The City Prolific: Weekend Events Jan 18 - 20

The weather is back to normal, and some people are rejoicing. Others, like me, are reluctant to turn their backs on winter. Having to re-adapt my wardrobe to 80 degree weather is a project.

I went for a walk today, along Santa Monica between Gower and Cahuenga. When I returned to my office, I was dripping sweat under my jeans, tall boots, and long sleeve blouse.  Someday I'll have to begin dressing like an angeleno, in flowy skirts and dresses, short shorts, and battered tshirts. When I do, I'll look to StreetGeist for inspiration. Although, lately, because our weather was cool, almost like a proper winter, their subjects were fairly bundled up.

It's weird, this whole nice weather all the time thing. Not that I'm complaining. But I wonder if it will ever be in my blood. A major part of me doesn't want it to - I like that my blood has seasons. That's how I understand life, transition, change, age. Seasons.

What is in my blood, though, is the city. This city, that city - doesn't matter, as long as there is stuff to do, culture to experience, food to taste, things to see.  That said, not a whole lot going on this weekend that's worth writing about.  Here are a few selects:

FRIDAY, JANUARY 18

John C. Reilly and Friends at the Bootleg

I heard John C. Reilly on KPCC this morning, talking about his blue grass band. He is the sweetest, most salt-of-the-earth guy, I just want to hang out with him. I was smiling ear to ear listening to his teddy bear voice.  He ended the interview by saying, "I love KPCC! I'm a KPCC listener!"

John C. Reilly and Friends appear at the Bootleg tonight.

$10:00

Doors: 8:00 pm / Show: 9:00 pm

Bootleg Bar
2220 Beverly Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90057

SATURDAY, JANUARY 19

Bootie LA

Go get wild with a bunch of twenty-somethings in Echo Park at this notorious and messy dance party.  Midnight Mashup Show and go-go eye candy from resident dance crew: R.A.I.D. (Random Acts of Irreverent Dance). Get your oh-so-slick facebook pic taken in the photo boot by scenesnaps.com

$6 before 10 PM, $12 after (21+ only)

9pm–late

Echoplex
1154 Glendale Blvd. (Back Entrance)
Echo Park, Los Angeles

SUNDAY, JANUARY 20

Kiera Hated Improv (A Very Special Catsby)

Catsby is one of the most fun indie improv shows around, organized by one of my favorite people ever, screenwriter and funny guy Chad Damiani.  On January 21st, 2012, one of CAT BATH's original members and Chad's longtime girlfriend Kiera Goodman passed away after an 18-month battle with cancer.   In honor of her memory, all of the proceeds of Sunday's show will be donated to one of her favorite charities, Karma Rescue.

Follow @LAhappenings for daily event updates.

First Friday of the Year - Hollywood, St. Germaine, Fuku Burger, Strangers

Joseph was excited about the weekend. He was IM'ing me every second of the last hour of the work day with ideas about our evening plans, and he finally, decisively declared that he wanted "burgers, Manhattans, and video games".  I suggested the usual: Stout, Umami, or The Bowery for the first two, we'd take care of the third at home later. He checked Scout Mob to see if there were any deals, and he found a "$30 for $50 Worth of Food and Drink" deal for FukuburgerLA on Cahuenga, as well as a happy hour event at Space 1520. Our plans took shape then and there.

We made one of of our typical strolls into Hollywood, walking past Franklin Village to see what was going on at UCB and to check up on the Scientology Celebrity Center - make sure those religious celebs weren't getting too rowdy - and then we turned onto Hollywood Blvd at Bronson, near what would normally be the always-lively crowds at the Music Box (sadly, it closed its doors this week, and last night it sat silent).

As we passed the W Hotel, we stopped to watch an a capella trio whoop it up in front of the Pantages. I desperately wish I'd gotten video of them, but they were so good that I got caught up in the moment, and forgot.

We arrived at Space 1520 to see that the happy hour was taking place within PUR, a vintage boutique.

A bartender mixed St. Germaine cocktails with a California Brut, and a DJ spun mashups while tipsy hipsters shopped the racks of carefully curated vintage.

I remarked on how very LA the clothing choices were, with lots of bright, Southwestern desert patterns, and Joseph mused on how very different the vibe of such an boutique would be if it were in San Francisco or New York. LA has a strong personality, and we like it.

After we'd over-indulged in St. Germaine, we walked around the corner to Fuku Burger. We've enjoyed the gourmet burger revival taking place in LA in recent years, and were excited to try another outpost. I ordered the Tamago Egg Burger, and devoured its Asian flavors in minutes. It is now, greasy hands-down, my favorite burger in LA.

From our table behind the bar, we had a straight-on view of the large television on the wall, which features a live feed of @fukuburgerla tweets. Joseph tweeted something about Fuku Burger being his new fave, but autocorrect changed the v to a c, making Fuku Burger his "new face". I tweeted a response, which prompted a surprising and hilarious exchange with some other folks in the restaurant, and we found ourselves crying from laughter over the whole thing.

As we wiped the tears from our faces, our server informed us that two men at the bar wanted us to join them for a couple of FukuBombs - a shot of sake dropped into a glass of Sapporo. The guys were great - funny and friendly, and we felt like tourists being treated by welcoming locals. The whole restaurant cheered as we guzzled our bombs.

It was a wonderful, very Hollywood night of walking, shopping, cajoling with strangers, and of course, drinking. I'm amazed I didn't wake up with a hangover.

The City Observed: Tony's Saloon

I asked for a Red Hook cocktail with Bulleit Rye, but the bartender suggested something else. A Red Car Named Desire is made with rye, luxardo, and cassis, with a peel of lemon. At first taste, it was too sweet for my liking, but it hit the back of my tongue with an intriguing spiciness before disappearing down my throat all together, as if I'd taken a sip of water. It was an interesting cocktail, with nuances on the tongue like you’d find in a good glass of wine.  Tony’s Saloon is my favorite bar in Los Angeles due this kind of personalized service. With each beverage, they craft an experience tailored specifically to the customer.

I also love Tony’s because of how comfortable I am sitting alone at the bar. This is one of my favorite activities, and I say so with absolute honesty. I’m not shy about sitting alone in bars, and I’ve done so at almost every type of place you can think of, from chic lounges in SoHo to the most divey, green-carpeted slime hole on San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue.  Despite my non-discriminating affinity for solo bar-going, there are times that I feel uncomfortable, once seated, as if all eyes are on the lonely girl at the bar, or as if all lonely guys seem to think I’m theirs to win. Not so at Tony’s. I can sit there undisturbed for hours, until I strike up a conversation with the bartender about his favorite whiskey, or a fellow patron chats me up about books or movies. I’ve had many great conversations at Tony’s, over many a great cocktail.

My only complaint about it is that it’s becoming more popular, however deservedly. 

Photo by Colin Young Wolff

Tony’s Saloon - 2017 East 7th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021

The City Observed: Thrillist's Punch Crawl - (Los Angeles Roars On)

During the week of Zooey Deschanel and Pat Morrison’s war of words over Downtown LA, two opportunities arose to experience the wonders of the metropolitan center of the city. The first was the Thrillist Bols Genever Punch Crawl on Wednesday night, and the second was the monthly Downtown Art Crawl. I did not attend the latter, but I did attend and thoroughly enjoyed the former.

Six bars in Downtown LA offered up unique punchbowls mixed with Bols Genever. For $25 dollars, we got one glass of punch and culinary treats at each stop. I love grainy alcohols, I love discovering bars, and I love Downtown LA. It was quite a night. I consider myself pretty savvy about Downtown, as I worked in the Oviatt building on 6th and Olive for nearly a year. However, that was two years ago, and Downtown has since changed. There are more people and more places, and I view them as a very good thing. Of the six bars participating in the punch crawl, I had only been to two: Cole’s and Varnish.

We started at Bar & Kitchen. Their Vondlepark Punch was a refreshing mix of Genever and Amontillado Sherry, and they served us two delectable morsels of bacon-wrapped dates. The deliciousness of both the punch and dates had us drooling over the menu and vowing to go back in the near future for dinner. I also enjoyed the atmosphere of the place: unpretentious gastropubbiness with an East Coast feel.

Next, we wandered over to the address of Caña Rum Bar: 714 West Olympic Boulevard, which happens to be the beautiful art deco Petroleum Building. We saw no sign or door for a bar, and were momentarily confused. We walked under the gorgeous archway into the beautifully-tiled lobby with two walls of old elevators framing a set of double glass doors. We told the security guard that we were looking for the rum bar. She directed us down a hallway (lined with historic photographs of Downtown) to the parking lot (adorned with stunning art deco light fixtures – yes, the parking lot!), where there is a tent in the corner that serves as the entrance to Cana Rum Bar. Once inside, we saw that the double glass doors at the end of the Petroleum Building lobby lead to the bar. But they’re tinted and sealed, either to create a speakeasy atmosphere, to keep rum-filled drunks out of the lobby of the office building, or to provide easy access from car to bar back to car (such is Los Angeles).

We sipped our Panamanian Detective, made with guava, Averna and limes. This was my husband’s favorite punch of the evening. I enjoyed it, though I really savored the scent of cigars from the Cigar Garden. Again, I vowed to go back for a specialty cocktail and a carefully-selected cigar from their humidor. I hope they have someone on hand to help me choose.

Our third destination was Drago Centro, in the corporate City National Plaza. I typically avoid lounging in corporate atmospheres, but as we wandered around looking for the restaurant, I noticed that the plaza is designed to offer an elegant view of the Central Library, the West Lawn, the California Club Building, and the high rises ascending out of the landscaping of the Bunker Hill Steps. It’s really a lovely view, and made the experience of wandering around a corporate plaza actually inspiring. I felt like I was in a dynamic and alluring city, because, well, I was.

Drago Centro served up a Pompeii Punch accented with nastertium petals. This was my favorite drink of the evening, as with each sip it revealed new interactions of flavor. They also cooked up a tasty fennel sausage pizza, which holds a place on their standard appetizer menu. I loved my drink, and I liked the snack, but because of the heavily corporate atmosphere of the restaurant itself, I probably won’t find myself there very often.

Next up was The Falls. We have a friend who works there, and she showed us her newly acquired badass bartending skill of lighting her finger on fire and blowing the flame down the length of the bar. This trick was far more fascinating than their punch. Called Flowing Bols, it was altogether unremarkable. We had a great time there, though.

Finally, we stepped into Cole's for a Peach Cobbler punch, with cinnamon simple syrup and angostura bitters, served with a little side of baked peach cobbler. The pie was good, the punch was underwhelming.

We were, when it came time, very ready to saunter back to Varnish, where the cocktails are always astounding. A charming gentleman named Chris welcomed us to the punch bowl and took great interest in describing to us his punch concoction, which he christened the Dutch Pugilist. He’d peeled dozens of lemons early that morning, dusted them with sugar, and let them sit for hours on end to create a zesty syrup that was the base of the punch. I remember it was wonderful, but I fail to remember details of its flavor (and failed to snap a pic), because at this point in the evening, I’d drunk a lot of punch.

Chris charmed us with his love of libations and introduced us to a distant nephew of Maurice Chevalier, who wore a well-tailored suit and stood about 7 feet tall, no exaggeration. Drinking an old-English-named beverage in a 1920’s style speakeasy, and conversing with a relative of a vaudeville entertainer transported me to a very specific Los Angeles – one you wouldn’t think exists today. And yet, behind secret doors in Downtown’s historic buildings, it endures, this roaring Los Angeles.

The City Observed: Cafe Culture

I’ve always had a thing for cafes. It began in high school, with a search for a personal identity. (That’s an interesting time in a teenager’s life – her first unaccompanied forays into social activities. What one chooses to do, where one chooses to go, has everything to do with one’s true character.)

There were few cafes in Salt Lake City, Utah at that time, and I gravitated toward them because of their clientele: what my friends and I later nicknamed pseudo-intellectuals, the most interesting people in Utah. These people knew Shakespeare by heart, they each had a favorite poet, they carried notebooks full of sketches or scribbled stories, they wore clothes other than the typical Utah uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, and they – gasp – drank coffee. Coffee was much frowned upon in Utah and most restaurants didn’t carry any. The majority population considered coffee shops the devil’s playground, but I’d been to Seattle, I’d been to New York, I knew that café culture was a place for writers and poets and artists and conversationalists. If this was the devil’s work, I wanted a job.

While in college in New York City, my café habit became one of necessity. Living in tiny spaces rife with roommate woes, the café became a refuge - the only decent places to get any work done.

Now well into my adulthood, the café is once again a place for musing, for nurturing my now well-established personal identity. I read, I write, I work, I drink a lot of coffee, and I love people and people-watching. However, over the years of nurturing this habit I’ve also adopted a fairly judgmental attitude. I am very critical of cafes and their décor, their color palate, their music, their air-quality, and the comfort of their chairs. And with today’s ever-changing technological needs, free wifi and plug-ins also now inform my regard for a cafe.

I have, in my mind, a very favorite café. It has lots of tables and comfortable chairs, as well as a lounge section of clean and plush couches and armchairs. It boasts natural lighting by windows or skylights by day, and by evening is lit entirely by floor lamps, and also has a bank of tables with those green library lamps for people who need to get some real work done. It has free wifi and lots of plug-ins. It has a book exchange. It offers a large selection of loose-leaf teas, and serves good, free-trade coffee with a lot of care. It serves simple egg sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches, cheese and onion sandwiches, and the usual selection of pastries, cakes, and bagels. Most importantly, the music selection is entirely instrumental, mostly classical, but also a little jazz or bossa nova or salsa or other atmospheric but non-distracting music. It is warm, inviting, clean, and non-pretentious.

I have never found this café, and I’m not sure that it exists (no café I’ve ever been in plays classical music). I may have to build this cafe myself. In the meantime, here is a list of my favorite cafes in no particular order, followed by a list of my least favorite cafes.

Favorites

1. Solar de Cahuenga, Hollywood
Free Wifi and plenty of plug-ins. Great coffee, good teas. The décor is warm and cheerful, and there are wrap-around windows that provide a lot of natural light. The chairs and tables are plentiful and quite comfortable. It’s a great place to sit for a long spell and get a lot of work done.

2. The Oaks Gourmet, Franklin Village
Free Wifi. No plug-ins. Great coffee, good teas, delicious pastries. It’s a combination deli/gourmet food store, wine shop, and café. It has a nice outdoor seating area that overlooks Franklin avenue, and the Wifi signal is strong out there. The chairs are very comfortable.

3. Urth Caffe, Downtown
Free Wifi, a few plug-ins. Great organic coffee and teas. Really expensive, though! Tons of tables and chairs. Chairs are decently comfortable, but not the best. It’s located in the industrial arts-district, and is a good café for people watching.

4. Casbah Cafe, Silverlake
I love their snacks. Soft-boiled egg sandwiches, warm brioches, and exotic frittata-type things. They’re kind of expensive, and their wifi rarely works, but the atmosphere is wonderful. It doubles as a middle eastern gift shop, and the goods for sale, in their saffron and jewel-tone color palette, make the place feel really warm and comfortable.

5. Intelligentsia, Venice Beach
Free wifi. No plug-ins. It’s sleek and everyone there is tres fashionable. Whenever I go there, I feel like I’m on a very fancy vacation. Also, their coffee is absolutely incredible.

Least Favorites

1. The Bourgeois Pig, Franklin Village
It’s a café designed specifically for ravers or Fraggles. Horrible atmosphere, just horrible.

2. Sabor y Cultura, Hollywood
Free wifi, plenty of plug ins, but the décor is terrible – the walls are dirty and painted in drab, muted shades of mustard and red and purple. There are not enough tables, so it feels unfinished. The music selection is horribly distracting – they’ll put on Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Metallica, and my ability to get any work done is stamped entirely out. The coffee isn’t good, the baristas don’t know how to make a good latte, and the pastry display and counter area are sparse, which makes everything in or on them look lonely and unappealing. Tip of the trade: always keep a pastry display filled to the gills, and if you’re running out of supplies at the end of the day, put whatever’s left in the top shelf, and push it all to the front of the display closest to the customer’s view (keeping everything well-arranged) and turn the lights off on the bottom shelves. This will give the illusion that you’re well stocked, because the customer’s eye will only travel to the illuminated shelf.

The staff can be very grumpy, too, and very slow. It once took my friend 20 minutes to get a single cup of coffee even though there was only one person in front of him.

3. Starbucks, Anywhere
Starbucks fails at the very thing they’ve attempted to do: provide a warm and comfortable café lifestyle with good coffee, good music, and an inspired atmosphere. Their décor and the floorplan/layout of their spaces are the absolute worst. The whimsical swirls and trite quotes all over everything are just annoying. Also, most Starbucks cafes in urban cities are dirty and unorganized. The coffee chain has become such a behemoth that it can no longer exercise quality control over its staff, and many of them are unprofessional, barely-fit-for-employment, downright terrible customer service representatives.

The City Observed: Katsuya

Katsuya is a trendy Japanese restaurant on the corner of Hollywood and Vine.  It is often the backdrop of paparazzi photos and videos featuring the likes of Mark Wahlberg or Charlie Sheen exiting its large glass doors and gliding into their fancy cars at the valet.  There is a lot of Hollywood hype about Katsuya, but I’d also heard that the food is good.  When Dine LA Restaurant Week rolled around, I convinced my non-seafood-loving husband to choose this as our semi-annual dining splurge.

Katsuya’s decor is within a color palate - deep reds, pinks, and blacks – that one might find described as ‘sexy’ in the local glossies.  The clientele is largely made up of the kind of people I’d expect to see standing behind the red velvet rope of Hyde Lounge or Teddy’s, or on the rooftop of The Standard Hotel – that is, trendy – hoping that their shiny lip gloss or fleur-de-lis-emblazoned blazers will help them get discovered.  Joseph and I sat at a corner table at the back of the restaurant, and my unobstructed view of everyone kept me quite entertained. 

My amusement over the atmosphere of the place didn’t, thankfully, inhibit my ability to take the quality of the food seriously.  I really enjoyed it.  The Albacore Crispy Onion was so tender and intriguing in its flavor and texture, with its marriage of soft and crispy, marinated and grilled, that even my non-seafood-loving husband ate a full portion.  The Baked Miso Marinated Black Cod was decadent and reminded me of dusk, if dusk had a flavor.  As enamored as I was by my cod, I was less impressed by Joseph’s dish, the Beef and Mushroom Toban Yaki.  Although the beef did meet all expectations for medium-rare Kobe, the mushrooms didn’t add much of the earthy flavor that I generally expect from them.  Joseph was pleased, though, nodding his head enthusiastically and widening his eyes for emphasis when I asked, “How do you like it?”

Katsuya is known for its cocktails almost more so than its food, therefore, despite the exorbitant price of $14 dollars per, I ordered the Eastern Raspberry Sidecar: “hand pressed fresh raspberries intertwined w/ Hennessy VS Cognac & Nigori Sake, rounded out w/ Cointreau and freshly squeezed lemon”.  I love sidecars as well as every single ingredient on this list, thus I assumed this cocktail would suit my taste.  It did not.  It was watery and monotonous in flavor, like a frappe with too much ice that’s begun to melt. 

Overall, my experience in Hollywood and Vine’s trendy restaurant with trendy cocktails and trendy food was, maybe not top-notch, but upper-middle-notch. I’m glad I went and that I’ve got Katsuya under my belt now (being able to say I’ve been there might help me get discovered).  I will say, though, that I was somewhat disappointed that not a single paparazzo showed up to snap my picture when I exited the glass doors and glided home, along the Walk of Fame that had been wetted by rain (those charcoal tiles are slippery!).

The City Observed: Wilshire Spa

It had been an extreme winter. I’m not referring to the weather – I live in LA; I’m referring to life and activity. October through December saw a mess of meetings, obligations, rehearsals, online marketing, offline networking, panic attacks and meltdowns, all in preparation for a December performance of one of my original theater works. The highs were terrific, the lows unbearable. Then came Christmas and the New Year, which I enjoyed by ceasing all activity, by sitting in front of a television, alternating my attentions between video games and movies, eating all holiday treats imaginable and drinking cocktails one after the other. Looking back on 2009, and particularly autumn, I felt less than extraordinary, I felt ordinary: easily wrapped up in life’s mundanities, chasing my own tail.

My husband had given me a spa package for my birthday in August, and I’d been holding on to it all this time, waiting for the precise moment when a visit to a spa might save me from utter demise. During the aforementioned months I thought, “I’ll wait until all this over, and I’ll go to the spa to recover.” After the December deadline, I thought, “I’ll wait until the holidays are over, when my body will be all tense from the East Coast cold.” When I returned from the East Coast, I thought, “I’ll wait until after Sundance, when I’ll need some deep relaxation to bring me back to Earth.” Finally, a few weeks ago, I looked at my gift certificate and saw that it was set to expire on February 22. I had to make time to use it. I made an appointment for the approaching Sunday. I now declare that if I had the means, I would implement a weekly ritual of Sunday visits to the spa for the saving of my soul, so cathartic was it.

The entrance to The Wilshire Spa is at the back of a tall, corporate multi-use skyscraper on Wilshire Boulevard. The reception lobby is unpretentious, showcasing no particular luxury or status, showing no signs that it is indeed the portal to an underground bliss. Below a set of stairs, in the sub terrain of the mid-Wilshire district, lies a sumptuous Eden of tranquility.

Basic accoutrements for a pampered experience are provided free by the facility: towels, shampoo, conditioner, soap, q-tips, hair dryers, slippers, coffee, tea, and cucumber lemon water. Two banks of vanity tables give ample space for post-pampered beautification. Behind a pair of doors to the left of the vanity bank sit three tranquil rooms, each heated to a different degree and lined with certain minerals – one onyx, one yellow ochre, and the other mineral salt – each of which, according to descriptions on the walls, has unique calming properties. A set of doors to the right side of the vanities opens on to three baths of varying degrees: cold, hot, and extremely hot. I have a high tolerance for heat, and was pleased when I found myself dripping with sweat immediately upon entering the hot bath; I could only stand five minutes at a time in the extremely hot bath before craving a quick dunk in the frigid water of the cold bath. The proper cycle for getting the most benefit to your circulatory system isn’t something you’ll need to research beforehand – the desire to go from hot to cold and wet to dry will happen naturally. After cooling myself down in the cold bath, my physiological needs led me to the sauna – a typical wood-lined room kept at a controlled heat that I found to be perfectly comfortable, a place where I could lie back and read for quite a spell before finding the pages of my book wet and crinkled from my sweat. The steam room, on the other hand, was far too hot and steamy, even for someone of my high tolerance. I nearly suffocated after a mere thirty seconds in its billows. I removed myself quickly and re-embarked on my cycle of hot bath, really hot bath, cold dunk, and dry room. After a time, a masseuse in black lace bra and panties motioned for me to follow her.

My husband had thoughtfully chosen for my gift the Signature Body Massage after learning that it included two of my favorite things: a massage and a facial. That wasn’t the extent of it, though. My masseuse placed a clean sheet of plastic on a table, splashed a bucket of warm water over it, and instructed me to lie upon it face down. Then, she scrubbed. The website describes this as “a treatment that uses exfoliating cloths to gently remove dead skin cells from your body”; ‘Gentle’ it wasn’t - it was firm and intense. Tension was immediately tossed away - I was like a fleshy mannequin, a pliable material in the form of human only that the masseuse sanded, molded, pushed and pulled into a more perfect form. Entirely nude I lay there, face down whilst she scrubbed me with loofah gloves and cucumber salt. Her gloved hands knew no bounds – every inch of my body received a scrubbing: shoulders, elbows, stomach, inner thighs, groin, and recesses of my behind all received equal attention.  This wasn't a massage for the modest.  She’d turn me from stomach to back to side to side all with a swift push of the hands. At times she’d scissor my legs open, other times fold them over each other to gain access to all surfaces. The scrub lasted at least thirty minutes, enough time to rub off at least my first layer of skin. When there couldn’t have been another single dead skin cell to remove, she squirted a warm lotion all over me and gently rubbed it in. Then, she poured three full buckets of warm water over me. This was my favorite part. It felt like I was lying on the wet sand of the beach as the tide washed over my spent body. Next came a deep and thorough full-body Swedish massage that the masseuse administered with strong arms, digging elbows, and crisp palms.  Again, she left no stone unturned, treating all parts with equal attention, from my fingertips to my spine to my skull. Finally, she worked a green tea conditioner through my hair, layered cucumbers on my face and eyes, and doused my flesh in warm milk. This pure adventure in beauty manipulation lasted a full eighty minutes. I went in an ordinary human and exited a glistening goddess.

My milky, glowing aura stayed with me a good two days. Now, I appear to the world as the self I’ve always been. With my newfound knowledge, however, that I can be so completely transformed in the underworld of Los Angeles’ Korea Town, I won’t wait so long for the perfect time to visit. Perhaps the more often I go to the Wilshire Spa, the more likely I’ll manifest myself into a glistening, enlightened goddess in my daily reality. Good riddance, stress, I’ve found my spiritual practice.