A friend is visiting from California this week. She told me yesterday that it’s great to be back in NY – she prefers our intellectual climate. It seems that topics of conversation in L.A. tend to be very different, and she has been growing weary of people at social gatherings starting out a conversaation by asking her: “Which one, Jennifer or Angelina?”<\/p>\n
For those of you who cannot decode this mysterious question, it refers to which gal one would like a certain top movie star to end up with, in a romantic sense. Apparently you must be on either one side or the other on this issue. It’s kind of like that other question about the war in Iraq, with the difference that people take the Jennifer\/Angelina question far more seriously.<\/p>\n
Of course there are at least two issues that would come to my mind, were I to be confronted by such a conversational opener: (1) Is this really a good way to assess new people in your life? (2) Why is this question even any of our business<\/i>?<\/p>\n
But somehow, over the course of the day, the New Yorker in me has started worrying this question, trying to tie it in with my own world view. And I have caught myself continuing the conversation in my head, with an answer that goes roughly like this:<\/p>\n
“I would say neither one of those. Most likely Johnny. This would leave Vanessa heartbroken back in Paris, but she’d salve her wounds by stealing away with Nicolas. Feeling snubbed, Carla would make a play for Angelina, but would somehow end up with Jennifer instead. Meanwhile Angelina, feeling literary, would secretly start seeing Salmon. Not to be outdone, Miley would begin to date Kazuo. This would encourage Woody to call up Natalie – not realizing that the film he’d just seen her in was from 1994.<\/p>\n
Natalie, of course, would have scooped them all by dating Noam, but she would leave him for Benicio. Unfortunately for her, Benicio would soon leave her for Javier, while Sean and Josh would shock everyone by eloping, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.<\/p>\n
All of this would inspire Anne to finally go back to Ellen. But Ellen, in a stunning turn of events, would suddenly opt for Brad, who would leave Johnny, which is ok, because Johnny would end up in a happy and satisfied ménage à trois<\/i> with Geoffrey and Orlando, and they would all three be adopted by Tilda.”<\/p>\n
That might just be the closest I can come to L.A. party conversation. Of course, the person who’d asked the question would probably have fled in alarm and confusion around the time I got to Nicolas and Carla. Which would probably be for the best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A friend is visiting from California this week. She told me yesterday that it’s great to be back in NY – she prefers our intellectual climate. It seems that topics of conversation in L.A. tend to be very different, and she has been growing weary of people at social gatherings starting out a conversaation by … Continue reading “Party conversation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":814,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}