Live from the Golden Coast, Part 2: The Birthday Girl and Beverly Hills
I get into the car and make myself comfortable in anticipation of a long car ride east to Palm Springs. In the front seats, there’s the birthday girl, in the driver’s seat, her husband. I find it hard to believe it was only a little over a year ago that I was in San Francisco for their wedding and singing a Maid of Honor speech to the tune of a song from Hamilton. On one hand, it feels like it was just yesterday, on the other hand, it feels like it was a decade ago.
To my left, there’s the girl I’d met during the semester I cross-registered for a course at HBS during my time at MIT. When she and I first met in class, she was working on a women’s health startup, and I interviewed her for in the podcast I used to do with a friend from business school. She catches me up on her last two years: getting married, moving to Los Angeles, and returning to the management consulting life she’d been living prior to HBS. Good news, her startup is still alive and well, even if it isn’t her full-time gig.
I find it strange how, two and a half years after graduating from business school, this particular collection of people ended up in this Toyota Corolla on a drive to Palm Springs for a 30th Birthday weekend. Such is life.
The Birthday Girl is her usual bubbly, animated self, even if a little bit self-conscious about the fact that today is her 30th birthday. She tells us about how she used to see reaching 30 as the end of the timeline by which she would have hoped to accomplish anything of significance in her life. She worries about not living up to those goals she had set for herself, but I’d argue that she already has achieved them, even if her accomplishments aren’t emblazoned on the pages of Forbes’ “30 under 30.” She’s launched more than a few personal care products that are sold nationwide and is at a nutritional CPG startup that is on track to become a hit. If I had to guess, in 2 years, the company will sell, she’ll have a pretty payout, and she’ll ride off into the sunset for a while before starting her own business. If I’m lucky, she’ll hire me, too. By then, I, too, will be in my 30s and worrying that I have accomplished nothing of professional significance.
About an hour into the car ride, we begin feeling hungry. Looking at our convenient roadside restaurant options, we decide on Chik Fil A, because most of us in the car, myself included, have never been to a Chik Fil A.
Remarkably, I’m able to order chicken items off the menu, even if grilled instead of fried. I opt for a salad and grilled nuggets instead of a sandwich with a gluten-free bun. In part because my expectations were low for a fast food restaurant and in part because Chik Fil A is actually as good as the hype, I really enjoyed my meal. The birthday girl, who decided to order the 30 nuggets for her 30th birthday, gives up on the nuggets after eating about 5 of them.
After another hour and a half of driving, we arrive at our Airbnb in Palm Springs, which looks like something out of an Architectural Digest magazine. The aesthetic is all white, turquoise, and grey on the inside, with a lush green lawn, incongruous in the desert, outside. There’s a hammock out back, a small pool with chaise lounges, and cacti so cute you’d want to touch or sit on them until you remember how painful it would be to do so.
We’re joined in the house by one more couple, the wife whom I also know from that same class at HBS. After we drop our bags, the birthday girl’s husband and I get back in the car to procure ingredients for the birthday feast, which I’m sous cheffing. The theme is celebrating her 30 years of California heritage: Mexican-Chinese fusion tacos filled with 5-spice pulled pork and savory marinaded grilled steak. We quickly stop at a small bakery for a few motley cake slices (in the absence of full cakes), and then head to an Albertson’s, where we acquire all the ingredients for the tacos, along with plenty of wine and avocado.
We drive the mile back in the desert to the house and start on the first bottles of wine with some chocolate. The birthday girl going from tipsy to drunk so quickly that she takes a nap as her husband and I cook. After a few hours of cooking and conversation with the other guests, we craft an assembly line for DIY tacos along with the “Californian salad” I made with greens tossed in olive oil and lemon juice, topped with goat cheese, blueberries and walnuts.
We finish eating around 9 and go out the fire pit by the pool at the Airbnb. I’m feeling chilly and fading fast, yawning into the blanket I’ve draped over myself and trying to stay awake despite the pull of the east coast time zone, which is telling me it’s after midnight and I should be in bed. Eventually, I find the courage to say goodnight amid social pressure to stick around and drink and play board games.
I don’t sleep particularly well, in part from indigestion from the rich tacos and guacamole but mostly from the fact that the beautiful bed in the immaculate glam bedroom may as well have had a mattress made of desert tumbleweeds. Still, I sleep a full eight hours, something I’ve yet to achieve all trip with all the disorientation of time and space that comes with travel.
Knowing that no one will be up for at least two more hours but being too awake to go back to bed, I park myself at the kitchen table, pour myself a glass of the ready-to-drink Starbucks cold brew from the refrigerator, and get to polishing my first blog post of the trip.
I’m so completely in the zone that I hardly realize that two hours pass by at my computer until the birthday girl wakes up at 9:30 and wants coffee. She drives me and the other girl from the car the day before to a cute local shop called Ernest Coffee, which just so happens to be in the location of Don the Beachcomber’s original tiki bar/restaurant (his real name is Ernest, hence the name of the coffee shop). I love all things Tiki, so this makes me absolutely giddy.
We take a brief walk downtown, passing by a few hair salons and boutiques that haven’t opened yet and a specialty food store with some samples and a fabulous plastic cow outside. From our little jaunt, my two-line takeaway on Palm Springs is this: Palm Springs was beautiful and strange. It’s like being on Mars if we colonized the planet in the 1960s.
By 11, we return to the house, where the husband has been hard at work making eggs and potatoes reminiscent of the kind the birthday girl’s mom makes, cut finely into matchsticks and seasoned with a unique combination of Chinese oils and sauces. We feast on these, along with the leftovers from the previous night, and get to cleaning up the Airbnb in advance of our checkout at a leisurely 1 o’ clock.
With a little downtime to spare, I write a belated birthday card and a few letters to friends, sit in the hammock for a little while with the girls, and then we get in the car to drive back toward Los Angeles with one critical stop at the outlet stores. The birthday girl loves to shop and has impeccable taste, but she and I find absolutely nothing to buy. Still, we marvel at the enormity of the outlet plaza and the serpentine line for admission into the Gucci outlet.
Exhausted, I pass out on the car ride to West Hollywood. It’s a little after 5, starting to get dark outside, and I don’t know what I want to do this evening. It’s my last night in this area of town, so I want to make the most of it by exploring a new neighborhood instead of staying put completely. Deciding between an Uber ride to Koreatown or Beverly Hills, I opt for Beverly Hills because I expect to be close to Koreatown tomorrow night for jiujitsu.
Beverly Hills reminds me of the Bal Harbour area of Miami: glitzy, elegant, and purely aspirational. Not super hungry yet and also not well-dressed enough to go into any of the restaurants aside from the fast food ones (I’m in my navy shorts, a T shirt, and a khaki anorak), I stop into a Greek yogurt chain that has some life-changing soft serve (carrot cake, rose, honey, and plain). I let myself get lost with my cup of yogurt and stumble upon the famous Rodeo Drive and SUR, the restaurant owned by one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Maybe it’s love, or maybe it’s just my being dazzled by being and seeing somewhere new, but there’s something that feels very “right” about walking through these streets at night. Even though the scene is new, it feels very familiar, like I already live here.
By 8 pm, I’m too cold in my shorts to keep walking and craving something to warm me up. I decide that I really, really want pho and search for a decently-reviewed restaurant that doesn’t require me to be well-dressed. I settle for a place with a pun in the name: Absolutely Phobulous.
I live in Chinatown in Boston right across the street from a renowned local pho restaurant, so finding a pho place makes me feel like home. It just so happens that the restaurant is next to FabFitFun, making me think it could be my near-future professional destiny to be over in this particular area of Los Angeles. I entertain the thought that this could be the first of many times I end up eating in or getting takeout from this restaurant — if that’s what I really want. If not, it’s just a reminder that I can always find a taste of home with some Vietnamese chicken soup.
I walk into the restaurant and it immediately reminds me of the love story someone once wrote me called Paper Plates, but it’s in a Vietnamese restaurant in LA instead of in a pizzeria in Princeton, New Jersey. It is clean, not fancy, minimally-furnished, and not empty on a Sunday night — a good sign. I’m one patron among a mother-daughter pair, a couple, and another lady getting takeout. The lady getting takeout is a beautiful, high-cheekboned Asian woman with a Chanel bag and unusually-accented English (perhaps Singaporean) who looks like she could eat anywhere she wants but is getting pho here — another good sign.
I look at the menu and chuckle. Of course, a menu option in LA is a “low carb version” of any pho entree (in other words, pho with fewer noodles and more protein).
Digging into my appetizer of papaya salad with chopsticks, I remember the waiter from the other day at Blu Jam. Take my time. Taste the mint and the sour fish sauce and the crisp shrimp and crunchy papaya and crushed peanuts. I try to notice my surroundings and take in the whole environment. My favorite pieces of the scene: one, the takeout bags for the restaurant, say “Muchas Gracias” on the side; two, a trio of women with British accents comes in, and as they dip their spring rolls into peanut sauce, they talk about the benefits of cryo chambers. This is about as Los Angeles a conversation can get, with two of the visibly older women prodding the younger-looking one for her beauty secrets.
I slurp up as much of the warm broth as I can and steel my nerves before paying my bill and beginning my homeward odyssey down Melrose Avenue. By Boston standards, a November night in the 50s is exceptionally mild, but not so mild I’m going to walk around Boston Common in shorts and a light jacket. Still, that’s exactly what I’m wearing on a night in the 50s in Los Angeles. I try to take advantage of the remaining inner warmth I have from eating the soup and take my mind off of how cold I know I”m going to be about ten minutes from now.
Walking through the night, I think of a similar after-dinner moment from my last vacation: I was in Lima, wandering the streets, eating my way through a large bag of sweetened puffed rice cereal after going to two separate places for ice cream, and lamenting my broken heart on the night before a friend’s wedding. It was possibly the worst night of the vacation — the one on which I was completely alone and stuck with my thoughts, no fellow wedding guests, no fellow hikers on the Inca Trail to distract me from myself.
Tonight, in contrast, is lovely. It’s a little lonely, because the vastness of LA is starting to sink in, but I text my boyfriend on the way home and it alleviates the sense of isolation. It feels like we have been apart for much longer than two and a half days. I tell him that this place has everything I want — the only thing I’m missing is a good jiujitsu gym and him to be here with me.
Walking back through West Hollywood, everyone in the restaurants looks so polished and stylish. My hair is a frizzy mess and the only thing about my outfit that is on point for the weather and scene is a quartz crystal necklace (crystal healing is a thing in SoCal). I pass by the bar next to an improv theatre and ‘One Headlight’ comes on, the song of my life a decade ago. My life feels like it is consolidating into this very moment and it all feels very meant-to-be, some sort of “next chapter” here in LA.
Even though I had eaten the Greek yogurt soft serve earlier, after the savory dinner, I’m still craving something sweet. After the 30-minute walk back toward the direction of my host’s apartment, I decide to stand in line at Milk Bar and see if this notorious growing chain is worth the hype. I almost leave, but then the Notorious B.I.G. song ‘Hypnotize’ comes on and the line begins to move, both events putting me in a good mood. Perusing the menus and merchandise, I’m shocked that there are any real gluten-free options aside from the cake truffles. Resolving that I only live once, I get a slice of the famed birthday cake (for which they make a gluten-free version) and a cookie.
I take a few bites of the cookie and throw it out because it’s too good. I wish I had done the same with the cake, which was also too good, but I end up eating the whole slice while watching ‘Big Mouth’ on my host’s couch before going to bed.
Tomorrow, I know I’ll regret what I ate today. But for tonight, it’s the stuff that long holiday weekends are made of and it’s a pretty good end to a long, lazy Sunday.
