

You worry the demand for it is unsustainable.īut you still have fond memories of that peach and mezcal cocktail at Accomplice in Mar Vista, under a photo of a topless Ryan Gosling playfully tucked into the bar shelf by a former bartender. Once the plant is harvested it never grows back. Your drink of choice, mezcal, is made with agaves that have reached their highest sugar content, which at minimum is six years but it can take longer than a decade. You’re uncertain how many of our current rituals can continue. I hope the world still affords you that privilege. These small acts, as you know, are the makings of an unspoken promise to be present. The world might be a hot mess, but I hope this much for you, and your life, however it takes shape: You deserve to dress up, to talk to a stranger, to sip something somewhere. and that maybe you should take a cue from a teenager and embrace being seen. You thought about how much work we put into announcing ourselves in L.A. You crossed the street and made your own entrance into the quietness of the Dresden, a 1950s dive of Hollywood fantasy with black-vested bartenders and curved vinyl booths. She hovered next to her party planner until the DJ’s voice announced her into a hazy lavender glow of teenage screams. You peeked inside and saw a girl celebrating her quinceañera. One rainy evening, on your way to the Dresden in Los Feliz, a flash of a sparkly seafoam-green dress caught your eye as it twinkled through the doorway of the Louvre Banquet Hall. The drinks didn’t bring out your demons, the act of being seen alone did.
#Night owl x app playback problems how to#
You remembered when your stepmom didn’t let you wear pink or shorts as a kid and how you still have to shed the influence of a backward militant feminism that makes you think too much about how to conceal yourself. At Echo Park’s Bar Caló one day you stirred the ice in a mezcal Old-Fashioned, cocooned by blush pink walls and sexy red velvet couches. You felt lonely and weirdly exposed for being covered in feathers. There were times like when you entered that packed bar in Silver Lake in a fluffy white sweater, sticking out like a white snowy owl in a flock of black leather. In observing the city, you missed the politeness of Istanbul, the solidarity of New York, the late-night jokes at Mexico City taco stands. but that doesn’t necessarily mean you connect. of our dreams.Įveryone loves to look and be looked at in L.A. These letters are part of Image issue 7, “Survival,” a collective vision for the L.A. There is a difference between feeling like you move through a big city not by yourself but fully as yourself, and you knew the latter would take practice. Without the buffer of friends or dates, solitude allowed you to listen to the city better, and made you sit and listen to yourself too. In L.A., you didn’t want to wait for anyone to sit in the rose gold seats of Bavel, or slurp frozés at Madre, or wind through the Santa Monica Mountains to weathered walls of Old Place. You have always connected with her in that way. Your grandma Adrienne used to take herself to baseball games as an undergraduate in New York City, a rare thing for a woman to do on her own. How the people in our family chart our own constellations in these infinite cities and hope it makes us feel like we belong. I’ve been thinking recently about rites of passage.

But I’m hoping you’ll take it somewhere special - that favorite bar of yours you know which one - and read it alone. I don’t know where you’ll be when you open this letter, or how you’ll feel when you see it, when you unfold it, hold it under the light. This story is part of Image issue 7, “Survival,” a collective vision for the L.A.
