Day one

Once again LA surprised me by just how quickly I got myself tired out. Today Mitch and I met a friend of his father at her place off of Sunset Blvd. First of all, forget what you know about the romance of the classic movie and the thousands of songs written about the place, Sunset Blvd is a nightmare. For some god-foresaken reason the city decided to schedule construction on the road during the summer, and also don't seem to care enough to synchronize the traffic light changes to maximize traffic flow, it took us 40 minutes to travel half a mile.

Anyway, the woman we were meeting Kia has been living in LA most of her life and works as an actress and a screenwriter/editor. She took us to Mel's diner on Sunset and let us grill her with questions about getting work in LA, the path to being on stage, and general knowledge about how to survive out here knowing no one. She was nice enough to get me in touch with a few of her friends who are into improv that I can meet up with. I'm sure I'll be in touch with Kia off and on whenever I have a question about an upcoming audition or interview, frankly it's just nice to know someone in this town. One funny story though: Kia took us down to the West Hollywood drag to get some awesome frozen yogurt and as we were leaving a homeless man tried to make fire by snapping several times, he was unsuccessful.

I then drove Mitch to Burbank airport where we split ways and he went up to Portland to live with his father and work a comedy club gig for a few weeks before he then either comes back to LA or moves out to Chicago. I'm sure I'll be seeing him again but at this point I am now completely on my own.

That is of course except for my landlady/roommate Dara. Dara is incredibly nice and genuinely helpful about making me comfortable as soon as possible. She has been directing me to all the local places I need to know about and even pointed me in the direction of this cool coffee shop down the road that did a sort of story reading tonight. In NH the term would be "hipster" but in LA it was nice to just see people being themselves and to not feel like I was underdressed.

Tomorrow I have an "interview" to be on Minute to Win It, you know that game show where they do all those weird mundane tasks for money. I'm not getting my hopes up to actually get on the taped show, but it is nice to do something that I wouldn't have the opportunity to do in New Hampshire. I've also moved my audition for the Groundlings to Saturday, which actually I feel pretty good about. I think it would do me good to have a few days to feel a little more comfortable here and get my mind about me to get in the mood to do more improv.

Anyway, that's the first full day in LA. Please keep in touch everyone! Happy Trails!