About, but not limited to, Van Nuys, CA.
In the archives of the Los Angeles Public Library are many old photographs from defunct newspapers such as the Valley Times and the Herald Examiner.
Thanksgiving is always a holiday where family, togetherness, food, and feeding the hungry are foremost.
The old ways of thinking about this holiday are on display in some of the images below, taken in the 1950s and 60s.
A tailgate prayer and Thanksgiving feast was brought to the parking lot of Dunn-Edwards on Sepulveda this morning. Attending the event, sponsored by the Iglesia Mision Divina, were the very few day worker/painters who normally congregate at the paint store when it is open for business.
There was something spiritual and signficant, human, kind and touching here this morning. 
One of the first lessons new arrivals to Hollywood learn is that you make friends with people who can do something for you.
It’s a secret that is out in the open, one that many imagine they alone own.
I was as guilty of it as anyone else when I moved here in 1994 and thought a 15 year friendship with a television producer would lead to work and connections. Instead it just ended in bad words and we never spoke again.
Poisonous as it is, the tendency to believe that high connections produce happiness and fulfillment leads people into dead ends. And the idea that every single new friend should have some mechanical use is part of the reason people here have so many friends, and hardly any good friend.
This was one of the weeks I was back at work turning people I hardly knew into friends. Because I have written a webseries. And I want people to work on it. And I’m pitching it around and thinking that I’m getting somewhere by speaking personally to those whose skills or interests might correlate to mine.
You own a studio and you build sets?
You went to film school and you’ve shot video?
You are funny and you act?
You’ve never acted and you want to?
You’re a producer because you call yourself one?
I’m going to be your next friend.
This is the time of year when the weather turns colder and leaves turn golden and I think of those times I would cook Thanksgiving dinner with my mother and father in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, and she would rip out the entire food section of the New York Times and we would try and create something artistic like Creole Oyster Wild Rice Stuffing that would later be eaten and despised by my father and brother.
And when my parents were here in California, on a holiday visit, or living here, we would all gather at a relative’s house. And my mother and I would drink many glasses of wine and eat several helpings of turkey and stuffing, potatoes and pie, and wander around, not talking to anyone, but just enjoying a stuffed stupor, while outside Christmas lights twinkled and cold winds blew. And life was bracing and lovely and numbingly satisfying.
Those occasions were times I had to testify to my mother on plans and ideas and money-making schemes I had dreamed up. “I think I might work on a new documentary in January Mom. Nobody is hiring in December. The whole city is dead.” Some of those Thanksgivings, especially in the 1980s and 90s, involved a blonde woman named Carmel on my arm, and a message handed out by matriarchal authority that I was only welcomed home as a heterosexual.
Everything is gone now, the house, my youth, my Ralph Lauren tweed jackets and wool pants, my mother and father. My brother and his family escape to luxury in San Francisco and eat burritos and sushi in the Mission District while I stay back and think about which friends or family are really true and who are not.
Thanksgiving (like Halloween, Christmas, Hanukah, Easter and the Fourth of July) is not thought of too highly by my Malaysian born partner, but he is willing to eat everything provided it is drenched in maple syrup.
This year we were invited to several places but we will cook at home. It sounds cozy and dull. But I should be thankful I think.
Some friends from out-of-town, people whom I know from years back, may visit Los Angeles and I will see their photos on Facebook but they will never call. They will be busy, they will be showing off their children, their production photos, their visits to Disneyland. And I will still call them my friends.
One poetic and articulate friend is now an executive producer rebranded as an authentic Southern voice and storyteller. He was one of the quality people I met when I moved here. If I live here 20 more years I will probably encounter others of great self-importance.
Living in Hollywood for twenty years I still have idea how to quantify or recognize authenticity.
We had driven, swiftly, across Highway 10, after a brief diversion through downtown Los Angeles that accidentally deposited us onto the 5 North. We eventually found the 210, the 57, and shot across those mall-covered lands that stretch from the ocean to the desert.
This was a family holiday, a Thanksgiving out in La Quinta, a 1920s golfing, tennis playing, horseback riding, swimming-pool sprinkled property surrounded by purple mountains.
We went with those relatives who swing from spa-to-spa the way monkeys navigate the trees. In another 10 days, they will be flying to the Caribbean, and next year, may be spending months in Spain, England and France. A few days in a luxury resort is as natural to them as stopping off at Trader Joes for milk and eggs.
La Quinta welcomed us with freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, plucked from those hundreds of citrus trees that are planted here. “Sir, may we take your bags?” a bellhop asked. I did not take him up, preferring to load my own into our little casita.
A fireplace roared inside a vaulted lobby furnished with large leather sofas, iron chandeliers and polished ceramic tiles. Guests drove up, valets parked their cars, and I glimpsed many of those fine women who smile with their lips closed, and those haggard husbands, who leave behind, for a few days, lucrative days at Chicago’s Board of Trade and make their way out west to play golf or sit by the pool sipping champagne.
Much of La Quinta seemed like old Southern California filtered and cleansed for Middle Westerners. There were almost no black, Asian or Latino guests, and what passed for Jewish was blonde or riding a scooter in board shorts, just like Brentwood. There were many families here, many kids, and if anybody had a gay thought or a tattoo on their leg, it was well hidden.
On the first day, I swam in the pool and went for a long run around a wide golf course. LaQuinta is behind walls and gates, and it adjoins a 1980s era, beige community of garage doors and affluent deadly silence.
There are a few restaurants where they serve Mexican or coffee house foods, and they are quite good if you don’t mind spending $20 for two tamales. In case you forget your golf shorts, there is a handy Polo Ralph Lauren store on the premises.
On the third day, of beautiful weather in perfect surroundings, my eyes started to tear up. I got a horrendous allergy attack. I took an Alavert and crawled into bed. I had never experienced a worse case of temporary blindness, one that forced me to shut my door, close my eyes, and pull the blankets over my head.
The watery, itchy, parched eyes lasted for much of the last day, until relief finally came with another dose of Zyrtec pills and eye drops. Whatever atmospheric element had attacked me was now diminished.
At twilight, still in a drug induced haze, I grabbed my camera, ventured outside, and walked around La Quinta in the orange-tinted light of sunset. The sun drops behind the mountain, dim electric garden lights turn on, women with wet hair change from bathing suits to bathrobes, cocktails are poured and children disappear. This is a haunting and fleeting hour, a temporary time between the activity of day and the promise of evening, when hope is hungry and our appetites turn to wine and fragrance and love and food.
On the last night, we drove off the property and into the windy town of La Quinta and ate pizza at an outdoor restaurant under the heat lamps. We met the other relatives and their friends, who were drinking near an open-air fireplace. One woman I saw, hair tied back, covered in a cashmere wrap, drank red wine.
Inside the resort of La Quinta, they have erected a plaque near a tile bench. It says that Greta Garbo and John Gilbert sat there, “basking in the sun and watching the Santa Rosa Mountains.” I don’t know if this is entirely true or not, but if you visit here you might be tempted to do the same.
Here in Van Nuys 
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