Diary: A Jaded New Yorker’s View of LA… Oscar Week, the Shit Show Begins!

LA style…..

(All text and photos by Susan M. Kirschbaum)

Approximately sixty hours in Los Angeles. I’ve already  spotted Barbra Streisand a couple nights ago. She appeared at an art benefit in Santa Monica for Nomad Two Worlds, an art installation by artist to Russell James and aborigine artists, for an Australian organization that helps kids.  (Very cool that she supports this cause.) I’ve also unfortunately collided with numerous guys with gelled hair (think everything from Rob Lowe in “St. Elmo’s Fire” to Duckey in “Pretty in Pink”) I’ve been chauffered by local friends who believe forty minutes counts as  hop, skip and a jump. And, everyone’s working on “a project.” I’m missing yellow cabs and straight talk.

It’s raining ‘cats and dogs.’Cold wet rain, the kind that chills your bones. Good thing for Tom Ford who opened a store last night in Beverly Hills –Kirsten Davis showed in white dress — that the wet waited till today. But it was chilly enough last eve that I raised eyebrows at some of the Beverly Hills dames — average age seventy– who came without jackets to Ed Ruscha’s gallery opening at Gagosian in Beverly Hills. The non jacketed included Three’s Company star Suzanne Sommers in a tight black dress with what appeared to be  matching boa. I’ll admit to being amazed by her, only because  at age six, my parents did not let my baby sitter allow me to watch her show (then already in reruns) about two women living out of wedlock, with a straight guy.

I was no less struck by Ruscha’s amazing paintings — one with  ocean waves and old bed  mattresses with fine lined stitching I could almost finger– than I was struck by the fiftyish woman with the pulled skin in the bronze sequined mini dress up to…… never mind. Valentino strutted in, tan as a Brazilian coffee bean.

Transplanted New Yorkers at NOMAD charity exhibit: Film curator Andrew Saffir and nightlife queen Amy Sacco.

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