LA Law of the Land

You may not know that Los Angeles has a metropolitan area of 15 million, but after being there for a few days, visiting our son who works for a CBS talk show, I’ve seen this sea of people, some as far as the horizon. At a beachfront restaurant in Santa Monica they swam by us to a pier with a giant Ferris wheel illuminated with splinters of neon light, a kaleidoscope of color beneath the evening sky. The air cool, crisp, the beach wide, stretching for miles to distant mountains. No wonder people come, try to earn a living, like my son who works from 7 to 7. He dreams of owning a house on the other side of the mountain from Studio City, where his show is filmed, so he can be near the beach, the palm trees, the cool air that comes off the ocean. Dreams that drive a lot of people to LA, among them writers, who, when they're not working on a screenplay, imagine, like my son does.