I flew from Salt Lake City into LAX for a conference yesterday. I am currently ensconced in a hotel near enough to the airport that I can hear jets taking off and landing pretty much constantly. Like the monkey house at the zoo I found this offensive to my senses at first but have now adapted.
The interesting thing about my flight yesterday was its timing. Due to Sundance , and the fact that it was a Monday morning flight from SLI to LAX, the plane was stuffed to the gills with (apparently) Hollywood types.
Despite this, the closest I came to a brush with fame on the plane was to bumble past a person who I am 99% sure was Octavia Spencer, from the Help. Many seemed to be media industry cogs of one kind or another. It's worth noting that I have never been in a better-dressed coach section of a flight in my life.
I cracked open Grant Morrison's Supergods to while away the brief flight (about 90 minutes). My aisle-mates were quiet and mellow - pretty much the perfect travel companion strangers - but across the aisle from me sat two men and one woman who together constituted the highest concentration of @ssholedom that I have ever experienced.
As soon as they were seated, the Three Douches (as I began to think of them) starting yakking it up. The guy on the left was some sort of producer - the guy on the right an agent. The woman seated between them was an @sshole by pure coincidence because she is actually in sports medicine and works in Toronto. Why do I know all this? Because the Three Douches bleated their bona fides to the rafters and bragged as loudly as possible the entire way to LA.
The agent chatted up the woman by demonstrating his thorough knowledge of professional tennis and what so-and-so and such-and-such could do to improve their game. The producer mainly stuck to shop talk, "talk" being code for "name-dropping."
Finally we arrived at LAX, deplaned, and once we were past the boarding gates, I witnessed literally a dozen chauffeurs, all dressed in black and standing so stock-still that they might have been wax figures or cardboard cutouts (each held a sign with their client's name on it). When the baggage arrived, I witnessed a kid - probably younger than 23 or 24 - literally throw a huge, heavy bag off of the carousel directly at his hapless driver, who received it with a grunt and quietly began to haul it to the car.
LA, baby! Or, to be charitable to the vast majority of Angelinos, Hollywood, baby!
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
ReplyDelete