How a Hollywood cynic began to believe that dreams really do come true [sic]
When it comes to the hordes who pack up their cars and move to Los Angele
s, I like to think that I don’t fit the cliché. A year ago, I decided to make a change and move out of the San Francisco Bay Area—and my parents’ comfortable suburban home. L.A. offered the same good food, the weather, the politics that I couldn’t stand to leave. Best of all, I didn’t have to change my license plates.
Really, it was just an exercise in laziness.
I carried the typical NorCal resident’s cynicism for anything Hollywood, and I came here with no desire to see my name in lights. I don’t have a screenplay to sell. Getting into the hottest club isn’t my ultimate goal in life. Somehow, I thought this would be evident soon enough; that I’d get a steady job and join the throngs of regular people sitting on the freeway on our ways to work. I’d put the same amount of thought into a place to live—after all, I’m the type who drives my car down Rodeo Drive even though it rattles and is missing a side mirror. Something nice and comfortable, no matter the ZIP code, would suit me just fine.
They said that it couldn’t be done. Or, rather, that it shouldn’t.
I’d always known that at least on a relative scale, my family was doing all right. My parents came from different economic backgrounds—my mother was the only daughter of a wealthy small-town doctor while my dad was one of five kids in a working-class neighborhood—but both were college graduates who worked hard to create the suburban enclave where my brother and I grew up. Those varied backgrounds sometimes clashed when it came to relatively small matters like after-school jobs, but we were never overly indulged. In contrast to some of my peers, I got a hand-me-down minivan when I turned 16 instead of a souped-up sports car, and my parents only grudgingly allowed me my own phone in my teenage years while friends of mine had their own home entertainment centers.
There may not be a more perfect pastry on God’s green earth than red velvet cake. With its rich body accompanied by tangy cream cheese frosting—not to mention the larger-than-life color—red velvet manages to appeal to pretty much everyone. You need no further proof of that than bakeries specializing in gourmet cupcakes cropping up across Los Angeles and New York City, where red velvet has joined vanilla and chocolate among the classics. Reworking the decadent old-South recipe into a form that reminds busy big-city residents of their long-forgotten childhoods seems to have struck a nerve—or at least a taste bud. I’ve seen the resurgence attributed to the 1988 film Steel Magnolias, with its famous armadillo-shaped red velvet groom’s cake, or the 2002 nuptials of Nick Lachey to Jessica Simpson in her native Texas. While both have long since faded into the cultural landscape, perhaps it’s appropriate that the surging interest in a longtime Southern tradition counts the two largest cities in the U.S. as ground zero.
