What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Los Angeles Dodger pitcher, Hideo Nomo, pitched his team to a 7-5 victory last Tuesday night despite giving up eleven hits in six and two thirds innings. It was the most hits Nomo had allowed in a game since May 11, 1994 against the Seibu Lions. The crowd of 48,449 was heavily populated with Japanese fans. It was yet another indication that I wasn't in Minnesota anymore. In fact, there may have been more Japanese faces in Dodger Stadium that night than reside in the entire state of Minnesota.

Nomo is another in a long line of celebrity sensations residing in Southern California. A walk through the Little Tokyo section of L.A., one can't help be impressed by the sheer amount of Nomo merchandise up for sale. He has even gained popularity in his home country where last year his win/loss record was a very average 8-7. Yet in the culture of Los Angeles, anyone with a different angle can, and often does, become a star. Of course as Nomo left the game in the middle of the seventh, there were those among the throng that couldn't resist saying the obvious, "No more Nomo." When in Rome...

The next night in the studios of CBS entertainment, Bonnie Hunt taped the first episode of her new sitcom, The Bonnie Hunt Show, in front of an impatient studio audience. The taping was delayed for over an hour as Ms. Hunt and producer (former David Letterman headwriter) Rob Burnett rewrote sections of the program.

Ms. Hunt, best known as Charles Grodin's wife in the Beethoven movies, and also as the waitress in Rain Man (the one who was a bit freaked out when Raymond recites her phone number, and when Raymond tells her how many toothpicks fall on the floor) starred in a short lived sitcom last season, one of the few highlights on an otherwise miserable CBS schedule.

The premise of this new show is yet another of Hollywood's comedies set in the entertainment industry, this one has Ms. Hunt playing a reporter for a newsmagazine. The running gags were established early: a mother who constantly calls to check up on Bonnie; a ditzy neighbor who also works in the newsroom; a hunky boss who seems to have impossible work demands with little or no sense of humor; the boss' assistant who is out to sabotage Bonnie's enthusiasm to impress on the job; and a sarcastic co-worker who helps balance the wackiness of the newsroom full of characters (a vendor named Sammy Sinatra who does imitations, a hypoglycemic editor with more nervous tics than your average midwestern town).

Every show needs a gimmick and this one has a fairly interesting one. Ms. Hunt films clips of interviews she does with real live people, and those clips are used in the pieces she does for her fictional newsmagazine. This utilizes Ms. Hunt's great ability for the ad-lib, the witty conversation that is necessarily stilted within the confines of the setup-punchline format of the sitcom. The most impressive thing about watching the taping was in the retakes where Ms. Hunt improvised new lines take after take, improving each time out. It was refreshing to see some spontaneity, life without a script.

Hollywood and its culture are such a long way from the quiet suburbia of Roseville, it is like visiting a foreign country. It's a city that amplifies the very concept of the "melting pot." Hundreds of different cultures are forced to coexist within its sprawling limits. To its natives, the rest of the country is somewhat insignificant. The industry and the culture supersede all else. The city itself sometimes only seems to exist to entertain the rest of the world. It is a town that builds up anyone for celebrity status if only to tear them apart and bring them crashing down. It sometimes seems more real than life. As the rest of my family continues on their journey -next up a visit to a huge hole in the ground- I come home to face the familiar grind of the work day week.

And almost as if to prove you can find just about anything you want if you look hard enough in L.A., while shopping in the Santa Monica area I walked by a Heidiwear shop, and jokingly asked my sister if she cared to go in. We glanced in the small store, with its racks of intimate apparel, looking for a glimpse of Charlie Sheen perhaps -no luck, but darn if the woman folding some clothing didn't look familiar... Yes indeed, it was Heidi Fleiss herself, the woman responsible for many nights of entertainment for many of our biggest entertainers. She looked a little sad and forlorn, perhaps with her jail sentence firmly in mind. It was a bit of a jolt to see a face only seen previous through a TV screen, but such is life in L.A.