For Middle and High Schoolers..

[pingtheduck]

Rick Kushman did a fun and insightful piece on Beverly Hills yesterday. Seems like a good piece to share with the kids re: clique coolness run amuck. I'm printing this one for my young friends.


The Good Life: J Street is no Rodeo Drive, and thank heaven for that

By Rick Kushman - rkushman@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Wednesday, July 23, 2008

BEVERLY HILLS – The scene last weekend was so clichéd, I'm almost embarrassed to bring it up.

There were two young women, 20ish, standing in front of Da Pasquale Trattoria on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in the posh shopping district here, apparently posing for the cameras they wished were there.

Both wore tight jeans, tall heels and low-cut tops, and, of course, one was holding a small, fuzzy brown dog under her arm like a purse. The poor dog wore a white bow on his head and a dark blue poncho. He didn't look thrilled.

I'm a dog guy. I looked at him for a moment. His brown eyes were big, and a little pleading. I'd guess he wanted to say, "Dude, I'm just a dog. These people are crazy."

I don't want to overstate it. There are plenty of places in the 90210 ZIP code with homes, stores and people just like homes, stores and people anywhere in California. There are old cars, sloppy clothes, Rite Aids with people buying floss, and Starbucks baristas scraping to pay off student loans.

But when you wander down to the shopping district around Rodeo Drive, it really is nearly another planet.

"Beverly Hills is its own character," Gabe Sachs, a producer of the coming CW show "90210," said during a TV Critics Association press tour session last week. He's not kidding.

There's not much free time to get out of the Beverly Hilton during the two-plus weeks critics are here, but we're just a few blocks from Rodeo Drive, and last weekend I got to go for a walk.

Rodeo Drive has wide, spotless sidewalks so clean you expect to see Disneyland employees with brooms. It's got small palm trees out near the curb. There are lots of sleek glass storefronts, lots of pale stone walls and lots of tourists speaking lots of languages.

All the high-end fashion stores are there: Gucci, Christian Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, Cartier, Prada, Chanel, Bijan (an appointment-only boutique often called the most expensive store in the world).

And you don't have to go far to notice two things right off.

First, as Francis Cavanaugh, CBS' West Coast vice president of photography, warned me, "You can't get two blocks without seeing someone dressed so weirdly, it stops you. It's like they're playing characters."

Besides all the dogs used as fashion accessories, there was, on my short walk, a red-faced guy in a dark suit, dark shirt and white tennis shoes screaming insults into his cell phone – which he held like a microphone – as he climbed into a black Mercedes in front of the Hugo Boss store. I considered reminding him that California is now hands-free.

There was the very blond women who was easily 70, wearing tight white hot pants, a thin white muscle shirt, white boots and layers of gold chains.

There was the guy outside YSL whose limo driver couldn't fit all the just-purchased boxes into the trunk. When I walked past, he was ordering, "In the trunk. They're not going in back with me." Maybe he worried the boxes would get carsick.

The second thing you notice is that it's not much fun being here. For pure sideshow entertainment, Rodeo Drive and the shopping streets of Beverly Hills have a few good minutes. But you feel constantly watched and measured and judged, whether by tourists or locals or, I suppose, columnists out for a walk.

Seriously, this is no way to live – and never mind the cost of things. Who wants to spend their days trying to be cooler or showier or just richer than everyone else? Who wants to have to own the trendiest clothes and cars and shoes, or to go to only the hottest bars and clubs?

And it's a sucker's game. No one wins. No one feels cool enough or hot enough, not the wannabes and not even the Paris Hiltons. If Hilton were truly happy with her life, she wouldn't act like Paris Hilton.

I know some of this sounds stale and trite. I know I'm not the first to make this argument. And I admit some of it comes from feeling overmatched by the "demands" of Beverly Hills hipness.

Still, I'm saying you can feel the unhappiness, the insatiable need for approval, the perpetually discontented quest for coolness and status. There's no friendliness here, no ease or affability walking around.

Lots of the women you see on Rodeo Drive are scary the way Victoria's Secret models are scary. They look mean. The men aren't scary, just uninteresting. They look dismissive and belligerent and shallow.

All this chicness is too sterile, all this cultural one-upmanship is too cold. It's not something you want to spend much time around.

And it's a stark contrast to walking a commercial street in Sacramento, say J Street from 19th to 24th. In Sacramento there are trees, there's some charm, there's comfortable outdoor seating, a human scale and a feeling that it's just a genuinely fine place to be.

This runs against our own conventional wisdom and the region's inferiority issues, but Sacramento's cool is effortless. It's natural, easy and real. And it is so much more pleasant than Rodeo Drive.

This is not, by the way, a screed against wealthy towns, not even Beverly Hills. There are lots of good people here, lots of parents who are terrific with their kids, lots of fashionable women who are kind to purse-sized dogs.

I'm just saying it doesn't matter that you can't buy a $74,000 Harry Winston watch in Sacramento or that there's no outlet for $14,000 Manolo Blahnik shoes. Relatively, those are worthless.

Life in Sacramento, just being here and living in a good place, now that's priceless.