People Watching

People tend to have a lot of different impressions about Los Angeles. For some people, LA is Hollywood. (Although not actual Hollywood--the "Hollywood" most people think of is more like Beverly Hills and the Palisades...the real Hollywood is way different.) For some people, LA is smog and traffic. For some people, it's the Dodgers. For some people, it's WeHo and the L Word. For some people, it's Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach.

For me, though, LA is the people.

Not the movie stars, fashionistas, or club goers. For me it's the real people. The draw that a city like this has to pull people of all walks of life from near and far is amazing to me. It's the underbelly of Los Angeles - beneath what dominant American culture sees as the capital of glitz and glamour, is a world of people in the trenches, making LA what it really is.

It's the guys who get paid to stand on street corners, holding big arrows directing prospective renters to apartment complexes, some of them turning sign-holding into an Olympic sport.

It's the community organizers, who breathe life into community-based groups at a rate unlike anything I've seen elsewhere.

It's the guy skating down San Vicente in WeHo, in a cowboy hat, Hawaiian shirt, cutoff jean shorts and old-school roller skates, not just skating down the sidewalk, but skating down the middle of a traffic lane, continually pivoting from front to back to front the whole way.

It's the random group of people who, all independently, have become really great friends with the local guard dog.

It's the street character actors at popular shopping and tourist areas. They are movie characters in Hollywood, and are anything and everything on the Promenade in Santa Monica.

It's the friendly guy with a mohawk who bums cigarettes off of other motorists at stop lights.

It's all the people I ride the bus with, every day. Women toting kids, people obviously toting all their earthly belongings, the people who have gotten to know each other over time just because they always end up commuting on the same bus.

It's the bus driver, who has pulled a double shift that day and, when I talk to her at 6:00 in the evening, tells me she's been driving since 3:00 that morning.

It's the guys working in the carpentry and upholstery shop that I pass when I go home, who are always there working even if I walk by at 10:00 at night.

It's the sheer number of stories and personal histories that I brush with in any given day. It's all the people who have come to LA, for whatever reason, and whether they accomplished what they set out to do or not, have made something out of nothing, and give this massive concrete jungle such vital humanity. I admit, given my previous expectations of LA from popular culture, it is not what I expected.