Nancy Goes to Hollywood

4/3/2011

As Steff takes a brief sabbatical from our sabbatical, the time comes, once again, for an update. Apologies for any delays: we update when we have access to a computer.

Readers, we now habitually put our lives and the lives of others in danger. Have we become thrillseekers, adrenaline junkies? Not exactly. We have taken to the road!

Driving, surprisingly, is not an impossibility, in spite of the fact that everyone in the country drives on the wrong side of the road. You'd think someone would tell them. How embarrassing. Despite these minor motoring misadventures, we have not (yet) injured any pedestrians, cars, family members, or even ourselves.

In other news, television continues to fill us with surprise, joy, and disgust, in alternating turns: We never cease to be amazed by the antics of the people on Jersey Shore (a programme in which urban hillbillies are provided with ample money and alcohol; as a result of this, they fornicate like bunnies and fight like tigers. Very lucrative entertainment for the producers, mind-numbing yet addictive for the viewers). Reruns of childhood shows like Full House fill us with pure, undistilled delight. Our disgust comes in response to the myriad army shows some of the networks air. In my experience, being a soldier is but a job, and an unglamorous one at that. On TV, "soldier" is synonymous with dignity and honour. And what better way to glorify these government-hired assassins than through sensationalist drama (eg. Army Wives: Desperate Housewives with serving husbands, or Coming Home, in which featured loved ones are surprised by the return of related servicemen)?

A promotional advertisement for Army Wives

Oddly enough, there seems to be little reference to civilian casualties, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other occupational hazards of the enlisted.

Onwards! On the third, I visited the GOOD headquarters. Great stuff, though tricky to find (three circumnavigations and some help from friendly locals did the trick). It sort of cemented any whimsical notions of working as a journalist--where else can you work in a building with a ping pong table and a beer fridge? But in all seriousness, it's a great collaborative outfit doing some fantastic work on local, national, and global scales (more here).

At 12pm: I left GOOD and began my walk up Highland towards Hollywood Boulevard. By 12:30, I was still walking, because, as I soon found out, the scales on NZ city maps and US city maps are completely incomparable: what I thought would be a five-minute walk ended up closer to forty-five. Further, walking in LA is eerie, because nobody uses the sidewalks (which are ample and well-cared for). Is there something the homeless community and I don't know about walking the streets? Are the pavements innoculated with a rare pedestrian strain of cooties?

I arrived, overdressed and thirsty at Hollywood Boulevard. I chatted with fundamentalist doomsayers, schizoid naysayers, and jovial hip-hop artists peddling their wares. I dodged camera-toting tourists (not just a stereotype! Some were even wearing Hawaiian shirts) and fresh-faced pick-pockets. I drooled over a slice of pizza (with a diameter of approximately two feet, we can calculate that the entire pizza would yield approximately 450 square inches of cheesy goodness! Nom.)

This woman is fighting the recession in blue spandex.

By 1:30, my aunt and I had arranged to go on a Hollywood tour. At 1:45, we saw the man who harassed us away from his tour taken away in cuffs. Hollywood delivers.

A Hollywood tour, you ask? Yes, it's a bit naff, but let's be honest with ourselves here: this is the overseas experience! The go-away-and-learn-important-lessons-in-a-non-academic-setting trip. And did I learn anything? Certainly. For example:

-The people who typically go on Hollywood Tours are dull and uninspired. They are the sort of people who read aloud from every street sign the bus passes, so everyone on the tour can benefit from it as well. The sort of people who call out to civilians in expensive cars--"Yoo-hoo! Are you someone famous?", who pay to go on a the tour, but who don't know of any celebrities who starried in anything older than Titanic. You get the idea. 

-Hollywood celebrities have beautifully polished garage doors. For a lot of the homes, the garage doors were all we could see, but my, were they impressive. 

-Superstars seem to each own a Prius. Perhaps the car's simplicity and commonness detract from the stars' otherwise extravagant lifestyles, introducing a sense of quiet normality to their lives.

Here is what we saw:

Herbie Hancock's Smart Car, Winona Ryder's hedge (oh, my!), and Jacqueline Smith in a car accident.

John Lennon's home from 1967 to 1973

We saw the houses of Richard Simmons, Madonna, Phil Collins (his is approximately a square city block in size), Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Christina Aguilera, Donatella Versace, Russell Crowe, Dr. Phil (on sale for a cool $16.5 mil), and Berry Gordy. We also saw the former homes of Lucille Ball, Elvis, and Frank Sinatra ("Who's Frank Sinatra?", from the back of the bus).

The gates to the house in which MJ died. For those interested, it's on the market for $38 million.

Sidney Poitier, Kate Moss, Cher, Lindsay Lohan, and Adam Sandler are allegedly all neighbours in the same apartment block; Tobey Maguire, Keanu Reeves, and Leonardo DiCaprio are neighbours on the same city block. I know that the film industry is distinctly different from others, but under no circumstances would I want to be neighbours with my coworkers, regardless of how close our work relationship may be. But that's just me.

The park in which George Michael keeps getting busted

So all in all, how was the tour? Intriguing. Educational. Very, very strange. We were paying to stalk people. Given the incessant squealing coming from the back of the bus, one might assume that celebrities are an alien species, but it was the opposite which was impressed upon me during the tour: superstars are but human beings--eccentric and obscenely wealthy, but humans nonetheless. So who wins the weirdo contest here, us or them? The jury's out.

Whoopi Goldberg's square of concrete. Hands, feet, dreadlocks.

To finish, readers, I have found Jesus (Jesus and Bin Laden in the same month! We're doing well.): he was in rehab. Or perhaps visiting a friend; the exact details are unclear. Behold, ladies, gents, and everyone in between, West Hollywood Jesus! 

Tomorrow: We're going on a guitar hunt (we're gonna catch a big one)!

The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.