Hollywood to Home

Joyfully I sat on a stump at the entrance of Camp Wawona, waiting for my grandpa Les to pick me up. In an hour or two, he did, but that was only the beginning of the epic birthday weekend for my father and I, ranging from Hollywood to Disneyland, and eventually bringing me home at last, where I am now writing as I prepare to leave for Spain in two weeks. This weekend was a great delight for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost because of family and food. You may laugh at the last one, but food has recently become very, very important to me as a rare and valuable commodity. Even rarer and more valuable, though, was the family I got to share the weekend's events with.

I almost cried when we got to the hotel. It was so beautiful, and I had nothing to do with its ongoing upkeep. The beds were soft and comfortable, and the furniture matched. It may seem odd that something that simple would strike me so powerfully, but to look at the city of Los Angeles through the window was truly a spiritual experience for me.

The next day we saw a few sights before going to the long-anticipated Hollywood Bowl. A cemetery may seem like a bizarre tourist attraction to start, but Forest Lawn is no normal cemetery. It houses a brilliant stained glass replica of Da Vinci's Last Supper as well as the world's largest painting. I'm not kidding; at 90 ft high by 160 ft wide, the size of this painting is truly staggering. My father and I, suddenly struck by an inspiration, decided to track down the grave of the famous Walt Disney. Despite rumors that he is frozen beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, we found his family plot, a rather humble private garden where he, his wife, and his son-in-law are buried. More difficult to track down than Walt Disney, however, was our own relative aunt Lydia. Whereas Walt was easily accessible outdoors, we actually had to be buzzed in to a locked mausoleum and given directions through the winding corridors to find her. She had lived to be over a hundred before she passed away recently, and I can only hope that some of that luck carries over to the rest of us.

From there we visited an excellent vegetarian Chinese Restaurant, The Happy Family, before going over to Griffith Park Observatory. The observatory is a beautiful building, recently restored and outfitted with an entirely new underground floor of exhibits. The new exhibit I appreciate the most down there is a vast wall panel of the stars on ceramic tile, rendered accurately from a satellite image of a patch of the sky no larger than what is covered by a person's thumb looking up at it. I can now say officially that I have been stargazing underground. Coming back outside, the sun was setting beautifully over the famous Hollywood sign, and we made our way over to the Hollywood Bowl for the long-anticipated concert.

John Williams is not just an amazing composer, but a very charismatic, personable musician in live performance as well. It is one thing to half-listen to his internationally famous Olympic Fanfare while the sports are being shown on television; it is another thing entirely to be there in a live concert hall, feeling the kind of energy that many trumpets produce. Amazing, too, is the way that 18,000 people can become so silent so quickly in awe of such genius. I've been to Bay Area knock-offs of the Hollywood Bowl experience, but none of them quite equal the sheer spectacle of outdoor performance done right. The LA Philharmonic may not come close to matching the San Francisco Symphony in musical perfection, but when they play, their audiences listen with much more rapt attention than I've ever heard the San Francisco Symphony receive in even a closed concert hall.

A special guest to the program that evening was the director and choreographer of the immortal classic film Singin' In the Rain. Listening to this man talk about working with dancers like Gene Kelley and Fred Astaire was fascinating, and the clips shown with the music from these various films filled me with admiration for the old school Hollywood actors who had to be able to sing, dance, and act as triple threats. Between listening to his experiences and hearing so many of John Williams' greatest works performed live, it was a real night to remember.

That alone would have been worth the trip. However, there was still Disneyland the next day.

Disneyland is one of those places which continue to enchant me no matter how many times I visit it. Everything there has a story. Also, they are always building new attractions while refurbishing the old with innovative concepts. I had the privilege of seeing ASIMO, the only robot in the world capable of walking upright on its own. More impressively, it can also run and go up and down stairs; these are movements which were not possible in robotics even five years ago.

Another new attraction worth seeing is in the California Adventure theme park, the Toy Story Midway Madness. It does a beautiful job of combining ride, game, and show technology for a very fun, very interactive experience. It's great to be able to celebrate the introduction of a new attraction like that, but not without some sadness for the old. Let us now spend a moment of silence to mourn the passing of the Golden Dreams film which will be ripped out next week in favor of something slightly more interesting, despite its value as one of the most efficient and moving retellings of California state history I've ever seen. . .

All right. Moment of silence over. It gave me great joy to cross back over to Disneyland and view the fireworks and Fantasmic again. Every time I see Fantasmic, it fills me with great delight and makes me feel like the little girl on Dad's shoulders I used to be. In a good way. Some things are just too cool to be changed much with time, and are still worth coming back to time and time again.

Like home. At the end of a long, 6-hour drive yesterday (which was Dad's birthday--can't believe he's 50 now!), I finally got home to my cats, my room, and the tasks I need to accomplish before leaving for Spain. I am overjoyed to be back, and hope that life is treating all of you well. The next time I write a post, it very well may be from a dorm room in Spain; wish me luck!