O, Come All Ye Flirtatious Liars

It's officially Christmas Eve.

I'm still not sure if I'm ready to believe that this is actually true, that it's really December 24th, but all signs point to yes.

Besides, there were actually carolers outside my local Trader Joe's last night. They were singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" while standing outside by the shopping carts. They were singing in Latin. And yours truly knows all the words in both English and Latin. So I took my worst. singing. voice. ever. self over there and joined in with them.

"Adeste fidelis, laeti triumphantes
Venite, venite in Bethlehem
Natum videte, regem angelorum
Venite adoremus, venite adoremus
Venite adoremus, dominum."

Gosh, I haven't sung that in ages! Love it! But, I have to tell you, five seconds into it, I began imagining other shoppers saying, "Betty, I didn't know black people knew Latin. Did you?"

Or at least that's what I thought someone would say until a woman grabbed a shopping cart and growled to her friend, "I can't stand all this Christmas-y, Jesus s*%t! It's everywhere!"

Um, yeah, because Christmas is, like, tomorrow, dummy. But whatever, I'll just blame her grinchiness on PMS. Or hunger.

No kidding, she looked like she could use a sandwich... and a Norman Vincent Peale book.

Seriously, she really does need to think on the bright side. I mean, even the most serious atheist Angeleno has to be thrilled about how awesome traffic was this weekend. It was wonderfully light because everyone's headed back to whatever hole in the wall they're originally from. They'll have a nice Christmas dinner and try to avoid awkward conversations with their relatives about how their movie career isn't quite taking off the way they'd planned but no, that wasn't them in that porn magazine, no matter what Uncle Cutty says.

Speaking of movies, I went on a date with my eldest son on Saturday morning to check out National Treasure: Book of Secrets. We went to the 9:45 AM show because there was no way I was paying $12.75 a ticket to see that film. I was all about the matinee price of $8.75 and the matinee is only the first showing on the weekends.

As far as the film itself, the best performance hands down goes to Nicolas Cage's lacefront wig. I'm serious, it was rather entertaining to watch his hair bounce and shake during all the action sequences. I honestly don't get why he doesn't just say it loud, "I'm bald and I'm proud!" After all, we all know he hasn't had that much hair since forever.

Anyway, after the movie, I dragged my son into Anthropologie. He clearly wanted to die but I gave him my stern mommy face and told him there were, "Cute things on sale."

I fingered some blue and white dessert plates but quickly got distracted by someone speaking loudly en Francais. I turned, and a few feet away from me a thirty-something white guy was talking with two very attractive black women.

The gist of their conversation was that one of the women hadn't seen him in awhile and wondered how he was doing and where he'd been. This woman did most of the talking and literally purred, "We should get together soon. I've missed you." I caught her hand brushing the lapel on his jacket. He agreed in a sly, seductive tone that indeed, they should.

I thought nothing else of this rather obvious flirtation until I was standing in the incredibly long, snake-shaped checkout line trying to entertain my morbidly bored son. Suddenly, I heard a rather harsh voice say, "What were you talking to those black women about?"

I looked up and saw a rather annoyed looking blond addressing the same guy who'd been talking to the two women.

He played it super coy with his response. "What women?"

She didn't falter though, and she certainly didn't whisper. "Those two black women you were talking to."

I was immediately all eyes and ears. This was going to get interesting. This was what holiday shopping is about: eavesdropping on people!

He shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly, arrogantly, and said, "Oh, those women I said hi to?"

She nodded, waiting for his explanation, her HUGE diamond ring glinting in the light.

"Oh they were nobody," he drawled. "The one was a secretary at the office and then, poof, she just disappeared one day." He waved his hand like he was a magician performing a trick.

Then he changed the subject and asked her about what she was buying and whether she wanted him to put it on his card. or not.

She did want him to put it on his card.

A part of me (the insane part) wanted to yell out, "Take it from this black woman that he's LYING and he's about to go have hot, tantric sex later on tonight with that other woman!"

But another part of me wanted to just laugh uncontrollably. Now that I think about it, I suppose it was his superior demeanor coupled with her complete inability to whisper. I wonder what Christmas carols they sing at home, "O, Come All Ye Flirtatious Liars"?

Perhaps the carolers should sing that rousing tune outside the Trader Joe's instead. I wonder if anyone would complain.

A Rarity

Yesterday, I saw things that I almost never see in Los Angeles. No, not concrete freeways and not the BMW in this picture. I see both of those all the time.

Look past the car, past the concrete, above the overpass...what do you see there?

"Just some mountains," you say?

Well, let me tell you, I drive home on the northbound 110 Freeway every day and I rarely see those mountains. It was so clear in Los Angeles yesterday that it was an event worth talking about. Everyone I spoke to was exclaiming, "Wow, can you believe how clear it is?" Yeah, who knew those mountains were there. It was so pretty that I found myself thinking about what the original group of thirteen that founded Los Angeles over 300 years ago must have seen.

Yes, it was so clear that I could see downtown LA from Compton, eleven miles to the south. That NEVER happens. Usually, I can't see downtown until I'm two or three miles away. And then, for those of you who want it all, you want to ski in the morning and go to the beach in the afternoon...I could see snow capped mountains to the east. I could see the mountains in this photo from Watts. I took it while standing on the playground of a school. You all should have seen the kids pointing at the mountains and the snow. I overheard one kindergartener ask another, "Where did those mountains come from?" The other replied, "What's that on top of them?"

What do we usually see instead? Why, absolutely nothing but some pinkish-brown haze in the sky. I like to say that haze is just some fog that hasn't burned off yet. Except that I see that haze almost every single day, no matter what time of day it is. I guess I need to tack an "S" and an "M" onto the beginning of "fog" and get rid of that pesky "F". I think we all know what that spells, right?

If you follow the news at all, you know that Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth won a well-deserved Oscar this past Sunday. I saw it last May, almost a year ago, and wrote about it here. Everybody thinks it's a great film but we all still want the magic pill to make the smog go away.

I wonder if LA will every reclaim her true beauty. I wonder if twenty years from now, folks like me will still be snapping pictures of sights like this, sights they rarely see.