We've seen the way the other side lives!
We travelled through Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Bel Air today peeking through gates and over fences to see how you'd cut your grass and paint your walls if you'd made billions of dollars out of the entertainment industry. We've discretely invaded the lives of luminaries such as Jodie Foster, Simon Cowell, Janet Jackson and Madonna. We've swung by the homes of Ozzie Osbourne, Dr. Phil, Sylvester Stallone and Kiefer Sutherland. We've identified the scenes of the crimes of Englishmen Hugh Grant and George Michael and Americans Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Michael Richards. We saw where Brad Pitt used to serve chicken dressed as poultry and where Hugh Heffner invites young hopefuls. We drove by the 123 room home of Aaron Spelling and the hilltop mansion of Steven Spielberg.
In our defence, this voyeurism was carried out in the company of a mini-bus load of tourists and our part-time tour guide and full time photographer (he took the picture above) - a man utterly frustrated by the way stakerazzi (paparazzi who sit outside your home all day) give the profession a bad name. The company he works for has two full time private investigators on its books to update their database of movie star addresses so they can take folks like us around to their place uninvited.
All good fun though.
Without the aid of a tour guide or indeed anything other than curiosity we found, on our own, three important landmarks from the movie Pretty Woman. We found the apartment block down the fire escape of which Julia Roberts was carried by Richard Gere in the film's climax. We found Boulmiche - the top class clothes store from which Ms Roberts' character was ejected. We ventured (almost) into the lobby of the Beverly Wiltshire, the hotel where Mr Gere's character took Ms Robert's character for, eh, business. We photographed all our steps along the trail of this merger of the oldest profession, the traditional fairytale and modern America.
And Hollywood, indeed LA and California is very much modern America. To the extreme. Anything older than 20 years (we exaggerate, but not too much) is listed as historical. 1900 is ancient. No other city shows as cearly the difference between the energetic wanna-be, the talented gonna-be and the sad has-been. Make or break! That guy giving the tour wants to be a feature on the tour. The guy serving ice cream just needs another chance.
Speaking of ice-cream, at lunchtime today we overindulged on sundaes with the following contents. I kid you not! Vanilla ice cream. Chocolate ice-cream. Cream. Hot fudge sauce. Chocolate sauce. Gummie bears. Sickeningly delicious. Way too big. Irresistible.
Apart from the above, we saw all the more traditional sights. We walked up and down Rodeo Drive and if you look very closely, you can see the world-famous Hollywood sign above Ruth's head in the photo above.
