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Posts Tagged ‘los angeles’
Like any ‘A’ personality, overachieving gay couple, my husband George and I know how to get stuff done. Among our friends and acquaintances, we are widely known for our gracious dinner parties, fastidiously over-decorated home, and forceful (some might say controlling) involvement in neighborhood affairs. As a matter of fact, George has become so ensconced in neighborhood goings-on, that he has become the de facto ‘go-to-guy’ for our lily white, corner of Los Angeles quaintly named Los Feliz Square.
Los Feliz, the larger Los Angeles enclave we reside – which I’m told in Spanish means ‘The Happys,” a happy place, or scarily entitled rich white people with too big homes built on too small lots depending on which nanny, housekeeper or gardener you ask, was apparently discovered by Madonna. Madonna, pioneer woman that she is, had the ‘daring’ to purchase a rambling estate here 15 years ago. Suddenly, Los Feliz became fashionable and the nouveau riche (us included) arrived in droves.
George and I purchased a large, 1930′s Georgian demi-manse (Translation: ancient, broken-down dump) on a wide street ‘south of the boulevard’ which in the old days (nine years ago) meant shittier part of town. Now of course, all of Los Feliz, including our formally unfashionable street has become in demand. Drawn by the large, relatively unspoiled vintage homes, quiet streets, and ‘small town’ feel of the place – straight couples with small children snap up the choicest homes, then litter their front lawns with unsightly Razor scooters, plastic sand boxes, tricycles, and other beastly child-related bric-a-brac.
At the time we purchased the house, our surrogate was pregnant with our son Ethan and was but two short months from giving birth. Unfazed by the ticking clock we charged ahead with the house renovations – demolishing our kitchen, ripping out the plumbing and electrical systems and removing the 70′s era brick and fiberglass ‘water feature’ in our astonishingly ugly backyard. We were so busy picking window treatments, re-chroming all the plumbing fixtures and selecting tile, that we glossed over the childcare needs of our yet, unborn son.
(To Be Continued)
Have you ever been out to dinner with some obnoxious asshole who sneers at the hired help that he just doesn’t ‘do’ domestic wines? This thumping bore turns up his nose at any classic vintage California has to offer and INSISTS that he be shown a list of ’real’ wines – the wines of ‘mother’ France. This guy is so affected and pretentious that you don’t know whether to sample the wines the hapless waiter brings to this douche, or punch him in the head. Well, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of dining with me, you know that I AM THAT GUY. I’m such a whiny (no pun intended) spirits snob, that I’ve reduced every sommelier in Hollywood to either tears or fits of rage so intense that security is called and I’m permanently ’86′d’ from darkening their doorstep.
I hate to admit it, but I have a substance abuse problem. My bourgeoisie, Francophile snobbery causes me to possess a personality devoid of any real substance, hence I abuse everyone. There, I’ve said it. I’m told that admitting one has an additiction problem is the first step in overcoming one’s addiction.
This past summer, I had the good fortune to dump…I mean…deliver my child to the good people at Camp Walt Whitman overnight camp and make my pilgrimage to the promised land. No, not that promised land, the other ‘real’ promised land, France. The Air France jet that carried me was cramped, the service appalling and the food inedible. It was EVERYTHING one hopes for when starting one’s journey to the land of milk, honey, and Louis Vuitton. I arrived in Paris dirty, tired and incredibly hostile – had my accent been a touch better, you would have no doubt mistaken me for a native!
I wandered around Paris for the next three days enjoying the favorable exchange rate by eating everything in sight and drinking whatever cheap, Chateau -whatever wine those French bastards put in front of me. One night during my pilgrimage, I sat in a dreamy Parisian bistro getting massively fucked up when my son’s sleepover camp had the bad taste to interrupt my drunken carousing by texting me that he required some kind of footwear called ‘cleats’ for the myriad of sports foisted upon him during the course of his internment, uh…I mean, vacation. Naturally, I hadn’t the foggiest notion of my son’s foot size nor where such athletic footwear could be found. In my drunkenness, my gaze wandered from the bewildering get-your-son-some cleats text to the large bottle of unopened champagne that sweated tantalizingly on the table before me. Suddenly, my mission was clear.
(To Be Continued)
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