The city was eerily ghost-town like, or at least as close as a major city like Los Angeles can be. Although it wasn’t nearly as empty as when we had LA and other freeways to ourselves during March through June of 2020, when we took full advantage of shelter in place policies, no traffic and cheap gas to explore this great country. The second to last week of the year is always one of our favorite times to explore Los Angeles because there’s very little traffic in comparison to the rest of the year.
One of our stops was to Angeleno Wine Company near Chinatown after we stopped by the Dodger store to pickup a baseball cap for the youngster. Angeleno Wine Company produces an extremely limited number (as in merely 336, 375ml bottles) of one of the rarest wines on the planet. This bottling is from grapes from the Ramona Vine planted in 1774 growing at Mission San Gabriel. This wine was made primarily with grapes from 2020 along with 2021. We had to have a bottle of what is probably wine from the oldest now commercially producing vine in the entire country.
Later that evening we stopped by The Hollywood Comedy on Melrose and parked in the Pavilions parking lot. We were one of *only* two people in the audience with three total comedians performing standup that night, including potentially a homeless person off of the street. He ended his set by showing us the start of the movie Barbie on his phone and then walked out of the building. The exit door was appropriately located right next to the stage. His performance was so strange we just had to laugh.
Their business model worked out perfectly that night. Each comedian pays $5 for five minutes of lines on the stage while admission is free to the audience. We ate it up, giving cheers, claps and satisfactory approval noises to try and make up for the lack of energy coming from the empty seats.
Two others took the stage that evening including the seductive Holly Chang who told us she got into comedy only about a month prior. The comedians had to reference their phones several times while on stage to either look up jokes or refresh their memory on lines. I wasn’t sure if that was part of the script, so I clapped anyways.
The lack of the audience reminded me of the time Hollywood based comedian Jimmy Shin performed in Cabo San Lucas at a bar I was at in 2020 along with two other imbibers. After his lines were completed, he handed out a cardboard cup to collect coins. Sadly, no one even put in a single peso. Times were tough for comedians that year.
Take my advice. Too much soju will mess you up; I am referring to the remnants of a lovely meal in K Town prior. The rest of the night was a blur, although I do remember ending up in a hotel next to an airport somewhere in the valley. Thank goodness I was not driving.
And in pursuit of perfume the next day we explored Scent Bar DTLA at the hip ROW DTLA. Wandering in here is an olfactory overload with hundreds of bottles of perfumes both behind the bar and on the shelves. They come in all different shapes and sizes with prices rivaling and extending beyond the cost of premium wines based on the per volume pricing.
And for another random experience, we visited the grave site of John Donavan Foley at the San Fernando Mission Cemetery. Unable to pinpoint the grave site searching on Google, we asked of its location to ChatGPT and were given its approximate location. Foley was well known as a sound man. His work was so influential his last name became the standard for referring to reproducing sounds needed for films (i.e., walking, loud breathing, breaking glass, typing on a keyboard, etc.).
And while visiting his gravesite we noticed the streets of the cemetery lined with cars and hundreds of people gathered around gravesites across a wide swath of the cemetery, seemingly having a great time, drinking and eating. Groups had even setup chairs around specific graves. Their weekend merriment brought a whole new vibe to visiting gravesites.
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