Technically I was being sent to Rancho Mirage (90 minutes east of L.A.), but I worked out a fantastic itinerary. I'd fly into L.A. on Saturday, saving a thousand or so dollars by flying to a major airport (LAX) on Saturday instead of a minor airport (Palm Springs) on Sunday. I'd save another hundred bucks by not staying at the Palm Springs resort on Saturday, but at something half the price in L.A. I'd rent a car and drive to the conference Sunday morning. When it was over Wednesday, I'd have through Saturday to drive around southern California visiting supermarkets for work. I'd fly out of San Diego Saturday night.
This would be my first time in California, and my expectations were high. I wanted to be in an earthquake. I wanted to have a car chase whiz by me. I wanted to casually run into minor level celebrities at every turn. I got one out of three, and I came away happy.
I was anything but happy flying into LAX. The Department of Homeland Security stole one of the favorite possessions. Newark International Airport is only twenty minutes from my apartment, so I thought I left with plenty of time. OK, I didn't leave two hours early, but I had scheduled an 8:15 A.M. flight, and leaving the house by 6:30 was still an accomplishment to be proud of. Construction rerouted my direct route through what I estimate to be Albany, which at least doubled my drive time. I made it to the ticket counter with 39 minutes to spare. The counter woman said that it was to late to check my garment bag, but I could bring it as a second carry on bag.
My Swiss Army Knife was in the garment bag. Ironically the knife was so dull I doubt I could pop a balloon with it. All the same, if security found it with the X-ray, my mug shot would become famous. If they found it. I wasn't eager to risk jail time, so I volunteered it to security before it went through the X-ray. I asked several times if they had some return policy, or at least a Lost and Found, but no luck. They put it in the enormous pile of toenail clippers, mustache scissors and other threats to the nation. I had that knife since high school. Grumble grumble.
I was able to make out the HOLLYWOOD sign up in the hills as I was landing. From the air it's tiny, but most things are from seven miles up.
The palm trees were the first thing that hit me as I stepped out of the airport (aside from it being fifty degrees warmer). They were all over the landscaping, and once I got my rental car and hit L.A. streets, they were as common as street lights. Palm trees are low maintenance, look great, and grow in the desert, so they're everywhere in southern California. They were the first of many things to distinguish this town from Fort Worth.
Mapquest said the drive from the airport to the TV studio would take 25 minutes. With L.A. traffic, it took an hour and a half. I had so much time between turns, I could read directions ten times, and then try to see if anyone famous was in the convertible next to me. (No one.) For once in my life, I was happy to be stuck in traffic. I had heard so much about L.A. traffic, it was a tourist attraction. I had enough time to try to decipher Spanish bumper stickers. Whoever this Cristo guy is, everyone loves him.
East coast towns were set up small in colonial times, then expanded due to population, then the railroads, then the automobile. L.A. is an east coast town in a blender. Nice houses, then a shopping center, then not so nice houses, then a freeway, then more nice houses, then another freeway, then more shopping centers and a tenement, and then mansions. There's no logic to it. One side of a duplex is eating imported cheese, and the other side is eating government cheese.
I reached the CBS Studios front gate, and told the guard I was on the guest list. He checked, then opened the gate for me. I felt like a big shot. I had a connection: Tom Riles, a fellow Mixed Signal. He was working on Hollywood Squares, which was taping now. I couldn't catch the three morning episodes, but I could see the two taped after lunch.
My first celebrity sighting was walking down the CBS hallway. A half dozen people were moving as one organism, including a big dog on a leash. In the eye of this storm was Ben Stein. Looks exactly like he does on TV.
Tom Riles happened to be wearing the similar glasses as me: some small rectangular shape. We both normally wear contacts, but his were acting up so he had his glasses on today, and I forgot mine back in Jersey City, so I was wearing glasses for the whole week. People thought we were brothers (both six feet tall and skinny), which I'm used to but not with Tom.
One of the first things Tom told me was that L.A. bagels are horrible. Pizza is pretty good, and there's no shortage of great Mexican places, but the bagels are atrocious. They're just rolls with holes gouged out of the middle. I didn't know it was possible to mangle bagels, and I made it a priority to sample this travesty.
Tom told me the giant Hollywood Squares tic tac toe is set up and taken down every weekend. Five shows are taped Saturday, five on Sunday, and then it's put away for the next taping weekend. Several soap operas were also taped here, and their smooshed-together sets all had HOT SET signs up. If I knew anything about soaps, maybe this would have excited me. I don't even remember which ones taped there.
An elevator opened as we were talking and the biggest man in the world came out. "Hey guys," he said in passing, seismographs recording his every step. It was the Big Show, a wrestler who might technically be a shaved bear. He's supposed to be 7 feet tall and 500 pounds, but he seemed like a mere 6' 8" and only 450 pounds. Everyone's smaller in person. He had banana bunches for hands.
Tom casually mentioned that the show taping here weekdays was the Price Is Right, and that the sets are all pushed in a corner. "You can spin the big wheel, if you want." The only proper response to this is to say "Yes" as quickly as the speed of sound allows.
The Big Wheel was unceremoniously left in the middle of dozens of sets. It was next to the Plinko board (for all my searching, I never found a single Plinko token). There's three distinct types of spins: the Normal Spin, the Old Lady (doesn't get around once, Bob Barker good-naturedly chides the old woman), and the Military Guy (a turbine connected to the wheel would power L.A. for a week). I grabbed the handles on the side of the wheel, thought Military, and heaved. Regular Spin, 40 cents. I tried again. Another Regular Spin, and 65 cents. $1.05, thanks for playing, get the hell off the stage. I tried a third time, grabbing high handles and letting gravity pull me down, and the wheel spun slower than the first two times. I've got new respect for our military.
I came thiiiiiiis close to swiping one of the giant checks from the Check Game. I thought there would be a whole pad of them, as if someone put a regular checkbook in the enlarging machine, but it was just a poster in the shape of a check. And just the one. I didn't want to get Tom in trouble by stealing it, but I'm going to regret never getting the chance to take it to a bank and watch the tellers' faces.
The Hollywood Squares taping was an exercise in forced cheerfulness. There's no point in having a studio audience if they're not clapping and screaming, so we were instructed to do this constantly. We had several minutes of practice cheers, and then the real cheers when the celebrities came out, then more cheering when the celebrities were taped walking out, and more cheering when the celebrities went in their boxes, and another round of cheering when center square Howie Mandel was picked, and then cheering whenever someone got the square, and then more cheering for picking another box, and cheering for another box, and then cheering for going to commercial, and then more cheering in the break so the momentum wasn't lost. This continued for two episodes. There's only so much cheering I can give to Lainie Kazan.
Friday's episode ended with someone winning the PT Cruiser parked on set, which was nice to see. It was an ideal reaction: the woman was screaming and jumping for glee and celebrating in a very camera-friendly way. Tom said cars on set can't have more than a quarter tank of gas in them, for safety reasons. Once a Mercedes was dropped off with a half-tank of gas, and Tom got the awful job of driving a luxury car around L.A. simply to burn up the gas in the tank. He's got a tough life out here.
The dressing rooms cleared out pretty quickly after the taping, and Tom wasn't being paid to be my tour guide, so I picked a dressing room and hung out there. Ben Stein really trashes his room. Crumbs everywhere, water bottles lying on the floor, Amazon.com receipts cluttering up the place. (He bought 26 copies of his own book. Hopefully as a giveaway.)
We left my car at the studio (I hoped the Big Show wouldn't shoplift it), and I rode in Tom's car to his apartment. His sisters were over now, (Tom had somehow snagged them tickets to Friends the day before). He was taking classes at the Groundlings, the legendary L.A. improv theater, which is just a few blocks from his place. We walked there to see if the 10:00 P.M. show was sold out for the night, and they were. Probably for the best, since that started 1:00 A.M. my time, and the closest thing I had to caffeine in my system all day was Ben Stein's orange juice.
The Riles clan and I met up with Tom's friend Dave, and the six of us went to dinner. Dave also had rectangular glasses. Was there a sale on these frames?
Dave was from Toms River, so all six of us were New Jersey expatriates in some form or another. I had always heard that L.A. people were uncaring and self-involved and dead on the inside. That's not true, they're just all from New Jersey!
Tom made reservations at the Old Spaghetti Factory, which is like the Olive Garden but without the hatred of the entire U.S. Italian population. You cannot spend ten bucks here to save your life. My entree was $7:35, and it came with soup or salad, a basket of bread, and spumoni for dessert.
I was hoping for some B-level celebrity sighting at the restaurant, and I got it. There's a show I haven't seen (but have seen five thousand ads for) on AMC called Movies At Our House. A married couple show movies, and during commercial breaks they're taped talking about what they've seen. It's like having friends but without the annoying human interaction. They were in a group of at least a dozen, including the old host of Beat the Geeks. He's not on the show any more, presumably because he was boring. He also had rectangular frames. Do they just not make glasses in 'round' any more?
I was nodding off during dinner, so Tom dropped me back at my car and Dave gave me directions to a hotel. I was staying the night in Hollywood itself. I could call anyone back home and be correct in saying "I'm in Hollywood!" If I knew anyone back home who was awake by their phone at 1 A.M. Saturday night, that was.
Sunday morning I hit the continental breakfast at the hotel. The bagels lived up to their horror stories. Crumbly, flavorless and trying to apologize for themselves by bloating so big they outsize toaster slots. Furthermore, the toaster was broken, so I had to pull the mangled halves back out of the cold slots and butter these room temperature wastes of flour. Based solely on holed baked goods, L.A. will never equal New York. Or New Jersey. Hell, even Fort Worth had decent bagels.
I had a lot of other stuff to do. I wanted to see the La Brea tar pits, and the obligatory visit to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There were a half dozen theme parks to see, a dozen studio tours, and enough shows being taped to go a year. I get excited enough when I recognize a location from the Sopranos: I could go nuts finding out which movie scenes were filmed two blocks from where I was standing.
But I left rather early in the morning. I didn't want to be late to Palm Springs. Also, I didn't want to tack a bad ending onto a very enjoyable time so far. I could squeeze an hour or two of sightseeing in, but solo sightseeing runs the risk of sucking about as much as any movie Part 4. I had a whole week to enjoy California: I didn't have to cram it all in now.
I had 100% great memories so far, and by lingering around I only ran the risk of finding a boring hour. So I drove off. I came into L.A. miserable and disgusted with the world, and came out optimistic that great things were in my immediate future. It's the opposite of the normal L.A. trip.