The Big Doughnut, The Redheaded Pressman, and Other Musings About L.A.

Hi everyone, it's your favorite Lost Angel, writing from the city of Lost Angels.

Oh, my word, the sun finally made an appearance here.

We found a big doughnut yesterday afternoon after gorging ourselves on sashimi at our favorite hole-in-the-wall place in Gardena.  I don't know if it was the big doughnut, but it was a big doughnut.

Judy made me drink a giant sake at lunch because I was stressing mightily about a couple of my jobs back in NYC. I didn't feel they were being covered properly in my absence.

This I expressed, quite eloquently, I thought, in the car going to lunch. Well, eloquent might be an overstatement.  Scorsese-worthy, Tarantino-esque, expletive-laden tirade is more like it. But I do have to admit, I was impressive in my creative and multi-layered uses of the word "fuck." 

After a couple of sake belts, I realized I wasn't stressing about the actual work, but about the fact that I wasn't there to rub my greasy fingers all over it.  Totally out of my head, I know.  I am here, the jobs are there, and someone else is covering for me.  There is only so much I can do, right? 

This thought, as well as the dry sake, calmed me a bit, and I settled in to enjoy my ebi and uni.  God, do I love uni sushi.  My sister had a Japanese-American friend who described it as "baby poop on rice," but I can't get enough of it.  Eating uni isn't really eating animal flesh so much as it's ingesting the essence of the sea. When you let it roll over your tongue, and the aroma fills the back of your head and you feel its tendrils creeping up into your nasal passages, you almost feel like a sea creature yourself.  Mermaidy, if I may say so.  If someone sat me down with a plate of a dozen uni sushi, I would happily schlurp them down and hold out my plate for more.

We came back and I had a couple of ridiculously easy approvals (which we totally earned after fighting with the color on one shoe -- ONE SHOE! -- and one fur purse -- ONE HANDBAG! -- all morning. Please refrain from making dirty jokes about fur purses. I thought of all of them.)  It took us, literally, hours to get the color matched to the proofs.  Such a fight, but we were all too stubborn to break down and say, "Lift it, and make new plates." Okay, after about a dozen pulls, I was ready to lift it and make new plates.  But Chuck and Frank, the pressmen, were convinced they could get there.  And after many, many hours and finally, a couple of counterintuitive genius color moves, we got there.  In my business, that's a victory.)

And a final note, on the redheaded pressman, my hot little Viking with the body like a statue, all I have to say after not seeing him for a year is, "Oh my lord. Oh my sweet baby Jesus lord. Praise God! Puh-raise God! Thank ya, jesus, thank ya."