I took Evie's friend Slavi on the horses the other day.
Slavi has never been on a horse. I don't know why his name is Slavi. He is australian but living in England. He was Evie's waiter at a bar in London 4 years ago and they stayed friends.
So I took a waiter riding the other day. She doesn't actually know him very well. I mean I guess he knows her better, he took her order and got it right.
It's his first time in America. And you come to Los Angeles, I say? When there's like, Omaha?
He says no he did have a layover here in LA a few years ago and went out to the closest place he could uber to, which was Venice Beach at 9 am on a weekday. He said it destroyed a little of his heart and global enthusiasm for beaches mixed with hungover dwarves skateboarding on meth. Oh but Venice is more than that, I say, hopefully. Think of the sunglasses.
I feel bad that he only saw Venice at its least optimum time. All I can do is rub some horses into his wound, and take him on the back trail up our mountain (I don't know him well enough to invest a whole extra hour to the creek which is the best ride there is.) I don't think this is really Los Angeles, this bushy path behind basketball courts, but maybe it's as LA as anything else since LA is weirdly sprawling, and nothing matches, and there's like every kind of ethnicity and sexuality, the mountains are they/them and we don't even need to talk about all the aretheyreallythatgreat landmarks. He said any recommendations. Well, I guess, my biggest recommendation is buy a farm and get the hell out of this city, but we do have the Lakers, and if you like movies go look at the handprints in front of the Chinese theater and drive through Beverly Hills to look at the mansions and up the PCH to see the beach and Malibu and you have to stand in front of the Hollywood sign squinting for a selfie. I think the good part of LA is all the possibilities of LA, if you go somewhere between 11-1 when the streets are clear. The possibilities of the film business and your family here, and the friends you meet and your script getting made and late nights on set after 14 hours when there's only one more shot til wrap and you can't WAIT to drive home with the crew and their jokes in your mind and your bed waiting for your 3-5 hour sleep until you have to be back on set.
It's hard to break up with LA. Slavi is a filmmaker, not just a waiter. He's a director. He says send me your projects. He wants to read them. He reads. People read? what. Of course I will back the truck up and dump all my projects into his waiter apron. I hope he has a really big one.
I think that's what Evie said at his bar.
Anyway, Slavi weighs about 20 pounds and those aren't British pounds cause he's actually Australian and we talk about where is the best place to live in Australia and he says Darwin. It's at the top, it's tropical, it's the Florida of Australia. It's always about 86 degrees. It's right near the equator. Isn't it amazing even the australians are using the equator. And with their cute accents.
On our ride we talked about how hard it is to get a project made, and his friend he brought along, the girl whose couch he was sleeping on, she was also a girl that Slavi had waited on in his bar, I see a whole network here, the girl talked about how she's working on tour with Bruno Mars and her shirt even had Bruno Mars on it like wardrobe dressed her SPOT ON as if to prove it or maybe in her contract she has to advertise Bruno Mars in everything she wears which would be kind of sobering. But she said it gets kind of boring on tour so she takes a sewing machine and makes quilts. She's really into textiles she said, which I instantly thought she meant like tiling bathrooms or something but then learned through context clues as she talked that textiles are like handmade needly things and we had that in common, I was like here is a CHILD who makes things like a GRAMMA, and I like all of those things too, and I would not be at one Bruno Mars concert let alone a whole tour because I think he rhymes too much.
But here are two CHILDREN on this ride who want to make movies and also while they're waiting, to quilt the world. And they're decent riders and they're doing it without their phones. Except to take pictures.
Slavi makes the world look good. It's not just possible, he says. It's probable. He holds up the menu and says I think you're gonna like everything here.
