A Star Is Born

A Star is Born

Lilly had been living her airy-fairy life down at the beach, as per usual, for as long as she could remember. Then, for a while, she had gone up to the mountains to hibernate, and on her way back down, she was discovered, just like those actresses of old in LaLaLand.

She was wearing her least favourite silver slip-on shoes that Alexi had advised her to buy for when her sister wasn’t there to tie her shoe-laces. And her newly cut fluffy-chicken haircut was sticking firmly in the air when a girl with a camera asked if she could interview her post-hike.

And so Lilly warbled on for twenty minutes about why she liked hiking, which, if the truth be known, she only liked because it had been raining loud and heavy one day, and so she had gone to the mountains to escape the hordes. And then it was because the guru had gotten so busy building a new house that he could no longer accompany her of a Sunday which is when she thought all gurus went to rest.

In any case, Lilly had been visiting her relatives in Berlin where she had used to live – and showed them a dark underground museum where a monster-maker slept every night with his monsters - when she received the call.

She was to return forthwith for a starring role in an online hiking campaign for a large American drugstore called Wallbeans.

Lilly had just been swimming when she head the message and was feeling rather odd to be back in her old stomping ground where she had once lived, and thought it sounded like the perfect plan to escape. And so she went online and booked her ticket home. And then she spent a day at her daddy’s house in England, and then she missed his party and went home to the beach.

The guru was busier than ever, and so while Lilly waited for her starring-role, she went to some parties for the Oscars. As it so happened, she had been anointed by the Queen of England to attend a rained-out garden party at the British consulate for the nominees for The King’s Beach, which was a film from England. At the party, she saw Ms. Helena Bonham Carter, who, like Lilly, had also been to Berlin, cos Lilly had seen her reveal her bossom there to the crowds there. And then she spoke to a man who said he was the Deputy British Ambassador to the United States, and spent most of his days speaking to President Bobama about furthering British interests. Lilly had decided that he was just an actor until the very next day she saw the film’s director, Mr. Tom Blooper, receiving the prize for the best film award on stage. The ambassador must have spent an awfully long time talking to the president, she thought.

The next day, she was to begin her own film career. And so she went to the mountains for her call-time of 9.30, wearing her finest pink jacket and gold-sequined Converse boots. And then, she told the camera people how, when she wasn’t hiking, they fitted perfectly with her Diane Von Furstenburg Wonder woman dress and her black pirate’s eye patch. And then they filmed her holding her shoes next to her face to encourage more people to go hiking, and then they told her she would be online April 7. Then Lilly went home. And then Lilly wrote a story on luxury and religion, which her editor said she was killing. And then Lilly went to bed having told her editor she wasn’t killing anything ‘cos she was now a Buddhist. She didn’t quite understand.

I'm Alice In Wonderland

Ever since that day when I had gotten to wander around the red carpet before the Oscars, watching golden statues being unveiled from large plastic wrappers and heaps of rolled-up carpet being laid out for the stars, I had come to think of my life as being just like Alice in Wonderland. This particular epiphany had come to me courtesy of Walt Disney. Tim Burton’s 3-D version of the film was playing at Disney's El Capitain Theater, which overlooked the Oscar ceremony walk-up on Hollywood Boulevard. A poster for the film, showing some weird-looking characters with green hair, looked down as the statues stood there naked. It was with this Alice theme in mind one recent Sunday morning, that I left my beach house, which stood next to the Santa Monica Pier, and wandered down to the shoreline in search of some wisdom of the Alice in Wonderland kind. I found it on Venice Board Walk, which I had also been thinking about and declared to be a place where the chaos of life is manifested in the most colorful of forms. Think one-legged hoola-hop dancers, pot-smoking doctors and artists of the tres bizarre kind. There was even a store selling Native American paraphernalia, which I walked inside. Instead of the scruffy-looking student wearing Hiawatha T-shirts, I imagined Indians dancing through the store to the sounds of the powerful pipe music, which came from a CD called nothing other than Drum Sex! Back outside on the walkway, I sought the wisdom of a tarot card reader who spent half of the session figuring out how to get her son from London to Liverpool by train once she heard my British accent. Still, she did tell me that I had managed successfully to slay some dragons in recent weeks. I did hope she was right as the guru had been after some very dragon-like women recently, and I didn’t much like having them around. (I had struck them off all of his class lists.) That afternoon I wandered to the pool, and seeings as it was Spring Break there were lots of children swimming. There was also a man who had asked me out on several dates. When I said at the top of my voice, so that he could hear me over the squeals, that I was sorry that I hadn’t been able to screw him, he said, “hush.” And then he said, “Do meet my wife.” From there I thought that it was best to go to dance class at the Brazilian studio in Ocean Park. Then I went up to the guru’s who had gone to Tokyo, and watered his plants. I practiced my new samba moves in his evergreen garden under a full moon, which loomed large in the sky, and then I laid down under the stars and breathed into the cosmos, just like he had told me. Then I went home to slay more dragons. These particular dragons happened to be my landlords who had said that they wanted to move back into my little studio home. I looked out the window at the most blissful view I knew, which was of the distant waves washing into shore, beyond the tall palm trees, standing under the stars shining all silver in the deep blue sky. The waves were lit up in a luminous turquoise and then green for a moment, by the reflection of the big wheel, which was hidden from view on the Santa Monica Pier. And I imagined for a moment that I was in South Pacific.

Back To Work: Oscars, Mansions and Filmmakers

It was on account of the fact that I had read something about there being the greatest recession since the great recession, that I decided it was time to go back to work. I didn’t want to admit it to myself but I thought that probably the fact that I had been doing water aerobics with the old ladies at 9.15 each morning, instead of being a worker bee, had something to do with it. And so I decided to give class a miss and get down to it. I got to the pool the next morning at 7 a.m. upon which I had to mingle with all of those morning people who were all bright and cheery and couldn’t wait to engage in conversation. I pretended that I was a shire horse with blinkers on and that I couldn’t see them. Pool men were diving in their underwear to look for Cynthia’s long lost earings which she would wear to the pool and lose almost everyday. Beach boys were laying out striped towels and a man was pretending to trim the palm tree, except that I knew it was a fake. As I passed the old ladies on the way out, I got to tell them the temperature of the pool, which was always the biggest news about these parts (once a journalist always a journalist), and then I set off to work. I walked right along the shoreline carrying my laptop under one hand as the surfers wandered by carrying their boards under the other. I passed a sound man who walked across the vast stretch of sand, carrying a large microphone in one hand and a recorder in the other. When I got to Venice Beach, I headed up Rose Avenue to look for Marisco’s Mexican food van, which had been recommended to me by none other than the chef from the Four Seasons. I ate a taco and sat down at the Rose café to do some work. I already had one assignment to track down a long lost Arab filmmaker known to be hiding somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. His name was Flamingo Ryan and he was thought to be hiding in the Goldwyn Mansion, which Sam Goldwyn, Jr. insisted wasn’t true. Just to be on the safe side, I headed back along the beach jumped in my car and drove around the hills asking everyone I saw if they had seen Mr. Ryan. As I approached the Goldwyn Mansion, I saw a man in a long dress and seven women in belly dancing gear sneaking around the side entrance. Supersleuth Lilly had done it again. I approached Ryan with my voice recorder and he broke down in tears and said he hadn’t been seen in public since his last film had made only $300 at the U.S. box office four years ago. I assured him that it was quite alright and gave him and his entourage a lift to the airport. He said he was going back to Palestine to be part of the new Palestinian film movement. That evening I headed to the Four Seasons Hotel where I met a composer called Maury Yeston who had written the musical Nine. $100 worth of champagne later, we were riding the elevator up and down, opening his Vanity Fair invite multiple times just to make those who didn’t have one jealous. The next day it was the Oscars and so I climbed in my car once again and got to the red carpet at 10 a.m. to watch the set up. Men in jeans were still rolling out piles of carpets and placing flower pots around the edges of the entrance, as presenters in long dresses gave Oscar pep talks to distant audience. I took a photo of a giant Oscar statue being unwrapped from its wrappers and interviewed some of the audience and left to pick up a Pink’s Hotdog to take to the guru. As the presenters were hanging around for hours on the carpet, we went hiking and did Chigong in the middle of the park and then pretended we were in the film Jules et Jim and rolled around on the grass. Then we did what any sensible person does and watch the ceremony on television whilst eating Indian for dinner.

The Wonders of a $10 Kodak Camera at the Oscars

I mentioned in my last blog some images taken at one year's Oscar ceremony with a $10 Kodak camera. Here they are...