(My writing workshop prompt today was to write about a city that we love or loved or meant much to us. So this is what i wrote. Since I’m committed to writing a memoir, this will fit in to some chapter and fleshed out later! Enjoy my substack friends! and let me you’re there!
Hollywood Da Da Da Da Da Da Da Hollywood...
Hollywood was where it was all happening when I was teenager and it was soon to be mine. Sherman Oaks was not. Sherman Oaks was the upper middle-class section of the Valley, where I lived with my parents and I went to school. It was where I was consistently fleeing once I experienced Hollywood.
Looking back, I can see that the direction my life took, which led me to cross that border between life and a dull death of spirit, happened relatively quickly. It began in my middle school years, in the early 60s. It happened without me even knowing it was happening one night at a sleepover with friends at someone’s house in the foothills close enough to Hollywood that I could feel my pulse becoming more rapid. We were playing with a Ouija Board. It was my turn. I asked the question uppermost in my mind and heart, “Who will I marry?” My hand, lightly covered by the other girls’ hands so as not to control the outcome, was guided by spirit to a D. And then, suspensefully, it crept across the board to an O., where it hovered, rested, and finally moved along to N. and stopped. We all screamed, DON. I was going to marry someone named Don. I didn’t know any boy named Don, but now I see it was a metaphor, just misspelled. I was starting to wake up and be done with the life I had worked so hard to construct up to that point-- always trying to fit in, wanting to be liked, to be the same so as not to banned from the group. I was beginning to see how shallow and phony these same girls were that I had so wanted to like me, to accept me. I had become as shallow and phony as them. I hadn’t yet realized we were all doing the same thing which was concretizing ourselves into lives none of us should have really wanted, if only we had woken up earlier. We were all trying to fit in to what we had been conditioned to be. We had all been being melded into the prescribed roles our culture expected of us -- to be nice girls, fun, likable, pretty; to want to be the appendages of boys, shadows beside them as they excelled; good girls who would be chosen to become wives eventually; nice girls on the outside, but definitely not cock-teasers, which we’d be called if we didn’t give in. We knew the rules. We knew what was expected of us. We knew what we were supposed to be like and in the process of so doing, we were beginning to lose the scent of our true selves. I could feel it. We were thinning ourselves, grooming ourselves, boxing ourselves up into the prescribed roles we were told we needed to be to as not to be banished from the group. We were supposed to move together as one, like slime mold. We were phonies. But this sickening, spirit-killing conformist behavior would soon no longer be possible for me to tolerate. Just how my soul leapt off that Ouija Board that night and smelled my liberation coming, I don’t know. But it did.
My first forays into Hollywood with a couple my friends were motivated by our intense longing to meet our idols, The Rolling Stones. By now, I was friends with a whole different group of girls. We wore black, and were called Freaks, and were not popular.
The Rolling Stones had just put out their first record in the US. God knows how we discovered they were staying at the Roosevelt Hotel that day, but we did, and we were going to try to meet them. Ditching school was easy back then. We’d just write notes and sign our mother’s names, turning them in the next day, and no one suspected a thing. We snuck out at lunch time. We were to meet one of the girl’s aunts, who she’d gotten to drive. ser name was Sharon and she was as excited as we were, which perplexed me. Sharron was a married woman, and I couldn’t understand how someone married and her age would be so excited to do this with us. Now, in hindsight, I can imagine she was bored stiff and lonely in her San Fernando Valley life as a young married woman. Anyway, she was driving, and we were going.
We were so excited as her car wound through Laurel Canyon where we saw houses on stilts sitting precariously over the steep hillsides. I felt like those houses looked, dangerously hanging over my own cliff as we passed the Country Mart where we saw young women in jeans, feathered hats, and crocheted shawls and long-haired guys with guitars. We were itching to get there already but we’d already arrived in this new land, so different from our day to day lives.
Finally, we arrived at the hotel, parked, and went in as though we were guests. I Nancy Drewed a way to figure out which room the Stones were staying in, probably, by telling a housecleaner I was Mick’s niece or something like that. When we found their room, no one answered their door. But there was a breakfast cart outside it with trays of half-eaten food full of booty: Spoons, forks, used napkins, little salt and pepper shakers which we believed they must have touched with their very own hands. We pocketed what we found and slipped away before being caught. Next, we drove to Capitol Records, where we believed they were recording. We drove into the underground parking lot and found a convertible car with the top down and rummaged through it, believing it might be theirs. We searched the car for any papers which might prove it belonged to them or their producer. In the darkness of those days, touching anything that we believed belonged to our idols was what kept us alive, kept us going. Otherwise, what we were living through day after day was just dead meat. That same year, 1964, in December, I would succeed in meeting Mick Jagger.
Now I really didn’t belong to any group per se Linda, but I was the first kid in 10th grade to come to school one day wearing paisley pants! The girls all loved them, and using my Liverpool English accent ~ I soon become a favorite amongst them! Most of the guys at our school were what we called greasers back then, but we had a few hip kids per say ~ Those who smoked pot and loved the music back then… I loved sports, but like some many others back in the day, I found myself getting more involved with the kids who smoked, drank, and partied after school for the nest couple of school years! As life would have it, I eventually had to get a serious job, and start thinking about the future!
This made me laugh so much Linda Wolf. Another connection we have. I am totally going to share this. I was kicked out of The Brownies and Bluebirds. I have just never been a conformist. And used to beat the shit out of the Boys. What has hurt me the worse are women and their fucking set ups. One of the stories was the worse that happened on the Internet and were nothing but terrible LIES LIES LIES and more LIES. They even created a group to bad rap me. When I had one staying here for nothing. I didn't realize what she was doing behind my back. FREAKY for sure. We have a party coming up and they are Artistas. I'm not going to take any shit and am practicing walking away from them. And no I will never accept an "I'm Sorry" Bullshit. Much LOVE sweetheart.