Sunday #12: Hollywood! Today

When the weather is good on Sunday mornings, I enjoy going on bicycle rides. Today was a day when the weather was good--our Indian Summer time of the year--bad for fires but good for morning bike riding. Hollywood is not a city that wakes up early on Sundays--it is more of a Saturday night town than a Sunday morning town, or at least it was before COVID. I don't know a single person who "goes to church" today, as opposed to my childhood, when the entire day was shaped around worship and rest (who says things aren't improving?). This means that I pretty much have the city to myself on my Sunday bike rides, or at least it feels that way. The only others I encounter as the sun rises are those who have realized, like me, that there it is a special treat to run, walk, bike, or hike before cars once again take over the streets. 

You would think that we would acknowledge each other--us fellow morning explorers, but this rarely happens. Out of the three Good Morning! greetings I offered today, not one was returned. (Was I too tentative in my approach?) On the positive side, I did get a couple of "head nods" from fellow dudes--I suppose I am less threatening to them than I am to solo women, and understandably so. But it saddens me nonetheless. One thing that makes life bearable is feeling that you are in it with others. These days, the "others" are often reduced to just one or two, which can significantly test one's response-ability, but as the popular saying goes, It is what it is. Still, I wish it were different. 

Hollywood is not fun right now, or at least it isn't for me. It is not a friendly town. Perhaps it is me who is not friendly--hard to tell when you get neither a positive nor a negative response from others--or perhaps it is just more apparent now that we have never been friendly to each other here, unless someone is actually your friend. Random friendliness is a slippery slope in this town--it can invite community, but it can also invite danger. Why take that risk? Better to just pretend that the person wanting to engage doesn't even exist.

Good gracious, this essay is going south, isn't it? 

Let's see if I can get back on track. Early Sunday mornings...on my bike...few other people around. Okay, there we go. 

Riding around today I saw a group of four women in Indian saris doing a synchronized dance on Hollywood Blvd. They were being filmed by a guy with an iPhone, naturally, but my mind visited about a million possibilities for why they were doing this at 730 in the morning on Sunday. I also came across a block of Sunset Blvd. that was closed off and filled with black luxury cars and several Armenians. I knew they were Armenians because they had some flags stating so. It was hard to tell what was going on, they were mostly standing around smoking cigarettes. I wondered if that was the pre-activity, the activity, or the post-activity. Then suddenly one car started honking its horn, and others followed suit. Something was about to happen! But no, the honks died down as quickly as they started, and the men went back to smoking their cigarettes. 

***

Riding around the mostly deserted streets always gives me an opportunity to check out some of the remaining grand homes from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I love looking at these homes, and the thing about Hollywood is that, unlike Bel-Air, you can actually see most of them from the street. My favorites are the ones in the low foothills, because you can tell they were built to take advantage of the sloping ground. They rise, castle-like, from the street, with their pale shades of stucco, colorful tiles, overlapping shingles, wrought-iron balcony rails, and terra-cotta stairways. The mystery behind the darkened windows always draws me in. It is easy to imagine what it was like in the 1920's and 30's, coming home from a movie studio or a night on the town at Ciro's, shiny sedans edging into narrow driveways before retiring to dark, elevated rooms for slumbers uninterrupted by police helicopters or pinging cell phones. 

I circle down to Hollywood Blvd., deserted except for groupings of post-apocalyptical homeless folks. I cannot tell if they are waking for the day or just going to sleep, or perhaps they are caught in between the two. The majority of storefronts are still boarded up, indicating that they are either closed, or still concerned about continued violence in the streets. Best to be prepared, I like to say. It appears that the city is, like the homeless, either preparing to wake up or go to sleep--I cannot tell. 

It all feels, on my early Sunday morning rides around Hollywood, like how it must feel to go on It's A Small World at Disneyland afterhours, when the music and animatronics are shut off for the night. I imagine it would be quiet, peaceful, and slightly eerie. Except this time there are one or two scenes that continue to be actively animated, the characters singing their song unaware, and perhaps not caring, that there is no audience. 

This is Hollywood, today.