So Halloween this year fell on a Saturday under a very full moon. No costume party for me this time, which turned out to be a good thing because I’d been feeling sick all week, and by the time the weekend rolled around I was pooped…though I suppose I could have gone to a party dressed as a swine flu victim.
When I don’t feel well I try to do busy work to distract myself from my misery. I’m here to tell you that plan never works. What I did was reorganize my closet which was once a spare bedroom. Even bought new furniture to create more storage, but before the furniture could go in, I had to take everything out of there and cram them into my home office. So now while the furniture looks great in my closet, I am sitting here at my desk almost in a fetal position, typing this, buried under the mounds of clothes and what not. I don’t know what possessed me to think this was a good idea. It may take a whole week of uninterrupted concentration to clean up this mess.
Anyway, Halloween Saturday started early at geek central, aka Fry’s Electronics, since I’m in the market for a netbook. Beetlejuice didn’t help me…
but I was just comparison shopping anyway. And my next stop was at Best Buy. No costumed employees there but I think I know which netbook I want now. A few more pit stops and it was time to refuel at a Vietnamese restaurant that specialized in dishes from Central VN (Huế). The best part was that I got to find a vegetarian bún bò Huế:
and a non-vegetarian bánh bèo (one of my all time fav snacks):
Vietnamese food tends to be quite salty, so I had to wash it down with a strawberry limeade from Sonic:
I know, you can take a girl out of Texas but you can’t really take Texas out of her. There’s a Sonic practically on every block in Dallas but here, I had to go all the way to Anaheim to find one! Anyhow, by 6pm I was back home and an hour later I was off to see the LA Clippers play the Dallas Mavs.
LA Live is a sports-entertainment complex playing a key role in reviving downtown LA. The Lakers, Clippers, and Kings play at the STAPLES Center,
and within this campus there are venues like the Nokia Theater/Plaza,
ESPN zone, Grammy Museum, and a bunch of restaurants:
Given that it was a Halloween Saturday and the Clippers playing (sorry guys), the arena was only about 40% full. But it was a pretty good game and at least during half time, the entertainment was an enjoyable group performance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller…
While I was enjoying my typical junk food fare,
I got to see Dracula,
and a bunch of people dressed as pimps and wenches. Oh wait, they weren’t in costume.
The Clippers tried hard but they also went down like the Lakers the night before. And by the time we all went outside, there were quite a few people, definitely in costume, at the Nokia Plaza:
But c’mon, this is LA. We don’t need Halloween to see all the freaks. And maybe next Halloween I can dress up in a Clipper uniform and they’ll let me play.
PS: this is a new feature I’ll try to incorporate into my entries because some of you have asked me to talk more about fashion, particularly working the ODJs (outfit du jour) into the story. So what was I wearing today on my day off? JCrew sherpa hoodie, Marni tank, Mossimo green khakis, Balenciaga leather bracelet, navy leather Converse sneakers, and Chanel grey camera bag:
Tags: Balenciaga, Chanel, Clippers, Converse, Halloween, JCrew, Marni, Nokia Plaza, Staple Center, Thriller
When I came home from the Galleria with my mom this afternoon my Dad told us that Michael Jackson had been taken to the hospital for a heart attack. About half an hour later, my friend sent me an instant message that MJ had died. She was at a car dealership in LA getting her windshield wipers fixed when the news broke. CNN confirmed the shocking news for me over here.
Just as with any unexpected passing of people we knew or felt we knew, the homing realization of mortality sits uncomfortably on our shoulders until we shake ourselves from the disbelief and let the sad fact roll to a stop at the pit of our stomachs. I’ve never been a rabid fan of MJ but as CNN plays his greatest hits during its report, I realize just how much his music has connected with events through decades of my life. Multiply this connection by a billion (or two) people and you can imagine the reach his music has had on many of us around the world.
The first time I held a boy’s hand was at a roller skating party in middle school; my hands were clammy partly because his green eyes were so pretty and mostly because it was my first time on skates. Rock with You played twice, and the second time it came on, I got my first kiss (I think I just heard my Dad groan oh gross!). Now whenever I hear that song, I think how cool it is to be a girl.
After I passed the bar exam, I was traipsing around somewhere when the swearing-in ceremony took place back in LA. So a judge swore me in privately in his courtroom a few weeks later while his clerk and my then boyfriend witnessed. It was a particularly memorable day because I had been pacing the front steps of the courthouse all morning, waiting for my mom and aunt to arrive from out of town for that very milestone. Some guy sitting on the sidewalk was playing the Dangerous CD over and over in his boombox (remember those?) while I fretted. They were late–this was before the advent of the GPS–and eventually missed most of the very short ceremony. For years when I hear Black and White I would cringe a little at the memory but now I identify that song with one of the coolest four-minutes blips on my radar. The day I broke up with that boyfriend who briefly became a fiance, Billie Jean looped on my Walkman all night and then the next day until I went for a run and decided that my decision was correct.
Not too long ago in North Africa I danced with a group of musicians from Ghana. After they played their traditional songs, as we were all leaving, a few of them stayed behind and played Thriller on their instruments when they thought no one was listening. That was cool.
I can’t tell you in how many cafes from Timbuktu to Malacca Town to Bruges I’ve heard Michael Jackson songs playing. There have been at least two instances in which strangers sang his songs to me when they found out I was from America; one was a German kid who did the moonwalk for me–he’d pointed at me and said Japan? I shook my head and said America. That’s when he broke into his MJ impression right then and there. Another was a (really bad) karaoke dedication to me at some club in HCM City. Beat It just hasn’t been the same after this experience.
So while we’re all having these life moments accompanied by his music, I wonder what songs were playing for him in times of joy, sadness, or just…living. Rest in peace MJ.
Tags: Beat It, Billie Jean, Black and White, Michael Jackson, Rock With You, Thriller
