There's No Place Like Home

I never expected to be raising a child in Los Angeles. Actually, I never really expected to live here at all, but life is funny and I've made more than a few big leaps into the unknown in my time. For me, this city has been an ever-changing panorama of fortuitous, almost cosmic-seeming connections against the vast and sprawling chaotic backdrop of civilization on the end of the earth.

I'm sure I will write more about the complex love I have for this city, but for tonight one beautiful facet shines particularly bright. Los Angeles is a land of transplants, wanderers, dreamers and orphans drawn here seeking fame, fortune, escape, and other ephemeral and intangible pleasures. The sense of hovering on the edge of something-- the continent, the big break, a breakdown-- is always palpable. Some are driven crazy by it, but for others a fierce and fast bond is forged. I fall into the latter camp and am blessed to be a part of an ever-growing tribe of creative, conscious individuals. We have friends here from around the world, each building something-- a theatre company, a business, a school, a family-- and it is this unity in diversity that comforts me, that brings joy to this unexpected home. A favorite quote, one I wrote inside a journal that I carried with me through perhaps my most uncertain and volatile times, seems particularly apt:

 So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began. (Salman Rushdie)