L.A. Woman

Chasing The Dream At 50

Hello, and thank you friends for checking out my debut Substack: L.A. Woman, which will come out biweekly, and feature my observations and experiences about reinventing my life in the thick of mid-life here in the City of Angels. And, if the gods inspire, since Southern California has such a rich history in music, I might throw in a song that I played on repeat because it kept me going. Dream chasing requires fuel, and music is fuel. Our lives all have soundtracks.

Of course, the title is a nod to The Doors’ song of the same name, which was released two years before I was born. For those who don’t know, The Doors formed here in Los Angeles in 1965. As a college freshman, I kept a Jim Morrison poster taped above my bed, and visited his grave in Paris in 1993 because Morrison was a poet, and as an English major, it seemed almost compulsory to have a crush on him. Next up is Mazzy Star’s “California,” which was released in 2013, and is a gorgeous song I played over and over and over this past February as I drafted an essay for an online literary journal called Panorama that you should check out. Titled “It Can Be Beautiful For Everyone,” the essay is a love letter and a plea to Los Angeles, asking how a city so gorgeous can allow the brutality of homelessness to continue. A second column, which will focus on L.A.’s landscape of theaters and the importance of movie palaces, will come out this summer. Both essays talk about pursuing dreams.

And, that’s the thing with living in L.A.; it is a city of dreams and broken dreams, and right now, I am somewhere in the middle, and unsure of where I will land as I continue to build my writing career in the face of clickbait algorithms, AI, and ageism. Any climb is hard—physical or figurative—and this climb, this pursuit of wanting things for myself in a youth-obsessed, sun-drenched city where I’ve wanted to live for years, and at an age in which I now qualify for AARP membership has proven to be uphill, zigzag, and sometimes Sisyphean. But it’s entirely mine, and there’s a singular beauty in that. I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing, where I want to be doing it even if I am extremely late to the party. But is anyone’s climb truly linear? We only get to hear or read about the ones who were catapulted into the stars, but I imagine most of us toil here on Earth trying, and trying, and trying. I want you to know that you’re not alone.

And, to really begin this climb just as I approached my 50th birthday? Seriously? My timing has always been, let’s say, interesting. I arrived in L.A. in August 2018 at age 45 and on the brink of divorce to a man whom I had met when I was 24 years old. I earned very little money and knew three people here. Eighteen months after arriving, the city went into lockdown as Covid-19 stopped the world. In March 2022, I pursued a certificate in television writing at UCLA Extension and completed that certificate one month after the Writers Guild of America went on strike in May 2023, the summer of Hot Labor. I seem to show up when things shut down. But I’m here. And, I keep trying, hoping for success, a lucky break, a “yes!” Because who wants to stop in their 50s? Who wants to stop at all? I sometimes wonder if that’s part of the lesson in setbacks and failure, to test whether you want to stop or keep going. How badly do you want this? And what would stopping even look like anyway? How can failure shape who I am becoming? Should we define success as the journey or the outcome? I ask myself these questions all the time, and why failure matters in our progress, something I definitely did not consider in my 20s or 30s when success showed up with such regularity that I didn’t notice.

Know Failure so that when Success shows up, you recognize her right away, because maybe it’s been a while and she’s aged, too—a sultry diva wearing a sequin tracksuit and sensible shoes like Hokas because Success is always on the go and has to be in many places at once. And Success gives zero fucks about being late, but she finally found time to swing by and see you again, so you greet Success with a martini because that’s what successful people drink regardless of the hour: martinis. And you and Success sit down and talk about timing, perseverance, and patience. She doesn’t have a lot of time, but she has a few minutes to down a martini and hear your thoughts on sticking it out. She likes what you have to say. Success doesn’t care that you already celebrated your 50th birthday. Success tells you you’re exactly where you need to be. “Don’t change a thing, honey,” she says, before getting up to leave and admitting she’s also a Mazzy Star fan.

Both Success and Failure leave scars and other signs of wear and tear. L.A. may have a reputation for wanting to be seen as blemish-, wrinkle- and cellulite-free, as completely unmarred, but I am here to tell you as an out-and-about middle-aged L.A. Woman who bikes the Santa Monica-Venice beach stretch regularly, nothing could be further from the truth. That’s a Hollywood thing, not an L.A. thing. What I love about my weekend beach bike rides is the honesty in the landscape. It’s all out there: the shirtless dad bods on skateboards with their man boobs jiggling as they shimmy through the crowds, the chunky girls roller skating and lost in a tune, the scrawny, old dude in all his top-of-the-line bike gear leaving me in the dust, the tourists, the locals, the elderly couple wearing huge sun hats holding hands, the teenage couple barely wearing anything holding hands. Imperfect, tattooed bodies on the go. Success and Failure visit these people, too. 

I knew I was home when on a bike ride last year, I pedaled past a group of volleyball players on the beach. There’s always volleyball happening on the beach, but what was special about this day was that I saw a very fit, elderly woman, perhaps in her 60s or possibly around 70, who was very tan, had cellulite and a ton of wrinkles wearing a bikini thong and playing some badass volleyball with folks probably half her age. Everything about her was unapologetically out and on view. I could tell that Success had already paid this woman many visits, and maybe Failure had, too, but that wasn’t stopping her. This is not what the rest of America sees when they see L.A., an older woman knocking a serve across the net, diving into the sand. It was beautiful, and she is exactly the L.A. Woman I aspire to be, out there, still going, still trying, getting dirty, not concerned with judgment. 

Get dirty. Try the things. We need all ages out there succeeding.

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