Posts tagged: maria alexander

Eddie Izzard says that G-d doesn’t love Los Angeles. Then again, he also says that he just performed in Las Vegas and Phoenix and those folks would find Hell a mild summer day. From a temperature perspective anyway. Apparently Phoenix gets jokes about squids and ink faster or possibly it is just easier to get a Phoenix audience to show appreciation aloud. Eddie Izzard performs two more nights this week in Slowsquidwritingjokesville (aka Hollywood) to finish out his Stripped tour in La-la-land.

My friend writer Maria Alexander invited me out to the sold out Eddie Izzard show at the Kodak Theatre. At least, I think it was sold out because it was insanely crowded and took me an hour to get home (once I found my car) even though I live down the street. Despite the fact that a non-Angeleno might consider my home walking distance from the Kodak Theatre, I had never been there before, although of course I’ve seen it on television like anyone else. In person, even the non-box seats are staggered in such a way that everyone gets a clear view of the stage. The ushers are courteous and helpful. The bathroom lines move almost alarmingly fast. The only oddity is that they don’t really show you the nosebleed seats on TV. The venue is like twice the size I thought it was and there are definitely seats farther away from the stage, even box seats, than might be ideal. Our seats were a bit far back, but we had a really awesome straight down the center view I enjoyed. I had to do four laps around three levels of the parking garage at Hollywood and Highland after the show …

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I’ve been meaning to go to one of the Media Bistro shindigs for media professionals, like yours truly, for ages. After seeing Laurel Toby speak, I even moved the post-it reminder a bit higher up on my monitor. I finally managed to roll over to one a couple of weeks ago. Horror author and poet Maria Alexander and I rolled over to the Luxe Hotel on Rodeo Drive, which is a fairly swanky, if odd, location for a book party. Aside from just hanging out being, you know, media-like, the Media Bistro party was also to celebrate the release of Gabe Rotter’s first novel Duck Duck Wally. Maria and I missed the hotel the first time we drove by because it is a boutique hotel and thus not very hotel-looking, so it blended into the landscape. I almost always stay in boutique hotels when I travel. The service and the suites always feel more personal than in like a Hilton or whatever. And there are usually bowls of green apples, no matter which boutique hotel it is. As I live in Los Angeles, I don’t stay in hotels here and neither Maria nor I had been to anything thrown by this particular organization before. We both went with mildly dressy professional and black. I know the color scheme is a shocker. When I saw that the hotel was actually next door to the Michael Kors store on Rodeo, I thought it was perhaps some sort of weird psychic flash which had caused me to just buy a bunch of black Michael Kors clothing this season. A good omen.

The party was fun. Maria and I chatted with a variety of interesting people. It …

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