My Own Private Los Angeles

Thinking about LA today. Funny how memory works. Winter is ending here in the Mountain West. And the warm weather brings back memories of that place where it never gets cold.

I half grew up there. My dad lived there, but my mom moved to another state. But they had joint custody. I mostly lived with mom, but every long weekend and every holiday break would be with dad in Beverly Hills.

His LA was a different place. When I was a kid in the 80s, he and his WW2 generation friends were the twilight of old Hollywood. Those people are all gone now, and that LA gone too.

The Jews of Beverly Hills have long since been displaced by Persians, and others. And Jews, like my dad and his friends, don't run Hollywood anymore. The studio execs and the agents and the lawyers and all the workaday industry people (like me) are a diverse bunch now. I can't help but think that's part of the reason for Hollywood's decline.