Pacific Palisades, my heart, my home…

When I was a young screenwriter, working as a development executive in Hollywood, many young women who were my contemporaries were coming of age socially and sexually through associating themselves with Sarah Jessica Parker’s unforgettable characterization of a well heeled, single New Yorker in the form of Carrie Bradshaw. I didn’t take to Sex in The City or Sex and The City as it’s actually called (I tend to rewrite everything…occupational hazard) because a. I thought the women’s appetite for numerous faceless sexual partners as though the city was one big bathhouse felt more like they were conceived by gay men instead of straight women and b. more significantly, I didn’t have HBO. However, I was struck by how my friends desired to walk a mile in Carrie’s Manolos, this point hit home hardest when my friend, Ronya, assigned the quirky instrumental Sex and The City theme song as her ring tone. One thing I do remember vividly, after the horrors the city endured through 9/11, was Parker referring to The Big Apple as the fifth character in her ensemble piece and how New York was integral to the trajectory of those characters and the success of the show.

That’s almost exactly the sentiment I feel when I think about the Palisades. Pacific Palisades wasn’t a fifth character in my personal story. Instead, the town was the main lead in a two handed piece, my love interest, my paramour, and much of the reason I could craft the stories I did. Last week, without warning, my love interest died a small death, but as though writing fiction for fact, I see the town having its second act not its final performance. Selfishly, I need The Palisades to survive as I don’t want to perceive a life without him.

When I first arrived in the town as a wide eyed youth, for a moment, I thought my parents had bought in San Francisco for the steep hills and canyons that felt treacherous to the touch of a tire as my life prior to The Palisades had been flat roadways without winding turns. It was aesthetically glorious in a way I hadn’t seen before. Prior to my family’s move, going to the beach was something you had to plan and pack for whereas in our new Palisades life, it was a simple walk down to where the fabled Sunset Boulevard met Pacific Coast Highway. Gladstones was an institution where you ordered more for the ambiance than you did for the lackluster menu.

I went to high school at Palisades High, which was quite a departure for a girl who had only gone to private school where my biggest considerations were which plaid uniform skirt to both wear and roll up for maximum leg exposure. At Pali, I was juxtaposed between locals who knew each other from preschool and those who were shuttled from the mid city daily on a bus to partake in a “better educational standard” than was allegedly afforded them before they were signed up for this integration program. A story I always remember was a boy approaching to tell me how much he liked my Crip Killer shoes and I looked down at the insignia of CK, horrified and responding with, “That’s Calvin Klein, brother.”

The rampant drug and alcohol use at the school when I was there was so unprecedented that Pali High was the first high school in the country to have its own AA chapter. None of that took away from my extraordinary experience - boy crazy in my youth, there was many a surfer boy who spoke with an accent I couldn’t quite place. The late Damon Geller and David Strickland were so kind to me when I was getting accustomed to the nuances on campus and were never forgotten even though they both passed prematurely and tragically. In my senior English class, the gregarious Greg Orselli talked of how his mother, the screenwriter Anna Hamilton Phelan, was nominated for an Oscar having written, Gorillas In The Mist, and I remember thinking to myself how much I would want that to be me when I grew up. When I graduated unscathed from Pali High, we walked to the beach for a party and I was gobsmacked to see the late River Phoenix was one of the guests in attendance.

Clearly disinterested in academics at Pali, my earlier high school career as a 4.0 student wasn’t enough to get me into UCLA when I got an F in Mr. Schoenberg’s Calculus class at Pali. I was more interested in hanging out with boys who had cigarettes dangling between their lips as they called themselves the PLB - Palisades Local Boys which I couldn’t quite make out if it was a gang or an a capella group as most of them could play instruments while listening to The Steve Miller Band’s Jungle Love on the tape deck in their interesting array of cars.

I went to Santa Monica College from Pali and pulled it together well enough to study American Politics as an undergraduate at UCLA. I didn’t live on campus, but chose to stay in the Palisades as the commute was under 10 miles. I got into UCLA Film for my MFA in Screenwriting and the strength of that education insured a well paid position at Predawn Productions where the principal, Ron Bass, would take his meetings in my Palisades “palace” where I was more than elated to host him and my co-workers in front of the ocean. The last script I worked on in that capacity was Amelia for Hillary Swank and when Ron was replaced on that project, he was replaced by Anna Hamilton Phelan, the same woman, the same mom of Greg Orselli who 17 years before had inspired me to believe that women could make for successful screenwriters in a field that was male dominated.

Most of my great adolescent and young adult memories were forged in The Palisades. I hit adulthood hard when my mother died there in 2006. My father retired to his home in The Palisades where I played and continue to play the part as one of his primary caretakers happily by securing The Treehouse, the office/studio space I secured on Sunset Boulevard to host my meetings, teach my classes, and connect to my fair city.

To say that my life was Palisades centric would be an understatement. I plugged into its beauty and resilience like a power source that kept my creative battery charged. I marveled at its beauty every moment I was conscious and consistently invited friends to come to me rather than the other way around simply because the sound of the ocean was so soothing and something that was meant to be shared. So small and interconnected a town, when I listened to reality television personality, Spencer Pratt, speak of the horrors he encountered through the fires, I knew the neighbor he referenced, a 90 year old Greek woman named Calliope because she had been married to one of my father’s grade school friends from India and even Pratt’s father has been dentist to a dear friend for 30 years.

And now my sweet friend sits in ruins. My house decimated, my dreams dashed, my first and consistent instinct is to help my friend rebuild in any capacity I can, not for me as I have already taken so much from the town, but for Pacific Palisades to stand strong for the generations left still to appreciate his majesty. My relationship with The Palisades reminds me of the unforgettable story from my childhood, The Giving Tree. In that Shel Silverstein masterpiece, a boy takes so selfishly from a tree who represents a parent that all that is left at the end is a stump so honored to provide the boy, now an old man, a place to sit.

Sometimes, with my fair city, I feel like that boy, but I refuse to believe Pacific Palisades will be reduced to a stump or a memory. There is love in the destruction, there is strength deeply rooted in the wreckage. I hope I am afforded life long enough in my lungs to help my favorite supporting character in the story of my life a chance to reclaim his glory…Thank you to The Palisades from the absolute bottom of my heart, please let me know what I can do for you as you always did for me…One day, you too will regroup like no painful aspect of this tragedy will define you, only inform you of the unexpected…

Bye for now, know that you are always in my heart, my home.