Summer '98
You know the old saying, you can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but you can't take Brooklyn out of the.... Well, this past summer, Brooklyn was temporarily excised or perhaps exorcised from me. I spent nearly two months on the West Coast, mostly in Los Angeles. Since I have been out West at least a half a dozen times before, I avoided all tourist attractions and tried to pretend that I was a native. Not an easy job.
I went to two concerts in LA. I heard Peter Himmelman sing at McCabe's guitar shop in Santa Monica. It was possibly the best and longest Himmelman concert I have ever attended and I've been to lots. Santa Monica is loaded with both aging and nouveau hippies who are mostly kind and creative and refreshingly real. It was a completely different sort of crowd from a typical Manhattan Himmelman audience. I also went to hear the Doobie Brothers at the House of Blues, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the old Ritz in New York City. There are no seats at the HOB, like the Ritz, and the crowd gets into the music in an almost religious way. Although the Doobies were quite good, I realize that I am getting way too old for these kinds of things. Thinking that you are too old for anything is a sad kind of realization, unless you put an optimistic twist on it and see it as maturity. Yeah, that's it.

I spent ten days in San Diego, visiting a friend who just moved to Pacific Beach. Once again, I avoided all the tourist traps. We did manage to squeeze in an afternoon of hang-gliding at Torrey Pines in La Jolla, which isn't scary once you've actually leapt off the cliff. San Diego is a beautiful city, with a personality that is more like Northern California than Southern.

It's nice to try on a different pace and lifestyle every now and then. When I came back to Brooklyn, I didn't feel completely at home until someone cut me in line at the cleaners. A little dose of rudeness is sort of New York's way of saying welcome home.

Wanna see what I did last summer? Ciao.