Reading Los Angeles

Let's pretend that I'm a Travel Writer.

Los Angeles is an ever-changing Landscape of Huge Signs. Every time I come, I can't wait for Marge to drive me around so I can read them & gauge my mood. 

It's a bit like reading tea leaves, I guess.

Yesterday's reading started out a Little Creepily. Marge bumped me & her brother David off on Wilshire in Brentwood where we caught the Bus that just  appears out of nowhere down to LA County Museum. As I looked out the window, all I could see were ominous signs featuring a dead-like creepy child that said 'Orphan'.  

Quelle Horreur, I thought, or I would have thought if I thought in French. 

Is this a warning , I wondered. And where do you put the question mark in a sentence like that, I also wondered. Perhaps here? Or here?

'Orphan' is one of those words that stand out like Dogs Balls to me. And now I'm wondering about where to put the apostrophe in Dogs. Perhaps at the end of it. 

 Being adopted has given me carte blanche to go Pear-Shaped every time I hear a word that remotely connects to Abandonment. And 'Orphan' spells Abandonment in Big Letters. One of my favourite anecdotes about an Old Hollywood Star concerns Clifton Webb, a clearly gay actor who reached his peak perhaps in the late forties in such Fine Films as 'Laura'  & 'Cheaper by the Dozen'. Perhaps you have never heard of him, so you just have to take my word for it that he was  Fairly-Big  inasmuch as an Slightly Effete Pansy could be back then. Or maybe even now.

Anyway, Clifton was devoted to his Elderly Mother. They lived in Hollywood together & were famous for hosting Legendary Lunches every sunday that all the rich & famous attended. 

Of course Clifton's Mother eventually died & the lunches stopped. It was inevitable. He felt utterly abandoned & never got over it even though Mum was ancient & he was sixty-two. 

From that time, Clifton became known as The World's Oldest Orphan.

I certainly don't want to be like that. 

But then later, Marge picked us up from the Museum & we went driving along Fairfax towards Sunset. I suddenly came across the 'This is My Town'  sign & my mood immediately changed. 

Of course, LA is my town. I'm at home. Kind of.

By the time I came across the 'Do You Grunt?' sign, I was positively kicking back.

And when I discovered 'Hooray', I was euphoric.