Life, turned inside out

LOS ANGELES is a place of few clear demarcations; a region distinguished by merging transition roads and neighborhoods that flow headlong into one another.

So too do its seasons.

My memories of growing up here serve up a succession of Junes with a low ceiling of gray clouds. I knew that “June gloom” could be with us for weeks even though store catalogs and endless television commercials were abundant with picnics and clambakes and staged swimming-hole adventures. Those were somebody else’s summers.

In L.A. we’d swim and sun and wear flip-flops year-round. So, carrying around a sweatshirt, or more likely a Baja hoodie, in June seemed a small inconvenience, when you had a September and October that still allowed for sleeveless blouses and bare legs.

Here, the official start of summer announced itself in a different fashion, surreptitiously, mostly in a series of shifts in customs. For my family, the first real summer day meant it had finally warmed enough for the wooden picnic table to be relieved of its tomato plants and succulents, hosed off, then draped with colorful cloth. Dinner was prepared outside by my father instead of inside by my mother, and served under the lacy covering of backyard apricot, plum and lemon trees.

Summer meant rituals were turned inside out. The things we did inside, we began to do outdoors night after night. It started with dinner, and as the weeks progressed it extended to concerts and black-and-white movies projected in bad 16-millimeter prints, thrown up on a stucco wall in the backyard of one of my oddball friends.

Being outside created a “big room,” almost theatrical feeling: There was something even more menacing about the flash of terror in Peter Lorre’s eyes, while I took it all in sitting on a retired beach towel on a drought-afflicted lawn. There was something that much more affecting listening to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Third Piano concerto on the stereo as the evening’s first ocean breeze moved across the canyon, or eating a beautiful white peach or an icebox cold plum.

Much as there are the backyard experiences I will forever associate with summer, there is music in public places too. L.A. has long had a collection of open-air venues: the Hollywood Bowl, the Greek Theatre, the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, the Universal Amphitheatre, when it wasn’t “Gibson” and didn’t have a roof.

Early on, summer meant pop classics at the Bowl -- Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven -- and a picnic with friends who had also suffered through Saturday piano lessons. Our reward was the cheap seats: the orchestra as distant yet striking as a smoggy sunset.

Years later at the Greek and the Ford, there were roots reggae and African high-life and Brazilian samba, all of it unfurling and brilliant as bolts of fabric. Out of the confines of a hall, it might as well have been your own backyard. It was intimate, kick-off-your-shoes casual or, as at the Ford, a join-the-dance-party-onstage free-for-all.

Despite its subtle onset, summer upped the ante. I had fixations about what made summer summer, and it started with what music made for the proper backdrop. Stan Getz was always my first choice: There was something about his phrasing -- blowing hot, then cool -- that complemented the blazing days that ease into gentle nights. By the time I was old enough to see him in a club, he was taking workmanlike swings through his bossa nova mandatories, referring to “Desafinado” as “Dis Here Finado,” and not always tongue-and-cheek. But those worn-out songs from “Getz/Gilberto” had beautiful melodies, and I was certain that if I were able to hear them outside, they would bloom brand-new.

Getz died a few months before he was to headline a summer show -- the first I would have been able to see -- at the Hollywood Bowl in 1991. But I’ve held onto the ticket. I felt not just a loss, but a sense of confusion. The soft guitar, that whispering saxophone seemed like a season’s soundtrack. Without it, I was knocked off balance.

I’ve found ways to regain it over time. And to this day, summer isn’t officially summer until I find a beautiful patio to sit on for a late-night dinner with friends, just as the heat of the day has finally given way, or listen to Brazilian music under the trees, or even -- I was heartened to find a couple summers ago in Pasadena -- chance into a occasion to watch a movie in a courtyard, projected on a wall. This time though, with the benefit of a screen.

Those pieces slide in place, the walls and ceiling slide away, and all the things L.A. was and is, night jasmine and orange blossoms, come into play. They put me in touch with my old, persistent sense memory of summers in L.A.

*

Lynell George is a senior writer for West and, come mid-June, will be navigating around town streaming “Getz/Gilberto” and “Jazz Samba.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Get up and dance: At the Brazilian Summer Festival, the audience is encouraged to shake it on stage under the stars. This year, the band Forrocacana is the headliner. 7 p.m. June 4. John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. $38; $12 for ages 12 and younger. (323) 461-3673, www.fordamphitheatre.org.

Off the wall: Among the outdoor film screenings is “Screwball Classics of the ‘30s and ‘40s” at the One Colorado mall, which includes “Bringing Up Baby,” “His Girl Friday” and more. 8:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays in July. One Colorado, Old Town Pasadena. Free. (626) 564-1066.