Happy Anniversary, Tinseltown.
This article is not usual for my LLG readers, but I have been thinking about this milestone/ anniversary, and I wanted to share some of my life advice with this journey. To hear the perspective of my present, I need you to share my past. I may ramble a bit.... so grab a glass of your favorite drink, get comfy, and I hope you enjoy the ride down this memory lane.
On April 5, 1995, 26 years ago today, I moved from Massachusetts to Los Angeles. I moved to West Hollywood, to be exact, my first LA pad. Now to give you some of my back story, this was not my first move ever. I grew up in Towson, a small idyllic town, just 11 miles outside Baltimore, MD. As a child, my family would travel and experience all different types of towns and cities, ranging from Brooklyn, Manhattan, Long Island, Cape Cod, to name a few.
My entire world changed at the age of nine when our family left Maryland and moved north. It was 400 miles away, to the historic "Shovel Shop Town" of Easton, Massachusetts. This gorgeous town is only 20 miles south of Boston and 40 miles north of Cape Cod. While I grew up going to Cape Cod for many Summers before our move, it felt like we moved to a completely different planet. The accents were bizarre, the popular slang of the moment was odd, and New England just had an altogether different vibe, smells, and sights. The people I met thought I was the weird one, with my very accurate BAL-more (yes, Baltimore) accent.
Still, as scary as it felt and was, I was lucky to experience this new journey with my family. While each of our individual experiences was much different than each other, it was a comfort knowing we were all doing our best to adjust to this new life. New house, new schools, new friends, new church, new job, so basically new everything. A new life and fresh start can be a fantastic gift in one's life, but at the time, I didn't see it that way at all. Just when I got somewhat comfortable making new friends in my new hometown, I then attended a brand new high school. A Catholic High School in a town I had never heard of; this protestant-raise teenager was not happy. Fan-fucking-tastic. ANOTHER new "move." That experience is a whole other article in itself for another time. Despite my dislike for this new school, this new step outside of my comfort zone, gave me the courage to travel to all over Europe at 17 years old. LIFE changing.
I know this experience pushed my fear down and pushed my courage forward, which made room for the next awesome adventures in my life.
It would be almost an entire decade when I went to college at Endicott College, located on the north shore of Massachusetts, to feel I was finally home. It took me leaving home to go to college to fully appreciate all the different and gorgeous gifts that New England had to offer. Around this time, I moved to New York City in between semesters, as I was itching to experience being another city, someplace other than Boston.
( Even though Boston is my favorite city, ever) Again, I grew up going to Manhattan and Brooklyn with my parents and even made trips without them, and all of those magical visits made me dream of living in NYC. So the time came to take a bite out of the BIG APPLE; I moved with my college roommate at the time, my best friend Tracy, to work and live in the city while being interns. I worked at Joe Papa's legendary Public Theatre in the Village, and she worked at famous Fashion designer Geoffery Bean in the fashion district. I will not lie; it was scary, even though we had each other before and after our workdays. Despite the fear and very little money, we HAD FUN. We explored the iconic landmarks in this massive city together as much as possible. We also explored with our boyfriends, who visited us both on weekends and treated us and made our fun even more memorable.
This experience changed me in so many important ways. Remember this was PRE- “Sex and the City.” I learned that I could handle a professional atmosphere and do a great job in the "real world". I saw how NYC was a melting pot filled with different people, classes, backgrounds, races, and cultures. I saw the low of the lows and the high of the highs. There were days where I was starving and lived on just a pizza slice for lunch, to then being treated by new friends by having my first experience eating expensive high-end sushi. I absorbed as much about the theatre world as I could, seeing live theatre shows, a lovely VIP perk courtesy of The Public, where I met famous actors and artists. I went to fabulous hot spots, dance clubs, restaurants, and fun parties. We took a HUGE bite and then some.
If this experience taught me anything, I realized that I was not as talented as I genuinely needed to be a working singer and actress to succeed professionally in NYC. I also had zero interest in being a starving actress, living in poverty in a tiny apartment, freezing my butt off 6 out of the 12 months a year. So after my internship was over, I returned home back to Massachusetts to finish college, knowing that New York was not the city for me to pursue my acting career. Despite that, I went back to NYC in the summer time to meet up with Tracy for more fun, making memories together.
Looking back, I realized having street smarts is a critical quality to have, especially being a young woman in a massive Tribeca like Manhattan. I think my experiences with other cities, Baltimore, NYC, and Boston, help prepare me for this move. Even though I was terrified of moving to a place I had gone to many times, I am grateful for my guts, vision, drive, and determination. I love that in my transition from being a teenager into my 20's I got to experience that birthday in the "BIG APPLE." I came out on the other side even more determined than ever to go after my BIG DREAMS. Even before I ever dreamed of moving to NYC, I dreamed of being a famous movie star in Hollywood as a little girl.
Next stop, this college graduate moves to Tinseltown. Despite never having been to Los Angeles before, I decided after leaving NYC that my next move was to the City of Angeles. After college graduation, I made a test trip and flew out West to check it all out. Remember when I said that moving from MD to MA was like moving to a new planet? Seeing and living in LA is like living on a different planet, a new world in an entirely different solar system. If the US was the Milky Way, then Los Angeles was in a galaxy far, far away.....
I found a cute, spacious apartment in West Hollywood called WeHo - where I was right around Melrose Place's corner. Yes, there is a street off Melrose Avenue, called Melrose Place. Remember at the time; MP was one of the hugest TV shows at the time. Please trust me when I say that WeHo is nothing like Hollywood, and thank God. Weho was a lovely, clean community in the West Side center, not far from the glamorous Beverly Hills, 90210. My apartment was almost on the top floor, and it even had a balcony. When I stepped out on it, I could see the famous Hollywood sign. Talk about feeling like being in a dream. I didn't even care about seeing the smog. I had officially arrived in California and made this dream happen.
One LA dream down -
one million more to go.
For my first official morning in LA on April 6, I remember waking up in my sleeping bag on the kitchen floor, not having the furniture arrive from the movers yet. It was a warm spring morning, and I felt scared, weird, excited, and it was all so overwhelming to wake up and realize I was now 100% on my own. I had no safety net of being in my parents' home or living with my best friend in our college dorm and apartment in NYC. Also, at this point, I was no longer with my former college boyfriend. He had zero interest in moving to LA and even less interest in supporting all of my dreams. Waking up that first morning in LA was the abyss of the unknown. I was scared shitless. I kept telling myself this BIG dream was my decision, these are my goals, this is my life, and only me and I alone could make my life happen. I think the immense excitement was getting a huge buzz and natural high, discovering the iconic LA landmarks for the first time. Driving around town was amazing to see all the cool places and famous people I saw in movies and television shows throughout my life. Horray for Hollywood! One of my highest of highs was seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time. As a child who played with a Malibu Barbie Dream House, I was finally there, in Malibu. It was even more beautiful than I imagined. The next thing was being on a movie set for the first time, working as a background actor on the movie, "The Craft." I also worked on a few independent films, and finally, years later, I got my union Screen Actors Guild Card, while working on a sitcom pilot with actress Delta Burke called "Sweet Potatoes Queens." So many more industry highs came for me, but that is for another time.
Instead of getting into many years of many details, I will break it down to give you a glimpse. I had moved to a city in the mid 90's which is a time before you had the internet to show you where everything was and who everyone is. Those were the days I was using an actual Thomas Guide Map Booklet to get me around town. Those were the days BEFORE social media - of me partying and having normal fun in my 20's at some of the most famous hot spots, including the hot Sunset Strip. I am so glad I grew up as a Generation X-er. All my life experiences weren't shared with out of control mass on social media like, people do today. I also got to live my private life, privately. I chose who I took photos with, and I didn't broadcast my dating life for the entire world to see like most people do today, just for constant validation. If I were to publically share my private life, it would be of my future husband, not of past fleeting boyfriend or casual dates.
As they say, it is a whole different ball game over two decades later, and I must admit a few things; being in your 20's and 30's is hard, but experiencing them in a city of 10 million people is even more challenging. I was trying to not only figure out the real me all the while trying to navigate my life, both personally and professionally. I was holding down one or two jobs at a time ( sometimes even three) to pay the bills, all on my own, trying to make it the industry, trying to make new friends and date. I was also trying to handle not seeing my parents and friends back home. I was also trying to keep in touch with certain important relationships with those people who were 3000 miles away. This was hard to do, as I was only able to afford coming home once a year at Christmas. On top of it all, my Mother was suffering with major life threating health issues for 15 years, and that stress was even harder me to navigate being so far away. I not only had major guilt not being there with my parents, but dealing with the stress of my Mother’s health issues were devasting to deal with all alone as a 22 year old young women to a 37 year old woman, before she passed away at 67.
I was living in a town that was all-consuming of "The Industry." I found that it didn't matter much how many theatre productions I starred in, acting classes I took, college degrees I had; most people in the industry didn't take me seriously. I quickly realized it was all about looks in LA. For someone who is known as the nice, gorgeous girl with the hot body in my small hometown, I was now in a massive city along with ten million other cookie-cutter twenty-something blonde ingenues, looking to "make it big" too. This once big fish in a small pond was now the tiny guppy in a vast ocean. It was hard pill to swallow, but it made me realize that my true beauty and true worth is who I am as a person and all my valueable qualites on the inside. I didn’t care the odds, I knew no matter what anyone said to me, I had it in me and the goods to make MY dreams come true.
The LA dating experience hard to handle, as I found the men here were just 'man boys' who didn't want to grow up and have actual relationships but only wanted to hook up. Again, this was before “Netflix and Chill.” The positive side for me was to experience dating many different types of men from different ages, backgrounds, races, classes, professions, religions, and interests. It showed me with eyes wide open that there is a great big world out there, and there are more than just the three stereotypical types of men I grew up with and dated in New England. I am so grateful I didn't follow the crowd like so many who married and had kids almost immediately after college. I am not saying it's terrible to get married and have kids, but most people are still trying to find themselves in their 20's and 30's. Hell, it gets so much better in your late 30's and all of your 40's; I think this is a great time to make those types of commitments. Once you truly know yourself, that is when you can find the best lifelong match for yourself.
The truth is when you have grown up in a small town; most don't leave that town. Ever. So when you finished your education, the next logical steps are to stay there, work in the career you studied for, hopefully get your dream job, get your first house near your parents, get married, and (possibly) have children. It is not a criticism; it is an observation. While I did want those things, too, I just wanted to do them, not in MA but CA, at the right time for me and with the right person. I thank God every day that I am not currently an unhappily married wife who married a past boyfriend or a divorced wife of my age, like so many, or even worse, a divorced Mom with kids starting over in her personal life. I know for me, with my own private personal life, the best is here and is still coming. Seeing family life in all types of spectrums, situations, and locations, I know observing those choices gave me the tools to not choose to be with the wrong spouse, just to have someone and to know who is the right one is for me.
I understand that all of the many unsuitable matches, horrible heartbreaks, and making so many mistakes in all areas of life and love all have brought me back to fight for my vast self-worth. I experienced all the difficulties in LA to teach me so many valuable lessons. I also had so many fantastic dreams that did come true. Places I got to go see, things I experienced, cool people I got to meet - including famous people I grew up watching and dreaming of meeting, and then I did! I left WeHo after two years and moved to an even better place in Beverly Hills, where I have been happy and in a grateful space making it my HOME the past 24 years. Has it been easy to do it all alone? No. Did I think I would still be navigating LA solo after all these years? No. In April 2020, I celebrated my silver jubilee LA anniversary, alone at home in lockdown. In some ways, surviving the industry and LA has been a marriage.
I stepped back, and I recapped my life I have made here in LA over the past 26 years, and I felt grateful. Grateful I stayed here when so many people back in MA, told me to give up, pack up and just come back home. Yes, I am even grateful for all the struggles, as it has made me wiser beyond I ever thought.
Like the city of LA itself, I grew and became a woman here. Both of us have developed, expanded, and upgraded in ways I have always prayed and dreamed that LA and I would.
I have experienced so many unique events and dreams in LA that this has been one of the most important relationships. Me and LA, just us two. Friends, men, jobs, and even family members some have come and gone some have stayed over the years; but besides my parents, this city has been the one constant compass in my life for the past quarter of a century. Living here solo all this time has made me incredibly proud of myself. After accomplishing this milestone, especially after this last year on lockdown - I can achieve anything.
I LOVE LA for many reasons, but I also know I have outgrown certain aspects of living in this town, and that simply comes as you age. I have realize that if it wasn’t for my very first move at age nine, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to pursue all the other moves.
I know that my journey of moving from someplace comfortable to someplace new, this gave me the courage and pushed me to the next destination(s). Without the huge change from Baltimore to Boston, there would have not been my time NYC. Without visiting Europe and living in NYC all before 20, there would have been no move to LA at 23.
I am in the space of looking ahead to a new life chapter, maybe even a new move. If you have ever had that voice in your head telling you that you want to move someplace new, do it. Please trust me on this and do it. It doesn't have to be LA; it can be ANYWHERE in the world your heart wants to take you. You can find a way to make it happen and work. HAVE FAITH. I did and still do. Please don't make money and your age why you can't or won't; do it because you only have this one life to live and live it to its fullest. Leaving one's comfort will give you so many critical perspectives that I can't even explain. Moving away from home in NYC and LA has made me appreciate my MD and MA childhood common sense upbringing more than I can explain.
Ironically, I left my small hometown because it felt like high school, where everyone knew everyone else's business and all the false gossip. When I got to LA, I realized that it's a small town here too. Especially in the industry, the same deal, but people here this city has 10 million people, more significant bank accounts and much bigger houses. So I learned very quickly with my common sense radar who is of value to be in my life and who wasn't or isn't. I see even more that it's better to have a few quality friends, instead of quantity. No matter my relationship status, I know that I don't always want to, even though I can do my life independently.
Has this been easy the past 26 years? FUCK NO. Has this all been worth it? HELL YES!
You know why?
I know in my heart that all of this has and will lead me to all of my meant-to-be.
Happy 26th Anniversary, Tinseltown and thank you!
Much Love and Gratitude,
