A Homeless Actress
Welcome to Los Angeles, where even the homeless dream of making it big.
Actually, this is Santa Monica. The shopping cart belongs to a homeless woman. She was standing about 50 feet away, talking on her cell phone. (Talking to her agent, perhaps?) You can see that she has her 8″x10″ headshot ready because you never know when you’ll be discovered.
Hooray for Hollywood.
Man on Fire!
A random encounter with a fire-wielding man in Koreatown.
This is Koreatown
Somewhere in Koreatown: a four-year-old boy stands with his pants down, facing traffic, pissing into a gutter. His mother stands behind him, waiting for him to finish. I ask her why she’s allowing this to happen. She responds in Spanish. I get the gist: “He said he needed to go.”
There are numerous businesses nearby. Plus an alley or two. Any one of them are better choices than letting the boy take aim at passing cars in broad daylight.
Speaking of poor choices, I walk past two young teenage mothers (13 or 14-ish) pushing baby strollers. The younger girl has a blanket draped over her baby’s stroller. “Why you coverin’ yo baby like that?” asks the older girl.
“Shoot, I don’t want mah baby lookin’ like no nigga.”
The two Ebonics-speaking Hispanic teenage moms giggle and laugh. I move on.
A 450-pound woman waddles across the street. She’s got a baby in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. She takes her time crossing, but quickly puffs away. Her massive flabby arms are covered with random tattoos, one of which is a Playboy bunny.
Did she get kicked out of the Playboy Mansion for gaining 350 pounds and popping out a fat baby with a one-way ticket to diabetes? Unlikely. One of the neighborhood gangs commandeered the Playboy logo years ago. Baby daddy is probably a local cholo boy.
I’m done with my tour. I walk into the usual Korean joint and order the usual. A chat with the waitress reveals my Korean is getting worse. Though it seems my Spanish is getting better–I understood most of what that woman said about her little boy needing to go. I think soon, maybe, I’ll know enough to tell her that she needs to work on her parenting skills. But then I tell myself to forget it. This is Koreatown.
Korean Women are No Joke
This in from the Chicago Sun-Times:
Kim Ja Moon wasn’t about to let two men rob her Oak Park dry cleaners in broad daylight, even if one had a gun.
When the men, twice her size, demanded money from Kim, 66, she refused.
When they ordered Kim — all 4-foot-10 and 100 pounds of her — and her husband to the rear of the business, she said she stood her ground.
Finally, when they ran off, she chased them — and the cops nabbed one of them.
Did I ever tell you that Korean women are no joke? Too bad she didn’t have a gun. But she did have some fine parting words for the suspects:
“He [should] study,” she said. “Get out [of jail], he find a job.”
“Don’t go to school, no job,” she added.
Well said, Mrs. Kim. Well said. Too bad your words fall on deaf ears.