Eight Views of Actors In Their Dressing Rooms

Well, I'm back from the trip to LA. Actually, we've been back several days now, but I'm finally getting around to making an entry. This is why people use blog readers instead of going and checking manually over and over, right?

Sunday we went to Dark Delicacies straight from the airport, and the place was PACKED. They gave me a number and it was number 58 and they were on number 18 and calling one person every several minutes to go up to the tables they had set up and I dunno...smell stuff, buy stuff...whatever they were doing I couldn't even tell. So we browsed through the skull motif purses, hats, shirts, sunglasses, underwear and jewelry for a while and perused the ginormous horror movie selection but it was totally not "our kind of place" and then we decided we'd be better off getting lunch and coming back. Like maybe they'd not even have gotten to number 58 by then.

So we ate at Vegan Plate in Studio City and it was so delicious that we went back there again for lunch on Monday. Well, because it was delicious AND because we tried to eat on the Queen Mary but they had a long wait and because the restaurant isn't far from the tv studios.

Coming back to Dark Delicacies we found there was NO line any more. I guess they had sold out of some stuff by then but I didn't really know what they had in the first place so I didn't really miss it. I had free reign to smell all the different scents with no lines and no pressure, just the nagging thought that my bf was totally and completely bored. Most of the scents didn't excite me too much and I just ended up getting Eight Views of Actors In Their Dressing Rooms and PPGC456, both prototypes that I guess aren't available anywhere else, and they threw in a bunch of samples which was pretty cool. I read somewhere that some room sprays were supposed to have been available, but I didn't see anything like that.

I can't believe all the fantastic restaurants in the area! After we checked into our hotel (the one in downtown LA where Arnold the Governator rode a horse in the elevator in some movie) we went to have dinner at a mostly-raw restaurant called "Cru", which was pretty cool (and tasty, too!) but didn't serve wine. They do allow you to bring your own in, and there is even a liquor store down the street, but we decided to have a green smoothie instead. So we could have had wine, but instead we had some scary green goo made with kale and bananas and stuff. It wasn't bad! Then the waiter told us there was a wine bar just a few blocks away, but we somehow ended up driving for miles and miles down Sunset Blvd until we FINALLY made our way back to the wine bar to find it was closed.

Soooo...we went to the lounge at the top of our hotel. It's one of those rotating places, so we sipped wine that is normally $11 a bottle at Whole Foods for $11 a glass as we rotated around the top of our hotel towers while a few blocks away glamorous people were getting out of the Grammys and looking for their glamorous after parties.

Monday I decided a trip to the Fashion District to buy fabric was a bad idea because I wasn't prepared. I didn't know what I wanted or where I wanted to go. Instead we took a short trip to Long Beach and the Queen Mary, then had lunch at Vegan Plate again, then made our way to the set of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. That was pretty fun...or at least it's easy to get this weird semi-false sense that you are having fun as you are trained and then recorded laughing and clapping on cue. My bf said they panned the audience from the back, and you can see the back of my head, but I must have missed that part, and our flight was delayed so we didn't even get home in time to watch or tape the show. We got to see Glen Campbell sing Rhinestone Cowboy and one other song, that was pretty cool, he was nice and he had his daughter and two sons up there playing with him. And of course Craig was very funny, and he said on camera "the audience wrangler just said only applause, hold your chuckles" and they cut to a shot of the "audience wrangler" in the aisle near us as he made a joke about what "holding your chuckles" might mean.

Finally after losing our souls in the great Hollywood machine, we decided to find a wine bar. It wasn't easy but we finally found one that I thought was just about the coolest wine bar EVAR and that my bf found rather horrifying, which I think illustrated pretty well the area in which our tastes differ. The place was pretty close to looking like a dive bar crossed with a bordello and had Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation playing on the tv. They served several kinds of microbrew beers and one red and one white wine and I think that's it, but because the Pinot Noir they served was pretty good IMO, *I* was happy there. Or I would have been if it'd been at least 5 degrees warmer and if my bf hadn't been so miserable.

Finally we went to a tapas place, which wasn't vegan or anything but they were totally chill about finding us something vegan to eat. I mean, not just finding us something, but without even having to question us about what vegan means or think much about it at all, like they are quite comfortable dealing with different dietary requirements. So that was nice.

I was thinking how great the restaurants in LA are, with their delicious menus and chill but friendly staff and stuff and feeling kind of envious, but then Thursday night we went out to Tamarine, our favorite Palo Alto restaurant, here in the Bay Area, and we love the food and they always prepare the dishes vegan for us and the all the bartenders are totally chill and this time we talked to a couple that was mostly vegetarian and we got along really well with them and found we've read a lot of the same books and stuff like that and we met another woman who talked to us and then we saw her again afterwards at The Wine Room (also in Palo Alto) and met some more new people at The Wine Room and saw some old favorites, and I just thought "who needs LA when we've got the Bay Area?"