I love you, Encino California. Even though you are sometimes one hundred twenty-eleven degrees outside.
On Saturday, Faith and Sara and I met at the Farmer’s Market for breakfast, hearty sustenance for the day ahead. Nothing makes weekends more weekend-y than eating breakfast out. Food tastes better when someone else cooks it and serves it and clears your plates, but this is somehow doubly true for bacon and eggs and toast. And coffee. Mmmmm, coffee.
First stop post-breakfast was Ellen’s yard sale. I was so excited about the vintage Tupperware and lucite that I forgot to take pictures!! That is truly a shame since Ellen’s studio is a magnificent space, with all her paintings and photos and ya’ll, she is NOT MESSING AROUND with the yarn stash. There was more yarn in her studio — color coded in plastic sealed containers — than in most yarn stores.
When it comes to stash, the bar has been set high. EIGHT FEET HIGH. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
After the yard sale, Faith and Sara and I piled in the car and drove to downtown Los Angeles for my virgin trip to Michael Levine’s Loft.
Eight city blocks in Los Angeles are known as the textile district, full of nothing but fabric stores and notions and beading and foam and feather boas and street vendors making bacon-wrapped hotdogs with fried onions. It’s a glorious place.
Michael Levine’s is a big fabric retailer and their new upstairs “loft” space is a fabric-by-the-pound gluttony of goodness. If you sew, you must come here. Let me say it again: FABRIC BY THE POUND.
Inside the insanity: textiles of all kinds, $2/pound.
Faith digs for treasure; Sara finds shiny Millennium fabric; Faith with camo pattern double-knit featuring sporadic red roses and a glitter finish. So damn Klassy.
After hours and hours of this:
“Sara! Look! It’s blue fun fur! It’s Cookie Monster!”
“Laurie, was this the stretch snakeskin you wanted?”
“Faith, did you call that the hide of the Naugha?”
… we left the Loft and drove all the way across the city to Burbank for a spontaneous Ikea fix.
Give us your tired, your poor, your hungry masses. And we will give them sofas, magazine holders, cheap meatballs and soda.
Chillin’ on the morgestkleptumblotwhatever; Sara is at home; the stranger we coerced into photographing us at Ikea. Hi! You’re on the Internets!
Faith drives us back to Los Angeles; I play tourist from the backseat of the car.
It was a perfect day. I arrived home tired and dirty and sweaty and my face hurt from laughing so much!
On Sunday, Jennifer and I went to Unwind — my gift certificate from Shannon and Karman was burning a hole in my pocket and Jen needed more scarf yarn and bigger needles.
I don’t know what they think of me at Unwind. I’m kind of dorky, and I sniff the yarn. This can’t be fun for the staff, to see some weird girl huffing fiber. But they are so nice all the same, and ya’ll they are open on Sundays! Also, did I photograph any of this? No.
After Unwind, Jen and I drove over to Shannon & Karman’s place for a good-bye party. Our favorite Amy is moving to Idaho for the rest of the summer doing artsy-fartsy film girl stuff and we will sorely miss her. Also, we told her she is not allowed to make new friends and cheat on us.
Before the party really started, it was just me, Jen, Shannon, Karman and Amy. Sitting around talking … and somehow it got on marriage, and divorce and after breaking Birthday Resolution #17 (“Stop saying bitter stuff about marriage”), someone was talking about divorce and all the sudden I burst into tears. BECAUSE I AM CRAZY.
So I am at a party, a fun event in which people do not normally CRY, and I am in a STATE, so I get up off the couch and run away … to the balcony. Upon which I discovered we were on the second floor and there was no escape from the balcony and I would have to one day, eventually, perhaps when I was old and grey and hunched over from living on the 3′ x 8′ overhang, return to the party where I had just made an embarrassing mess of things and cried like a baby.
Yup.
So there I am, knowing I’m maybe a little BATSHIT CRAZY, and also have just moved way down on the Party Guests We Must Invite To Stuff list, and it was starting to get kind of boring out there on the balcony, and I was hungry, and the cake was indoors, and there really was no escape even though I considered hoisting myself down on the neighbor’s balcony just below all Mission Impossible style, but I had on a skirt (and I was out of the clean, normal panties and so it was thong-up-the-butt day and ya’ll know, that would not have been pretty), and finally there was nothing left to do but smoke a cigarette, and Jen came out to assure me that there was no escape and she still loved me. And also they kind of needed the balcony for making the hotdogs. So could I please come inside and stop being crazy until everyone ate?
So I came out from hiding and then we ate hot dogs and tried to pretend nothing happened.
And that was my weekend. A good running start, but flummoxed at the end by the reappearance of Mentally Incompetent McGee. That’s me in case ya’ll wondered. Someone please tell me the inappropriate blubbering stops eventually. Lie to me if you have to. Because I am about tired of this crying shit, and damn tired of myself, and I am ready for a return to the fabled and magic land of mascara and eye shadow. Ya’ll know. I could care less about ever having a man in my life again, BUT I NEED MY MASCARA. Good Lord. Help me.
Tranquility in an uncertain environment 