For those of us who grew up in Los Angeles "in the good old days," Hollywood Blvd. and Hollywood itself are synonymous with adolescence--because it was a different kind of place back then. This Soul Collage card is in the Committee suit and I call it Adolesence. When you create a card you are instructed to use the following phrase: I am the one--to bring the card's deeper meaning up from the collective unconscious.
I am the one who "cruised Hollywood Boulevard" with my girlfriends instead of our hometown main street on many Saturday nights. I am the one who often saw movie stars walking on the sidewalks just like they were like the rest of us. I am the one whose girlfriend's boyfriend Jack actually owned this classic 1953 Corvette. I am the one who would wait outside the Hollywood boarding houses where upcoming starlets lived and was thrilled to see Kim Novak met by her date one time. I am the one who thought nothing of making friends with other kids cruising Hollywood Boulevard, getting in each other's cars, and going to parties in Beverly Hills and Brentwood. I am the one who got Natalie Wood's, Tab Hunter and John Derek's autographs. I am the one, with my girlfriends, who were forever hunting for the cast of Rebel Without a Cause who were rumored to be at certain parties; we never found them. I am the one who finally had a date for a movie at the Pantages with a young engineer I worked with at Lockheed--and I tripped and tumbled on the red carpeted stairway coming down from the balcony where we were seeing Simple Persuasion. I am the one who sat with a date in the old smoky Jazz City Club with a phony ID listening to Chetty Baker play My Funny Valentine. I am the one who went to dance to the big bands at the old Palladium. I am the one who got all dolled and made up to go see Grace Kelly in High Society at Grauman's Chinese Theater trying to see if what a few boys had said--that I looked like Grace Kelly. I am the one who liked to put her handprints over Marilyn Monroe's handprints at Grauman's. I am the one who once splurged with her girlfriends to dine at the old Musso and Frank Grill and faking that we knew how to use the utensils properly. (We were simple girls raised in the small towns of Sunland and Tujunga by working class parents.) But mostly we would drive back to Glendale, the home of Bob's Big Boy Drive-In after cruising Hollywood and exchange notes with everyone we knew there.
These memories are simply the tip of the iceberg. The town was shabby, but it wasn't seedy and filled with prostitutes and addicts in the 1950s--mostly teenagers, tourists and locals in those days prior to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If you are an old Hollywood aficiando, a really interesting and fun site is Haunted Hollywood.
