What has started you on this?" I asked. "We were talking about the holidays."

"Los Angeles is not a safe place for a young woman alone. I feel it in my bones."

"That's your arthritis, Aunt Sadie. Do you want me to get a gun? I'd probably shoot myself in the foot."

"I'd rather you got married again."

"That might be worse than shooting myself in the foot.

When I'm Los Angeles, it's work. That's what I'm there for is work.

I've lived in Los Angeles for at least 24 years.

I'll be going to the granddaddy of the Los Angeles theaters.

Los Angeles is a bleached-out, soulless pit.

Had his room been facing west he would have noted the sparkling twenty-five-mile vista to the sea which looks almost like the Mediterranean. He would have noted how the streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath. How laid over this crosshatch are streets meandering on the diagonal creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B's garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight. Had he been facing seaward on a balcony overlooking the city the writer might have heard drifting out of a tiny apartment window the optimistic voice of a shower singer imbued with the conviction that this is a place where it is possible to be happy.