Tonight we went on a date

They have these films that play outdoors in the summers. I think it's kind of a new thing in LA, although I remember when I lived in Seattle 14 years ago, they did something like that in Freemont. Before that, when your grandparents lived in Israel, they used to project surf movies onto a sheet in the parking lot of the US embassy in Tel Aviv. That was back in 1980.

The technology has gotten a lot better. They use digital projectors now. We went to a screening of 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly' in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery a couple of months ago. The picture was amazing.

Tonight we rode our bikes to the park behind the LaBrea Tar Pits where they were showing 'Cinema Paradiso'.

I'm sure you don't get the significance of showing these movies in these places--by the time you can read this, these old movies will be ancient and utterly irrelevant to you. But if I can't convince you not to go into film, and for some reason you develop a love for it, you'll eventually appreciate the significance. Which, by the way, is probalby lost on most of the audience.

That's not to say that the people in LA are stupid. But there's a perception that Hollywood is all about making movies. It's not. Hollywood is about making deals. It just happens that the deals have to do with movies.

If you want to go someplace where people love the art of cinema, Hollywood is not the place. Not that there aren't people here who do, but no more so than probably Duluth.

Do I sound bitter? I'm not, really. A little jaded, maybe, but not bitter.

Anyway, so we rode our bikes there, which is another thing we don't really do. This city is not exactly bicycle-friendly, but on the way home the streets were pretty empty once we got off the main roads. It was actually pretty pleasant.

I'm writing this, I suppose, because I never had a notion of my parents' life before me. I knew some vague stuff about them--that they lived in Greece, that they had a dog named Endoxie, stuff like that. But I never got a sense of what their lives were like. By the time I came along, they'd moved to Japan and then back to the States. What they did with me in their lives was probably very different from what they did when they first got married for the simple reason that they were living in entirely different cultures.

I'm pretty sure that by the time you come along, we'll have moved out of Los Angeles to some place more conducive to raising kids. And I hope you wonder what your mom and I did before you came along.

The strange thing is, what I'm telling you about tonight is the exception, not the rule. But maybe if you see enough exceptions, you'll get a sense of what the rule is.