Nancy Rommelmann:

Los Angeles will never say, hey, you’re past your freshness date; get out. Like an understanding hostess, she will make room for you even in reduced circumstances; under the stairs, maybe, but you are of course welcome to watch the paying guests eat, and really, she’d prefer if you did. It makes it that much more festive. And there you are, still part of the action.

...Excruciation is of course its own form of entertainment, and one in which Hollywood excels. In young blond imports whose peppiness turns to bewilderment, and then bitterness, but who stay nonetheless, for decades, until they find themselves working at a dry cleaners in Laurel Canyon, but the one where Nic Cage drops off his jackets so, you never know. Of nose jobs and boob jobs and platypus lips and calf implants, each an attempt to make you both better than you were and the same as everyone else, a zero sum game for everyone but the plastic surgeons. Of pretty mommies in expensive yoga-wear, their figures identical to their preteen daughters’, who hang back from the counters at the Japanese bubble-tea shops of West Los Angeles, trying and failing to not appear fragile and spacey and altogether ill-equipped to decide whether they’re hungry. And the couple in line, just ahead of me, at the Malaysian restaurant in the Farmers Market, a 50-something woman and her slightly younger gay companion. She, with so much Botox in her face and collagen in her lips she resembled Cesar Romero playing the Joker in the old Batman TV series. He, in a string tank-top that revealed a Schwarzeneggerian chest, a stunning contrast to hair fringed coquettishly above his eyes, eyes that had been surgically stretched between jubilation and terror, the same expression he might have come by naturally had he opened his apartment door at the end of the day and found sixty people yelling, “SURPRISE!” The couple’s bodies might have been politely scanning the overhead menu, but their psyches were cocooned in some existential web, and I, I could not look away, despite and perhaps because doing so made my stomach hurt.