and Elliott was imagining a bright future.
Then, it happened—as it often does in Los Angeles—he bumped into her at a party over Halloween weekend and she totally blew him off. She sent him a text message apologizing the next morning. That was the last Elliott heard from her.
What happened? I call it the glitter Louboutins syndrome. You've seen them—those red-soled, glitter pumps that are so shiny you can't quite look away. You know you have nothing to wear them with and nowhere to wear them to, but you can't stop trying them on, thinking, well, maybe with that dress—no. Not with that dress. And you know it. Oh, but they're so pretty. Yes, they are. But are you going to make the $600 investment?
Let's try them on one more time?
It's only a matter of time before you see the gray suede ruffled booties—and who cares if they're $1,050? Just looking at them you can think of at least eight outfits that were made for these shoes and at least twice that many occasions to show them off.
So off you go, strutting in the new Manolos, the glitter pumps forgotten in a corner of Neiman's.
I'm not suggesting men are accessories—I'm saying people are all gorgeous in their own way, but not always suited to us. We understand this instinctively, and that's why we hesitate about making the time and energy investments in some cases, while we jump head-first without feeling like we need to assess the cost in others.
CASTING CALL
Here, the options are endless. We're all here chasing dreams, and most of us have scripts already written out for everything, from our careers to our lovers. Like a casting director, we'll go through hundreds, if not thousands, of people looking for the right fit. Usually it happens at lightning speed, names and faces meshing together so no one even has a name anymore, or a number, but some descriptive moniker, like, “The Fetus,” for the really young guy you had a hot one-nighter with, or “The Venice Bum,” for that unmentionable tequila-soaked weekend on the beach.
And every once in a while, you have a glitter pumps situation that drags out for months. These situations are particularly jarring, because they bring you face-to-face with your point of origin (because hardly anyone who lives in Los Angeles is from Los Angeles) and you'll remember, briefly but painfully, that people are not disposable, that this isn't a casting call, but real life. You'll think about that guy who used you and left you high and dry in high school and send an apologetic text message to the guy you stood up last night and resolve to do things the right way, only to forget about it again when the door of you apartment opens and you find yourself once again in the veritable candy store of possibilities.
This is the Los Angeles emotional hit and run. We've all done it.
MEANING
Andy came to Los Angeles from Nebraska. As is customary, he was immediately invited to a party, and this is where he met the women who would become his future roommates, Simone and Ana. Andy was a great roommate—he immediately filled their bachelorette pad with fresh fruit and vegetables and showed them how to make banana-spinach shakes. He had a dream of opening a little juice bar one day.
The first time Andy saw Simone naked, he thought he'd died and gone to heaven. He'll learn, I thought, as I followed Simone into the bathroom with a camera and stretched out on the floor so I could shoot her angles and curves from a different perspective. There was no particular reason for this or any of our video or photo shoots, just the fact that she's beautiful and generally naked, and I'm always holding a recording device of some kind.
In Los Angeles, the things that usually mean something elsewhere don't mean anything—until they're supposed to mean something. The problem with this is that no one really knows what the hell is real and what isn't, what means something and what doesn't, until
