06/05/2015

LA, the beginning


While, officially, we "launched" a couple of weeks ago, LA really marks the beginning of the trip. Oregon is family. The airbnb place we're renting belongs to a woman in the movie business .... set design etc.. The decor here is a cross between 1930's thrift store chic and its dumpster out back. M. Lee, who is more kindly disposed to the display, describes it a prop warehouse. I'm sure he's right. Why else stuff some twenty dilapidated plaid suitcases of various bright colors under the bed? And the rooms are stuffed with everything from ancient phones, croquet sets, movie posters, animal skins, dishes, neon hotel signs, typewriters, cameras, antiquish bathroom scales, tennis racquets, spent bullets, rusty old coffee cans and lanterns to a wall of framed paint-by-numbers landscapes. In a word, crammed. Drives me not so quietly crazy which drives him crazy.


Our first day here, right off the plane, we took his mom to her favorite thrift store, a chain called Council Thrift. She found a white jacket she really liked and put it on to get M.'s opinion before buying it then went off to the cashier, still wearing it, and purchased her own coat, still in hand, for the grand price of five bucks. Later, realizing what she'd done, she was mortified. Luckily, she's a good sport because we're getting a lot of mileage out of it.

Off to Disney Land
And tomorrow we "do lunch" with Thea Bella, her gorgeous, green-haired, 15 year-old sister, mom and dad. They are, at this moment, en-route to Disney Land. Lucky for us, our paths just happen to cross because the next day we leave for Istanbul.

6 comments:

Roy said...

I love the coat story. I may use that. Er . . . not as a story, but, you know, as a buying strategy. Right--please never let her forget that!

OMG I draw the line at spent bullets.

My regards to the Portland Three. I have never been to Disney Land but I been to Oklahoma.

asha said...

Don't worry. The coat story has taken on a life of its own and, as a strategy, it's much better than mine own. I have actually fallen so low that I once knowingly purchased a vest I had donated a few weeks earlier. That's not only bad, it's pathetic.

And yeah. Spent bullets are just toooo much.

Will pass along your regards to the Portland Three. As for Oklahoma, only passed through that fair state though I did get arrested in some shit border town at the confluence of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas. I blame Texas.

Roy said...

You know something bad is going to happen when you take all the good qualities of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, (just about a mile from Texarkana,) and mix them together like that.
Once I got kicked out of Sugar Creek, Missouri (Missouri's "sweet spot") for having long hair and the fact that they had "a nice town here, and we wanna keep it that way." Never mind that the Standard Oil refinery had destroyed the gene pool by that time.
But we're older now, and wiser. So they say.

asha said...

I guess we should both feel lucky they didn't shoot us. Being "different" was my crime too. We got pulled over at a stop light about a mile from Texarcana because the cop noticed I was wearing a sari. He took us to a kangaroo court in the basement of some shithole city hall reeking of rotten cotton balls where an asswipe judge let us choose between a big fine or jail. Bastards.

Roy said...

Made me laugh.

"This here's Miss Asha. I'm Roy. We rob banks, annoy people, and generally downgrade the quality of small, disenfranchised towns."

asha said...

Oh yeah. They'd love us in Texarcana.