This is Hollywood

After work I drove to this coffee shop in Hollywood. A friend of mine hosts a comedy night there on Thursdays that I sometimes check out/keep promising I'll perform at. Anyways, tonight I went there just to have a cup of coffee and do a little writing. Except I forgot my notebook at home, and didn't have anything to write on. So I ended up reading.

Before I moved to Los Angeles, I imagined Hollywood as, well, Hollywood. And the thing about that is, it isn't. It's a tourist trap and, truth be told, kind of a shady place. You can see the faded glory of the glitz-and-glamour days long gone beneath the layers of fallen smoggy ash, peeling paint, and homelessness. It reminds me a lot of Niagara Falls, actually, except the falling water is still independantly and in-and-of itself really amazing in a bugging eyes and jaw hitting the floor way; meanwhile Hollywood relies on tour guides' stories and tourists' fantasies for it's appeal, not unlike the movies attributed to it.

So no, I no longer perceive Hollywood as "Hollywood." The real Hollywood is dirty, grimy, and above all, weird. And I love it for this last quality.

Which brings me to the coffee shop this evening. I sat at a corner table and prepared to write, realized I didn't have my notebook, and so prepared to read. In other words, I rummaged through my bag and after not seeing a notebook took out a novel. Then I looked out the window and there, on the sidewalk in front of the window, was a man. And this man had a pair of scissors. And he was using them. To cut a woman's hair. Cutting her hair, remember, on the sidewalk. Outside. In front of a coffee shop. In Hollywood.

And when I say "cutting her hair," I don't just mean the guy was using scissors to chop off some woman's golden (though in this case, brunette) tresses. No. This guy was doing some serious styling of hair outside on the sidewalk (and when I say "outside" and "on the sidewalk" I actually mean those).

The guy was metrosexual in an urban cowboy kind of way. Straw cowboy hat, black button-down shirt with four buttons open, stylish jeans, and cowboy boots. The woman had one of those barbershop capes around her shoulders and most of her hair was combed forward and covered her face as the "stylist" (?) trimmed the back.

Also keep in mind, it was night, so this whole operation was going on underneath a lamp in front of the coffee shop.

There's really no point to this story other than, good God, I saw a guy cutting a woman's hair on the sidewalk in front of a coffee shop in Hollywood. I lived in New York City for a year, and New York is a city where you can get just about ANYTHING delivered to you ANYTIME you want, yet I don't think I could order a trim chopwald at 9pm on a Monday night.

After I left the coffee shop and walked back to my car I did my best to not step on the Hollywood stars' stars embedded in the sidewalk. I momentarily lost myself in the names I hopped over: Hepburn, Bogart, Arnez, Welles, and so on. There were countless legends of film, radio, television, and music and I was walking through a part of the city that just marinates in tradition. And then I saw the Olsen twins star, and I remembered that any hack could get a star if they ponied up the thirty-grand. As I stepped squarely on the "O" in their surname, the reality that Hollywood is a land of lies and deception, where fantasy is passed off as truth; that it's old and beaten down, in real need of a nip and a tuck -- all of this became horribly clear to me. But then I was hit by the reality of the strangeness of the place, and how this strangeness somehow grounds it; a place where the Olson twins get stars and a barber can cut a woman's hair on the sidewalk.

In front of a coffee shop.