Druxy, regards your enquiry yesterday about how my move from LA was...It's been similar to yours. Fortunately, I had several old friends here...and several theatre connections, so that helped.
But what I missed and still miss most are people...not places, particularly. We had a large coterie of good, long-term friends of all age ranges. I certainly miss my meals with BK at Musso and Frank, Birds, House of Pies, and Langers.
I miss a lot of my bookstores and Amoeba and, again, Langers' pastrami. I'm beginning to miss the weather. After ice storms and too much rain and humidity, I'd prefer the bland consistency of LA weather. There is also a perspective you get from having lived in a major world city like LA that is sometimes hard to translate to anyone who has spent most of their life in a very insular environment.
I'm still not sure whatever angst I have has to do with moving or just growing older. I really hate getting older...A lot of it has to do with all my cultural references and touchstones veering to the peripherary of illrevelancy. Growing up the way we did...with just one or two TVs in the house, only three or four channels and you watched as a family, when top 40 radio could not only include rock records but even Broadway and country cross-overs, there was more interaction between the generations and so cultural lives intermingled too. The grandparent, parents, and kids all knew and liked Bob Hope or Jack Benny. Don't get that anymore. I can look in a National Enquirer these days and not recognize any of the supposed "stars" and "celebrities". The internet is also changing so much of the way we communicate and do business. I watch bookstores and CD stores dying and other shops...But I'm rambling...
But we adjust; we adjust...and find new comforts.
You, at least, went back to a place that you knew. Texas is totally new for me.
And, talk about not knowing people in the National Enquirer.
I'm so often blown away when I mention a name like Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart and the person I'm talking to gives me a blank stare.
Boy, do I know that feeling! I was once giving a talk to a college theatre class, rattling off all the people I had worked with in dinner theatre: "Shelley Berman, Nancy Kulp, Cyd Charisse, Don DeFore, Yvonne DeCarlo..." and I glanced up into these blank,uncomprehending faces, realized how much time had passed (whereas I always think of it as yesterday) and finished with "...and a lot of other people you never heard of."
When I occasionally teach a screenwriting course, I show a lot of clips from ol movies, mostly black and white, and I have to realize that when I was seeing these films, they were only twenty or thirty years old...add on another 20-40 now. Even many of my own films were made before these kids were born.
