2006-05-23 - 8:49 a.m.
It's funny, you know how your thinking can go down certain channels or patterns that serve as limits to your awareness? One of my favorite venues in L.A. is the John Anson Ford Center, an outdoor ampitheater in the Hollywood Hills (across the freeway from the Hollywood Bowl) that is a wonderful place to enjoy jazz or world music, or films outdoors under the stars. Every summer I make sure to attend at least one event there, and if I am lucky, I will get to go to several.
Parking at the Ford isn't all the cheap, really, and they have "stacked" parking, which means that they completely fill up every square foot of space with cars and if you need to leave early for some reason, you are out of luck, because you might have a hundred cars in your way until the end of the performance. That's always been kind of "claustraphobic" for me, but I took advantage of another choice that they offered, parking in a municipal lot off of Cherokee near Hollywood Boulevard and then taking a free shuttle up to the Ford. You still had to pay, but not as much, but this did entail sometimes waiting half an hour or more for the first shuttle, and there was generally a fifteen-minute wait for successive ones. Going back home took longer, as now you had a large crowd of shuttle riders exiting the ampitheater, all wanting to go home.
Last year, they changed the arrangement with parking and the shuttle, moving it away from the Cherokee lot and using, instead, the Red Line (subway) parking lot at Universal City. However, when I attempted to use the shuttle, the driver disagreed as to when he was supposed to start. He expected me to wait an hour, when I wanted to use that hour to eat dinner at the Ford (you can bring a picnic, have box dinners waiting for you, or simply order from their snack bar). Rather than argue with the imbecile (I'd been going to events at the Ford and having dinner there beforehand for the past five years, so I knew how it was supposed to work), I decided to simply park at the Ford (pay the higher price) and put up with the stacked parking. (The stacked parking ended up not being too bad, except for the fact that I met some people in the theater I wanted to stay and talk with afterwards, but then MY car would have been in the way of others, so I couldn't stay and talk with them--the stacked parking, instead of making me stay later than I wanted to, forced me to leave sooner than I wanted to.)
Other than the summer, the Ford is a kind of "void" in my mind, but now that summer is approaching and I know I am going to several events there, I suddenly made the "duh" kind of a realization that I happen to drive by it every morning on my way to work. And slowly but surely it began to dawn on me that the place really wasn't all that far from my apartment. For so long I had been thinking in terms of "half way down Hollywood Boulevard, park in the Cherokee lot, wait half an hour for the shuttle," and so on, never actually tracking in my mind the actual location of the theater "as the crow flies."
I've been trying to increase my exercise walking, so yesterday after work I decided to walk from my apartment to the Ford Theater to see how long it would take and what kind of a walk it would be. TWENTY MINUTES! Boy, now do I feel really stupid. All this time, in less time than it took to wait for the shuttle, I could have been there on my own steam, and completely at my own convenience. And not only that, but I realized that the Hollywood Bowl, too, is just as close (I would just walk a slightly different route to come to that side of the freeway). Although I rarely go to the Hollywood Bowl (being primarily jazz, Brazilian, African, and the like, the music at the Ford interests me more than the Bowl's typical more classical offerings), the fact that I don't go there more is something I always seem to regret for some reason or another. (Maybe it's when I hear those fireworks blasting, I wish that I were there.) I know that parking at the Bowl is such a mess that some people even stoop to taking special busses there, just to avoid that mess. (On Bowl nights, I NEVER take the Highland Avenue freeway exit, but avoid it at all costs.) But my new-found fact that I could simply WALK there in twenty minutes changes the entire picture. Now I view these two places as being right in my own living room.
Because I finally got myself to think out of the mental corridors on this one, this summer, I am going to have balmy evenings filled with outdoor music!
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