Post 600 - April 20, 2024

A housing development in the 1920s that sat on six acres of land on the coast in San Pedro, California began sliding into the sea over a span of a few months not long after it was built and, eventually, most of it disappeared under the waves.

It all happened slowly enough that except for two of the wood-frame houses that had been built there, the rest could be moved inland. The streets and lights and rail tracks, though, weren’t so lucky. Today, on shore, all that is left of the development are the concrete slabs upon which the houses once stood and the broken-up pieces of road that now end rather abruptly at a sheer drop-off down to the water.

The slabs are now, of course, covered in artwork and graffiti. Nobody is allowed in there, but people being people go in anyway. I certainly did. When I got home and started looking into its history, I found out that had the police raided the area while I was there, I could have been rounded up and fined $450.00. Yesterday afternoon, while I was looking over the barrier, I didn’t have that information, so when two other people climbed over and went in, I followed them.

If they’d jumped off a bridge, would I have jumped off too? Apparently, yes, I would have.

Los Angeles is a singular city. I feel fortunate in that I’ve been able to visit here as much as I have. Michael and I have very dear friends living here who all have lovely places. I’m always happy to come, and always happy to leave again. To be fair, I feel that way about almost everywhere, including New York.

Sitting still is not something that I am very good at. From a very early age, I knew that what I wanted to do was travel. It never crossed my mind that I could ever have a job that allowed me to travel. Once I figured out that I could, that’s what I focused on with laser vision.

There’s a vivid memory lodged in my brain that must date back fifty years. I was riding my bicycle through the local wildlife center in Bergen County, New Jersey when I suddenly panicked that I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was probably ten or eleven. As I crested a hill on my Schwinn, I decided that I could be a fireman. I was immediately relieved. The decision made; I stopped thinking about it.

I don’t know why I thought I’d want to be a fireman. As far as I recall, I never gave it another thought. At various times over the course of my young life, I wanted to be a zoologist or an archaeologist. Spending part of my childhood in South Africa made me fall in love with wildlife. My father made me fall in love with history. My mother made me fall in love with traveling which combined all those elements for me. As a family, we went on safari and explored ancient ruins. That’s what I wanted to do.

In junior high school, I discovered theatre. That passion temporarily left the others in the dust. It wasn’t a perfect relationship, though, because when I had to choose between doing the local summer musicals or traveling to Peru with my mother, the choice was never in question. I still have a picture of me and my sister high atop Machu Picchu to prove it.

During my junior year abroad in college, I swore off theatre so that I could romp through Europe with my friends. There were so many times after I started working professionally that I had to negotiate in family vacations with whatever theatre was hiring me. Egypt, New Zealand, the Galapagos, Islands, Indonesia, Western Africa – forget the show, I was going exploring.

I suppose it was a good thing that I was good at what I did. I missed the first week or two of rehearsals for a production of Don Juan of Seville at CSC that Carey Perloff directed.  We’d gone somewhere exotic on vacation. That might have been the Egypt trip. The first day after I got back to rehearsal, Carey told everyone to take it from the point at which Don Juan dies.  “Don Juan dies?” I said before I could stop myself.  “Oh, Hester…” Carey said, with a sigh. She then suggested that I read the script before we went into tech.

I got hired to be a production assistant on the original Broadway version of Lend Me a Tenor. I then got a job as the assistant stage manager on The Secret Garden at the St. James Theatre. For a few years after that, I thought of nothing else but theatre. I was in the middle of it. I still somehow managed to travel but my focus was strictly on the stage.

Then I did a musical called The Red Shoes. It was six of the most difficult months I have ever lived through. To nobody’s surprise, the show bombed. Before we’d even opened, I’d put in my notice so that I could go out on tour with The Phantom of the Opera. Anything to just get away.

The amazing thing about Phantom was that I was still working on a big fat Broadway hit, but now I was also traveling. Nobody tours anymore the way we did back then. Our shortest stop was eight full weeks and our longest was twelve. That meant that I had two or three months at a time to fully explore a brand-new city.

Chicago, Nashville, San Antonio, Kansas City, New Orleans, Costa Mesa, and even Hartford were places that I got to live and experience. We also went to Tempe, Arizona, and we stayed there long enough for me to fall in love with the Southwestern desert. When we played in West Palm Beach, I lived in this funky jungle-covered place right near the ocean. After the show, I could walk to the beach and watch the huge sea turtles making their way out of the ocean and up to the shore to lay their eggs.

After that, I always chose work that could potentially take me to different places. One of the reasons I took Jersey Boys was that our initial production was in La Jolla meaning I had to live near San Diego for a few months. That it then turned into the international juggernaut that it did, was far more distant traveling than I could ever have dreamed of.

Concert touring now means that I still get to visit a lot of different places albeit for a much shorter time. We are never anywhere long enough, but if we land early enough in a city, I always have that afternoon and evening to explore wherever we are. After that, I am stuck inside a theatre that could be anywhere.

Knowing what I wanted from such a young age, has made my career decision-making easy. I know about three words into a pitch whether or not I want to do something. If it’s going to keep me trapped somewhere, it better be an amazing project that I can’t turn down. If it wasn’t going to be amazing and it was going to keep me from going anywhere, then invariably I turned it down.

I have never regretted not doing any of the things I said no to. I knew the path I wanted to take so it was always clear to me which way I should go when I was confronted with a choice. More than anything else, I have also been on the receiving end of a lot of luck.

There were many times when I’d curl up into a ball of despair because I didn’t have the slightest idea how I was going to pay my rent that month. It didn’t make me question what I was doing, only how, in the name of all that was holy, I was going to get by while I was doing it.

My parents sometimes bailed me out over the years, and I will always be truly grateful to them for that. They never once suggested that I get a real job. They may have hoped I would, but they never said it. I first started posting pictures on Facebook so that my mother would know where I was and be able to see what I was seeing. They both liked traveling as much as I did.

This past week, we had three concerts in a row: Palm Desert, San Francisco, and Scottsdale. Yesterday, I had a day off here in Los Angeles before the concert tonight at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

I’ve spent enough time in L.A. that I wasn’t sure there was anything left I wanted to see. With its main industry being movies, it’s attracted a lot of disparate people who’ve dreamt of stardom. Some find it, but most don’t. Both often end up with compelling stories. So, I did a dive. As it turns out, there are plenty of websites devoted to the strange and weird things to do and see here, so I took some notes and hit a few.  One of them was the Sunken City in San Pedro.

I also went to this place called the Garden of Oz. Some guy has covered his whole backyard in mosaic tiles. His house is high up in the hills of Glendale but, sadly, was closed when I got there. Across the street, however, was a fantastic view of the Hollywood sign. I’d never been that close to it before.

From there I went to The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. It’s a huge sprawling ramshackle place with stacks of new and used books and a line of funky artist galleries upstairs. I’d never even heard of it before. While browsing through it, I found a book for eight bucks about the odd things the various Kings and Queens of England have done over the years.

Then I went to have a look at something that I have always been curious about. I had seen plenty of pictures of it and I had heard stories about it, but I had never personally been to Marilyn Monroe’s grave.

Marilyn died when I was six months old. Having just seen the Curran Theatre in San Francisco where she’d filmed a scene from All About Eve, she was on my mind.

Marilyn Monroe was amazing. I’ve always been captivated by her. Of course, so has the rest of the world. Her ability to enthrall so many different people led to her having a short, complicated life filled with suffering. Her time on earth was marked by an endless series of men who used her, objectified her, and took advantage of her.

She’s buried in a strange little cemetery off Wilshire. Unless you were directed to it by your app, you’d never know it was there. Far from being an expanse of green lawns, it’s a compact area completely hemmed in by towering glass skyscrapers. It feels like a large courtyard between the buildings.

Marilyn is not the only famous person buried there. After I’d parked and walked into the front gate, the first person whose grave I saw was Don Knotts. Nearby was Mel Tormé’s.

Having seen pictures of the marble front of Marilyn’s tomb, I knew she wasn’t in the ground. There were a series of what looked like tiny high-rise apartments for the dead, each with a plaque on the front and a small vase for flowers. Not knowing where she might be, I just started scanning the names. Truman Capote and Joanna Carson were together in one vault. The drummer, Buddy Rich was in another.

Then, around a corner, there were two marble fronts that were more of a pinkish color than the rest of the beige ones. There was Marilyn. Red lipstick kisses covered the front of hers. Perhaps washing them off is what’s given her marker its reddish hue. The other pinkish vault, right to her left was… Hugh Hefner’s.

Both of their vases had white orchids in them. I have to say, seeing Hefner right there was slightly horrifying. Hasn’t poor Marilyn Monroe been through enough without her having to spend eternity lying next to the man who put her nude photos out there for the world to see? Maybe more than anyone, he managed to take a, by all accounts, intelligent, charismatic, and talented woman and turn her into an object. He was, of course, only one of many who would do the same, but seriously, out of everybody on the planet, she’s now stuck next to HIM?

There’s a story that the guy who’s slotted into the vault above hers stipulated that he be interred facedown over Marilyn rather than with his back and butt to her. Great. Even in death, she’s surrounded by misogynistic horny old men who are looking down at her as nothing more than a sexual plaything.

I decided I’d had enough and made my way back to the parking structure, With a few hours of daylight left, I went to the Getty Museum where there was a special exhibit on the work of Camille Claudel. Claudel was the sculptor August Rodin’s protégée. Despite being widely admired in some artistic circles, she never managed to escape Rodin’s shadow during her lifetime. Suffering from mental illness, she spent the last thirty years of her life in obscurity committed by her family to an asylum.

Finally, her work is being rediscovered and its value recognized. She is being given a place in the pantheon of the Western world’s great artists. Her sculptures, while they are certainly evocative of Rodin’s are something else entirely. There is a heart and humanity imbued in them that gives them an unmistakable power. I am grateful for having been able to see them.

The thing about traveling is that you always learn something. The experience of reading about Marilyn’s grave and seeing pictures of it, paled in comparison to that of standing in front of it. Until I saw it in that tiny cemetery, I didn’t realize that Hefner was right beside her. Then seeing the Claudel exhibit only reinforced what I had been thinking about the tragic plights of these incredibly accomplished women.

The guy in San Pedro who built the houses on the bluff of land that eventually gave way clearly didn’t do enough research. It was hubris on his part to think that the clay-based land he was building on would be strong enough to withstand the forces of nature. I even wonder about the rest of the houses that stand nearby.

Did that developer care that he’d put all those people’s lives in danger? People using people. It was a theme of my day.

It was great to have some time in L.A. It was also a bit of a surprise. I had thought I was getting together with some friends for a meal only to find out that they couldn’t make it. We’ve rescheduled for when they are in New York in a week or so, so that’s all good.

I might be approaching the end of my interest in making theatre, but I don’t see any end to my interest in traveling. If I haven’t been there before, I’m going. If nobody wants to go with me, I’m going on my own.

There’s always something new out there to see. And nothing but being there, breathing the air, feeling the textures, and seeing the whole picture ever fully does a place justice.