City of Angels

This is way late, but I don't want to forget it so I'm sharing my favorite stories from our trip out West. For those that don't know, Autumn, Betsy and I ventured to the city of angels to visit Autumn's dearly departed roommate Sam, who left New York to pursue her dreams of working in the film industry. She now works at Entertainment Tonight.

I had been to L.A. twice before. Once with my family when I was probably in middle school or a freshman in high school. Needless to say, when I first came here, I was not a fan. The traffic combined with the fact that my family was staying downtown and didn't venture that far (except to Beverley Hills, of course). The second time I went to L.A. it was for the exclusive reason of going to The Price is Right. And while waiting on a street at four in the morning is a fine way to see any city, I was ready to give L.A. its final chance.

Highlights:
Sam lives in what is known as "The Valley," where Cher and Tai go to the party and dance to Rollin' with the Homies. Although in Clueless, it is considered a rough part of town to live in, I found the area where Sam lives to be charming. Lots of restaurants and little boutiques abound, and an easy commute over the hills, where you get to drive by Mulholland Drive, to the rest of Hollywood. We also spotted the liquor store where Cher was held up on our first night.

Betsy's cousin Mirtha is an actress in L.A. and she seems to know everyone. We happily abused her connections to get into Paramount Studios back lot. She is friends with a producer there and he let us drive around a little golf cart and check out the stages. It was a Jewish holiday, so the studio was pretty dead. Autumn and Betsy infiltrated the set of the CW's Privileged. It was awesome.

Mirtha was also able to get us in to Les Deux, which is a club the ladies of MTV's The Hills go to all the time. But she didn't just get us in, we went to the front of the line VIP-style. It was pretty cool. Until the club was so crowded that I wanted to kill someone, then I was happy to leave.

Sam's friend Ren, who also used to live in New York, booked us a surfing lesson for early the morning after our Les Deux adventure. While I had gone home at a reasonable hour, you can't keep Autumn and Betsy down when there is fun and drinks to be had. Although, they'd had little sleep, we all still made it to Santa Monica in time for our lesson. Our surf instructor, was of course, smoking hot. So first things first, we had to get our wet wet suits on. While this was an easy task for me (he gave me on that was too big) the others weren't so lucky, especially considering their respective hangovers. So I helped yank the suits on and we went down to the beach for our lesson. After a few practices jumping up on the board, which was a comedy of errors on many levels we made it out in the water. While it was incredibly cold, after awhile it felt amazing. He told us to just dive right in and Autumn took that to heart. She dunked her head under and when she came back up, days of makeup came running down her face, confirming our instructor's hunch that some of us had been out late the night before. We each took our turns, some more successful then others. One of my favorite moments was when Sam was straddling her board, like all cool surfers do. She had her long hair cascading down her shoulders and looked right out of a surfing movie. Ren, noticing how great she looked, said "Sam you look like such a surfer girl." She enthusiastically replied, "I know!" and she flipped her hair over her shoulder. As she made the sharp movement her board (and her) flipped completely upside down. It was priceless. I managed to stand up on my board for the briefest of seconds, otherwise the ocean kicked my ass. It was so much fun but also very hard work. We all were very sore for about a week afterwards, or at least I was.

All in all, I no longer will use the word hate when referring to L.A. I actually felt like I learned the city, especially since I did a lot of the driving. Other highlights: We saw Benji and Joel Madden at brunch in Beverly Hills, sitting a table over from us. Overall, a fun-filled trip.