Hooray for Hollywood!

• I couldn’t say “count me in” fast enough when Tom and Donna invited me on a day trip to The City of Angels. First we swept through the Orange County airport to pick up Tom’s tall sister Toni a tour guide from Texas. (Try saying that three times fast!) Having previously toured Los Angeles, Toni wanted only to visit the elaborate J. Paul Getty Museum that houses European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and photographs. After a two hour drive to get there, we were shooed out of the JPG parking lot with the abrupt advisory: “The museum is closed on Mondays.”
  

• With time on our hands and no particular place to go, Tom responded to Toni’s suggestion of an impromptu Hollywood tour with a sharp left turn onto Sunset Boulevard. As if challenged to prove the theory ‘there is one born every minute’, I was quick to hand over $10 to a somewhat scruffy boulevard vendor whose ragged homemade cardboard sign offered a Map of Movie Star Homes. Peppered with several hundred red stars, the map provided further information for only 86 stars with many footnoted as “former home” or “deceased” in case there is any doubt that Elvis Presley doesn’t live there any more.

• The nice part about the older residences is that many are unfenced and fully visible from the curb. For the most part, however, one can only guess about which star might live behind a given pair of ornate gates and high walls.

• The estate at 10236 Charing Cross Road was an exception. Built in the late 1920s and now the setting for many of Hollywood’s most outrageous parties, ours was not the only vehicle to stop for a photo op. The gates to the Playboy Mansion did not swing open in welcome nor were they readily attended by the advertised “armed response” of security guards. Hefner’s pad boasts the only private zoo in Los Angeles, featuring in addition to the trademark bunnies more than a hundred species of birds including flamingos and peacocks that freely roam the grounds.

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• The stretch of Rodeo Drive that sports the world’s most expensive shops and boutiques is actually only three blocks long. I guess the movie stars who so famously frequent Gucci, Cartier, Dior and Luis Vuitton were busy doing other things because there were no paparazzi jamming the sidewalks and no familiar faces. We had to be satisfied with watching a chauffer stand in wait beside a limousine outside the Armani store and the opportunity to snap a few photos of a blinding yellow Lamborghini.

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• Four tall silver ladies supporting the word Hollywood (appropriately named The Four Ladies Statue) ushered us onto the less chic Hollywood Boulevard where tourists and their dollars are welcomed.

• Rubber-necking our way along Hollywood, we circled back to Sunset Boulevard where, in the shadow of the copper domed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, dozens of tourists crawled the sidewalk matching their hands to concrete handprints of movie stars.

• Tom slowed the vehicle so I could hop out at the Kodak Theatre complex which features a peephole view of the 50 foot Hollywood sign on the distant hillside.

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• Not being much of a movie buff, the only famous stars I recognized in the world of fantasy and whim known as Hollywood were Spider Man and Homer Simpson.

• T’was a wonderful day! I am so fortunate to have made friends with the adventuresome duo, Donna and Tom. They too are leaving Golden Village at the end of March and, like me, they are committed to having as much fun as possible before their departure.