To Everyone Else, You’re From the Land of ‘Ahhhhhhs’

I’m not sure when I turned into an L.A. woman. But the inescapable fact of it was clear as soon as I started traveling for my job. Whatever my destination, big city or tiny hamlet, my name was never the important part of the introductions. It was the inevitable follow-up line: “She’s from L.A.”

“Ahhhhhh,” they would say with a knowing nod as I extended my hand.

Over time, I’ve learned that the assumptions behind those nods--about my lifestyle, politics, taste, tax bracket and sanity--vary from place to place. In a small city in eastern Oregon, the nod was followed by profuse apologies as we headed from the airport to dinner. “I’m afraid we have no vegetarian restaurants here,” my host explained.

In Baltimore, the cabdriver ferrying me to a meeting for which I was very late announced that he too was a “laid back” sort. Then he launched into a description of his therapist and the exact nature of his intimacy problems. My every effort to stop was thwarted with a cheery: “Oh, but being from L.A. and all, you’ll be interested in this. . . .” In the end, I could not escape from the cab without admiring wallet photos of his “mellow” dog.

I have been asked more times than I can count how to go about hiring a personal trainer. During the O.J. trial, I was pumped mercilessly for “insider” details no one believed I didn’t possess. Even my appearance has been filtered through my address.

“You’re not what I expected!” exclaimed the person picking me up in Alabama, though I had given her a pretty good description. I took stock of my boring navy suit and standard raincoat, and wondered what she could have had in mind. Black spandex? Nose ring?

I’ve never lived anywhere where image is so determinedly embraced over reality. But it’s really the outsiders who want to see L.A. and its people that way.

I should know. I was one of them.

*

I arrived in L.A. from a comfortable and predictable life in New England, lured with my husband by good job offers. The first hint of how profoundly our change of address would affect the way we personally were judged came at a going away party for us.

A prominent dowager who did not know us well at all felt free to bellow: “I understand this is a great opportunity and adventure for you and your husband. But Los Angeles? My dear, you have children!”

The room became quiet as people waited for my answer. Would moving to Pittsburgh have put me on the spot like that? I responded with some chatty nonsense that concealed the turmoil I felt. After all, I had been raised on the same media diet, in which the quintessential L.A. story was always one of aberrant extremes.

Truth be told, there was quite a bit of that in our first years here. Riots, floods, fires and earthquakes, followed by the jurisprudential years of O.J. Simpson and Heidi Fleiss.

And what were we doing during all of this? The same as most American folks. We worked, paid our bills and cherished family and friends. We lived in a quiet, unglitzy neighborhood that the crew of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” might happen upon only through a gross misreading of the Thomas Guide. We spent a lot less time “doing lunch” at Citrus than flipping burgers in the snack bar at North Venice Little League, where our children played ball.

If anyone in my travels ever asked me about life in L.A., there are lots of things I would have been happy to tell them. I would have described the city’s amazing resilience, putting itself back together over and over again where any one of the recent disasters would have KOd other places I’ve lived. I’ll never forget the sight of the huge cranes ripping apart the wreckage of the Santa Monica Freeway with the Northridge earthquake not 24 hours old, or the folks who poured into riot-scarred neighborhoods with push brooms and a shared sense of injury.

I could tell them about the experiences of my children in Los Angeles’ public schools, where the cultural diversity to which some adults pay lip service is a living, daily reality. They have had the opportunity to learn and compete and play with friends named Timur, Dikla, Rahul, Rosa and Yevgeny, and to learn firsthand about how their classmates came to call this country home.

I guess you could say our years here turned me into a fierce L.A. partisan. This should make me really popular in our new posting: New York.

We settled in the East last month in a small town outside the city, thanks to my husband’s L.A. company, which decided to send him to the Manhattan office.

The school guidance counselor confessed to being astonished that our transplanted Angeleno children were not fluent in Spanish.

A new acquaintance marveled that our 13-year-old knows to offer a handshake when introduced. And everybody has warned us about the weather, as if sunshine is all we know how to handle.

The biggest wallop, though, came on the day I wandered into a gift shop while searching Main Street for a hardware store.

Nothing special about my outfit that Saturday: T-shirt, jeans, sandals.

Except that I was from L.A.

That slipped out as the gift shop proprietress swished about in her stylish caftan, showing me the merchandise. The revelation literally spun her around.

She was wearing a pair of those heavy-framed glasses, designed to make you look brainy and conversant with the works of obscure poets.

Over the tops of these she peered as if seeing me for the first time, pointedly taking me in from head to toe.

“Ahhhhhh,” she said with a knowing nod.