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I went to two doctors today, both for minor reasons. Both at Newport Center.
These doctors' offices are full of very old, tremulously decrepit white men in cheerful retirement clothing. They're in aloha shirts and khaki shorts and running shoes, slowly dying.
The parking lot has a very low clearance. This results in comedy with SUVs. One patient made it in driving a Suburban; another with slightly larger tires did not, providing a condensed symbol of the Californian relationship with cars and a satisfying crunchy noise.
The pharmaceutical rep in the waiting room was qualified as a fashion model: almost six foot, slender, leggy, cheekboned and coiffed. Thieves and murderers always send out the best courtesans.
I did not buy the pigurines in the pharmacy window.
Some time in the late 1980s I was in Westwood Village, which is the part of L.A. just south of UCLA. It had been a big entertainment district, the place to be on Friday and Saturday Night, but was in a steep decline. Most of the fancy stores and restaurants had gone, things were dirty, and most of the pedestrians were lost souls. I was among them, since I was taking the bus from my unsuccessful psychotherapist back to my grimy Hollywood apartment.
It was maybe 9 pm, cold and blustery, and the first drops of rain were moistening the blowing trash so it stuck to people and objects unpleasantly. Coming up towards the bus stop, I came upon this scene:
In the doorway to an office building, one of the local homeless poor had set up camp. He was about 35, dressed in what had once been a decent suit which was torn and stained and shedding buttons. He himself had a mop of blonde hair and a dirty face wreathed in a joyous smile. He had a boom box going full blast and was singing along lustily, with a cap on the ground in hopes that someone would reward this piece of impromptu street karaoke.
The song he was performing? Barry Manilow's 1976 hit "Looks Like We Made It".
I still wonder about that guy. He certainly wasn't seeing the dingy, damp, urban failure in front of him, or the RTD bus or the other bums or me in my jeans & jacket & backpack looking at him in horror. He was in heaven, maybe onstage in Vegas. Maybe he even was Barry. Looks like we maaaaaaaade it! I wonder what happened to him?
It was maybe 9 pm, cold and blustery, and the first drops of rain were moistening the blowing trash so it stuck to people and objects unpleasantly. Coming up towards the bus stop, I came upon this scene:
In the doorway to an office building, one of the local homeless poor had set up camp. He was about 35, dressed in what had once been a decent suit which was torn and stained and shedding buttons. He himself had a mop of blonde hair and a dirty face wreathed in a joyous smile. He had a boom box going full blast and was singing along lustily, with a cap on the ground in hopes that someone would reward this piece of impromptu street karaoke.
The song he was performing? Barry Manilow's 1976 hit "Looks Like We Made It".
I still wonder about that guy. He certainly wasn't seeing the dingy, damp, urban failure in front of him, or the RTD bus or the other bums or me in my jeans & jacket & backpack looking at him in horror. He was in heaven, maybe onstage in Vegas. Maybe he even was Barry. Looks like we maaaaaaaade it! I wonder what happened to him?
Beep! click click click
Aug. 21st, 2005 02:43 am![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ch linked me to this marvelous antidrug filmstrip from the 1970s. I have so many memories of filmstrips from my grammar school education. To start with they were the bastard stepchild of movies, which we all loved. On a Friday afternoon we'd hope for a movie. At a minimum there would be entertaining footage of animals or cool science stuff, and if we were lucky we'd convince the teacher to play the movie backwards when it was done for double the movie time and the unstoppable belly laughs we got from watching birds walk in reverse, etc. But if the filmstrip projector came out, we were getting second best. Someone would have to thread the filmstrip into the machine and then help out by pressing the advance button.
Filmstrips were always about the most boring topic available. I remember seeing one about Where Borax Comes From, several detailing How the Indians Ground Up Corn With Rocks, a whole series on How Erosion and Silt Change Our World, and maybe fifty different social science filmstrips about How Some People Live in Big Buildings and Others In Little Huts and related topics.
But the most frequent use of filmstrips was to tell us things the teachers didn't want to discuss. The nearest we got to sex education, for example, was an extremely medical strip about How Your Bodies Are Changing Now That You're 12 Or So, with terrifying closeups of peach fuzz stubble and line art of Your Head With Squiggly Red Lines Signifying Emotional Stress. There were separate filmstrips for girls and boys. It was incomprehensible. And of course the drugs ones. I'm not sure I saw this particular drug filmstrip, but we had several on Not Taking Stuff From Big Kids Because It Makes Question Marks Fly Out Your Nose, also known as If You Light Something On Fire and Put It In Your Mouth, You'll Grow a Leather Jacket and Die in a Car Crash.
I think nowadays teachers put in a videotape and dive under their desks when bad topics arise. But to this day when I hear an old antidrug speech I immediately go to that crappy narrator voice wobbling along with the tape, the piercing beep, and the hum of the fan on the filmstrip machine.
One day the teacher left it on too long on one frame while she explained something and the film caught fire. We all had to go outside while the Fire Department came to check it out. I got a face full of burning plastic film smoke and I was light headed for the rest of the day. Drugs are bad!
