Food, Folks, and WTF?!? What I'll miss most about LA

This past summer, my wife and I returned to Chicago after a couple of fairly eventful years in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, CA. (Among the events: becoming husband and wife, thank you very much.) We were often too busy to get out and fully indulge in all delights and terrors that LA offers. Perhaps it was for the best. But the fact that my wife's family remains in the area gives us several good reasons for return visits.

As a Midwesterner, LA alternately enchanted, amused, irritated, and terrified me. I readily admit that I'm very glad to be back in Chicago, and in the Midwest generally. But I will also own up to a certain nostalgia for SoCal, for certain favorite things. You will find an annotated and hyperlinked list of them below for your amusement and/or enlightenment.


Lay of the Land

• I loved having mountains on all sides for scenery and for recreation, especially the Santa Susanas behind my mother-in-law's house.
• Living just over the hill from Hollywood, kitsch was a marked feature of the terrain: from the Brady Bunch House to the site of Spears-Federline wedding to the humming engines of "the Industry," all within blocks of our apartment.
• I also enjoyed interacting with the wildlife, especially stalking western fence lizards.
• After enduring a couple of blasts of desert summer heat, I came to relish "June gloom," when the damp marine clouds crept over the Santa Monica mountains.
• Even now, I am still floored by the incongruous and superabundant flora--pine trees surrounded by bougainvillea on the same block as decorative citrus trees. (How can you let those damn oranges rot on your lawns, people?)

Remembrance of Repasts
Though I'm not a real foodie like my wife and her family, I really enjoyed having every kind of exotic cuisine (made by people from there--and their Mexican cooks) a short drive away. Just a few highlights:

• "Sushi Gulch": our strip of Ventura Blvd and a favorite star hangout, where every other building serves Japanese food. Our favorites were Tama, Cio-Cio San, and Daichan.
• Zankou Chicken in any of its locations. You could go to Carousel in Glendale for high-class Middle Eastern cuisine, but you won't get Armenian chicken (and bright yellow shirts!) to go.
• Wat Thai LA's weekend Thai food bazaar (two words: knom krok).
• Asian markets (Galleria for Korean and Mitsuwa for Japanese food), where white people like me can almost be certain of what we're getting--but it's usually tasty.
• How could I forget? In-n-Out!
  

Espectáculos (or Guilty Pleasures)

• It particularly tickled me to run into familiar faces in the course of my everyday existence--spotting Clancy in his classic convertible, standing behind Walter at the bank, bumping into Steve in a museum, and watching MJ's dad go through the x-ray at LAX.
• Living treasure Huell Howser: did that Simpsons roast make sense to anyone outside of CA?
• Hal Fishman, legend, anchorman. Tell me he is not the model for Kent Brockman.
• Apocalyptic local news: Fire! Flood! Quake! Car chase! Immigrants!
• 6 Spanish and 2 Asian channels over the free airwaves. When I was unemployed and cat-sitting, I got my RDA of Korean soaps, Mexican courtroom shows, and Japanese cooking competitions.
• The SoCal hothouse for all flavors of eccentricity--the Church of Scientology, the Integratron, the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

We'll still have similar kinds of good things in Illinois. We can, thanks to our automotive accoutrement, persist in the Trader Joes/IKEA lifestyle (with all apologies to Sandra Tsing Loh). For that matter, there are still ethnic goodies to be had. Just not in the same abundance, or with the same atmosphere.

Postscript:
My first day in LA, my now-wife, then-girlfriend and I went to get groceries in the Studio City Trader Joe's. We found ourselves surrounded by obvious entertainment types (and probably wannabes; I still can't tell 'em apart). Noticing my Minnesota license plate t-shirt, the clerk chortled "Welcome to LA...now get out!" We all laughed.

Well, you got it, dude. Never meant to stay.