The Hollywood where I grew up is a very different one from my father’s version.

Some Final Thoughts on All That:

1. It was the most fun I have had in like, years.

2. I was the first person to cry, because I am an unstoppable sap. I was also the first to lose part II of our drinking game, so that right there is my second Manhattan of the evening.

3. In fact, there are precious few photographs of me without a drink in hand.

4. Which is probably because the guys had, at that point, decided I was an easy mark and taken it upon themselves to keep me knee-deep in whiskey for the evening. If you are going to get married, find some fun Ecuadorian groomsmen, won’t you? Ones who like drinking and dancing and who will encourage everyone’s terrible drunk Spanish? Guests will have a lot more fun if you do.

5. Oh also: bouquets! So heavy! My wrists are still sore. As are my feet. And my voice.

6. Dressing up like a Real Girl requires a crazy amount of stuff. You start with shoes and a dress and the proper underthings but then there is all of the makeup and the makeup’s fussy brushes and hair needs styling accessories and appliances and products. Maybe some perfume? Certainly a tiny purse and tiny versions of the makeup for touch ups. Double-stick tape for propriety’s sake. The good goddamn sense not to wear serious heels for an hour-long ceremony might be nice, too, but I was not born that way, it seems.

7. Even still, though, lacquered and shellacked and taped into the dress, looking like a bridesmaid, feeling like a fool: it really was the most fun.

I took an ill-advised nap yesterday afternoon and woke up when I was supposed to be leaving for the rehearsal, sprawled out on my little twin bed in cutoffs and a tee shirt, raw and confused and still helplessly sleepy as I put on a dress and some earrings and tumbled out the door. I drove the freeway I took to high school and listened to loud hip hop to keep from crying— about what I’m not sure I could tell you. Some particular protective layer had come off while I slept and suddenly it seemed overwhelming: my neatly done hair and nice dress, my mother’s big expensive car with its growling motor, the Los Angeles sun full and desert-warm through the windshield, every familiar inch of the 101 rolling by. The fact that I felt like I was going to a Sweet Sixteen and I was on my way to a country club to rehearse for a friend’s wedding; the fact that, even sleepy and confused, I knew perfectly well how to do this.

The Sweet Sixteens I did go to were generally lavish affairs, brunch for fifteen at a nice hotel restaurant with a video of the lucky girl receiving her bow-topped BMW, and favors for everyone who came; I would shyly valet my birdshit-spotted Honda and try to sweep inside knowingly, wearing oversize sunglasses and both of my pieces of Tiffany’s jewelery and looking at the other girls, smooth and lovely and sophisticated, put together, feeling intensely delighted when I felt I fit in. I knew it was a costume, and I loved that I knew how to put it on. It was important that sometimes I could look like a rich girl, too. I didn’t want to be one; prep school was an easy education in how little money could really get you, past a certain point. But I wanted to know I had the key to their world, and that I could pass an afternoon among them unnoticed.

This did not feel like that, exactly; I was among my closest friends, girls I’ve known since preschool, and there was no pretense or costume about it. I just liked the dress I was wearing and the way it looked on me; I had gotten a haircut, which meant neat trimmed bangs and the whole thing straight and shiny, for once. (It is deeply dismaying to me how instantly prettier I feel, still, with straight hair, more acceptable-looking, almost.) I liked looking down to the 405 pouring over the hill into the valley and talking about transit with other natives, high up above our city. It was scary because it wasn’t an afternoon in someone else’s world: I couldn’t pretend that it was just my stupid friends getting older and behaving, oddly, like grown ups.

The hour between the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner coincided with happy hour, so we took the Ecuadorian groomsmen to a fancy bar in Westwood with pink drinks on special: padrinos, cranberry mojitos, pomegranate margaritas. At dinner we played a drinking game with the wine the waiters kept pouring; J worked out a signal with one of them, palm raised and fingers extended: keep ‘em coming, sir, in five minute intervals.

Late, drunk, he leaned across the table to me. “Ignacio is getting married tomorrow,” he said. “Do you know what that means? Do you really know what that means?”

“It means that Allison is getting married tomorrow,” I said, meaning the same thing. Neither of us is remotely ready for this, but faced with our friends we had to acknowledge: they are. They were calm at the center of it, greeting everyone, making rounds, passing through the rituals of the grown up world. Many people have expressed surprise at how traditional young couples’ weddings are; “I thought our generation would do this differently,” A observed to me the other night. But it made sense, then, among all those relatives: it isn’t how I’d do it myself, but it serves as a kind of proving ground. When we were sixteen it was enough to put on the right clothes, show up on time and pick up the right fork. Now you throw the party yourself, inviting the right relatives, putting together a reasonable registry and a playlist that won’t offend. Weddings are fucking arcane; you participate in the full cultural rite as if to say, I know what these rules are and I can follow them just as well as you can.

As far as I can tell, the difference between behaving like an adult and actually being one is that you stop seeing it as performance— there is no secret thrill to picking up toilet paper and remembering to do all of the dishes before you go away for the weekend. It used to seem like a game; some days, recently, I realize it’s become habit. But I’m young enough to be scared of it all, still, and a little scared of myself. I’m going to be a bridesmaid today; no one who looks at me will think this is a joke or a ruse or a little girl playing dress up. I might not be fooling anyone, actually, particularly myself. I might just have to be there. I’ll let you know how it goes.

OK but actually, this is the best story about growing up in LA:

I was shopping with my mom in a little boutique near our house when I was 12 or 13— 1999, maybe early 2000. Two women walked in as we were leaving, laughing and talking loudly enough that they were pretty impossible to miss. Their conversation was vaguely vulgar; when we got out onto the street my mom paused. “God, did you hear them?” she said, “they were so loud. But that one woman was really beautiful. Just stunning.”

I looked at her for a long moment. My mom’s doesn’t read US Weekly or anything, but she has seen a movie or two. She used to work on them. She can usually spot an actress at a hundred paces.

“Mom.” I said, very slowly, honestly a little worried about her eyes or her head or something. “Of course they were. That was Catherine Keener and Julia Roberts.”

In response to this nonsense:

Go to a tiny, Jewish private school. Absolutely don’t believe it when you learn that Jews make up .03% of the world’s population. Realize, at 12, that you aren’t sure you’ve ever met a non-Jew.

Have a father who works in the movie business; sometimes, after dinner, when the weather’s nice, walk down to a nearby studio to check in on his equipment on set. Have your first & only IMDB credit read “Baby R,” because you and your family appeared briefly in a movie about space travel when you were an infant.

Go to a private high school that is three times of the size of other private schools but dwarfed by the public ones. Know your high school’s reputation for having kids who are intense, brilliant, and crazy spoiled. Realize eventually that the gradations between these schools are miniscule; realize that, in the tiny teenage mind in its tiny teenage world, this only exacerbates the idea that they aren’t.

Go to at least one Bar or Bat Mitzvah every weekend of seventh grade. Go to parties at temple social halls, the House of Blues, the Beverly Hills Hotel. See ice sculptures, video invitations, customized tee shirts. See Dustin Hoffman do an aliya. See Magic Johnson at the service. Giggle at Warren Beatty at the party.

Learn to drive the minute you turn fifteen. Take to it immediately. Find yourself totally unable to recall how you survived before you could just like, go places. Whenever.

Meet up with friends on streetcorners to talk through the evening’s parties. Complain about how the valley is like, too far. Agree that the Palisades are like, not happening. Stay on the eastside. Drive around. Turn the radio up; sing along loudly.

Start smoking pot. Smoke a lot of it; it’s the only thing that gets you out of your head. Have a “dealer” who is actually a high school classmate with a medical connect. Smoke in his enclosed front yard; laugh about the idea of getting caught. Let him drive you home.

(Quit smoking when you get to college; east coast weed is laughable.)

Watch your friends start doing coke. Start doing yoga instead.

Go to college on the east coast because it seems important to meet people who didn’t grow up in California. Develop crushes on the most blue blooded boys you can find, the kind whose grandparents visit and bring cases of wine. Weather a blizzard; go out with wet hair and no hat. Wear high heels in an ice storm.

After a couple of years, buy a real coat. Somehow, never get around to proper boots.

Graduate. Come home. Spend the summer in friends’ beach houses. They’ve legalized marijuana now, but you’re still not smoking. Adopt a motto: “fat enough to float, not drunk enough to drown.” Literally and figuratively: drift.

Start to figure it out; work odd jobs. Realize that you actually don’t want to leave. Realize that California is broke— the public schools and the nonprofits and the industry, too. Get offered a job at your alma mater. Return, grudgingly, to the east.

Weather more blizzards, another ice storm. Sit inside after work, gchatting with friends who stayed. Read other people writing about the city you love and miss (and not just when it’s icy.) Feel frustrated; they aren’t getting it. Set out to write a corrective; realize that aping their style isn’t helping. Anything in the short, declarative, semi-imperative second person just sounds expansive and grandiose; it lends itself to a sort of sentimentality you can’t quite place. Find yourself unable to stop.

(The only thing I want is to find a way to write about Los Angeles that isn’t hackneyed and stupid, that conveys how wild that place is, and how wildly I love it. The canyons and the beaches, sure, but also the flat stretches, the railyards and suburbs down the 5 south. The way the air clears after it rains; the jacarandas, night blooming jasmine, hibiscus. Driving home from the beach in my bathing suit; getting caught in traffic; going to dinner with sand in my hair.)