Recipe for a Perfect Saturday

Start by turning off the alarm and sleeping late. If you have a grey baby, you'll get better results. Percy, who takes sleeping very seriously, enables a Zen-like state of relaxation. His job around the house - which earns him ridiculous amounts of attention and too many soft cat food treats - is to keep our lives in perspective by reminding us of the importance of a good nap.

Here's an action shot of him on duty:

After waking up, spend the remaining morning hours leisurely drinking coffee and watching the Giro d'Italia. Then hop on your bikes and roll around Los Angeles, taking side streets to avoid traffic and making sure to enjoy the beautiful Southern California weather.

This past Saturday, our riding took us first to the USC campus. Dave had some work stuff to do, which not only provided a starting place for our wandering bike travels, but also allowed for a slight sense of accomplishment by being a task easily completed. After some iced coffee, we continued on to lovely Echo Park, which according to my half-assed Internet research, is one of LA's oldest neighborhoods, developing at the end of the 19th Century and seeing its greatest surge of growth between 1905 and 1935.

Prior to riding through it, my only other exposure to Echo Park had been through Allison Anders's 1993 movie, Mi Vida Loca, which presents life through the eyes of Latina Gang Girls in Echo Parque. Anders conceived of this movie while living in Echo Park at a time of increasing gang activity; she was at once terrified by her gang girl neighbors and extremely curious to know them and understand them as real human beings, not just as a feared stereotype. She collaborated with them to write and create the film, and many of the girls on whom the main characters are based appear as extras in the film. Whether or not her telling is accurate is subject to debate; comments on imdb range from "It's not really like that!" to "This could be a home video of my family."

My Saturday experience, though nothing like a movie, was fantastic. We rolled past lovely Echo Park Lake...

...past the Angelus Temple of Aimee Semple McPherson, an early radio evangelist and founder of the International Church of the Four Square Gospel...

...and arrived at the Brite Spot for a mid-afternoon breakfast. Our Country Fried Steak and Eggs, California Benedict (eggs, spinach, tomato, and avocado on English muffins and smothered in hollandaise), and Butterscotch Chip Pancake was made all the more delicious by the many honeys, babies, and darlings our spitfire of a seventy-something waitress Margaret sprinkled on us as we sat in our shiny brown booth.

The key ingredient to a perfect Saturday, though, is a picnic with friends in a cemetery while watching a creepy movie. Yes, that's right. A picnic with friends in a cemetery while watching a creepy movie.

With beer and Popeye's chicken in our bags, we rolled up to Hollywood Forever "Resting Place of Hollywood's Immortals" whose "residents" include Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Peter Lorre, Cecil B. DeMille, Mel Blanc, Bugsy Siegel, and Johnny Ramone. Other oddball celebrities interred there are a handful of Li'l Rascals and that guy who played Darren's boss Larry Tate on "Bewitched." Also, there are headstones for people who aren't buried there - Jayne Mansfield (she's buried in Pennsylvania and her two headstones bear different birth dates) and Hattie McDaniel (although it was her last wish, this Oscar-winner couldn't be buried there because she was black. In 1999, 47 years after her death, Hollywood Forever put up a Memorial for her). It's a very popular place - folks are dying to get in!

On Saturday nights, they screen movies at the cemetery.
This week's selection: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. In watching it, I was struck by how ambiguous and unresolved is its terror. Hitchcock provides no real answers for anything in the film, which I think is why it is so successful. Throughout the story, both people and animals behave strangely; their motivations are never clear, only their actions. I'm a great fan of ambiguity - I think it is more scintillatingly useful than the clear-cut because it opens up thought by forcing the audience members to interpret ideas, messages, and meanings based on the clues that are left for them.

I'm also a great fan of collective events in cemeteries. This Saturday night, a public space was (re)activated. People came together in a very unusual and yet oddly uplifting way; we smashed ourselves together on blankets and lawn chairs in a big green space normally held apart from life by its nearness to death and our own social barriers were lowered. As a mass we cheered Melanie Daniels's (Tippi Hedren) ability to pilot an outboard motor in a little skiff while wearing heels and a fur. We chuckled when Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy) brought up with distaste that Melanie had been arrested for swimming naked in a fountain in Rome and warned her son Mitch (Rod Taylor) to be careful. We cat-called during the forced conversations between Melanie and Mitch's ex, Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), howled during Melanie and Mitch's first kiss, and sat silently, holding our collective breath when the birds attacked.