The 3rd and 4th of July

I had much more activity on the 3rd of July than I did on the 4th of July!

I started out the day at The Grove. I met up with my g.f.'s from my lunchtime Santa Monica knitters group. We saw "The Devil Wears Prada." It was a predictable movie, but very entertaining. Just seeing all of those gorgeous fashions and HANDBAGS was faboo. I do love Meryl Streep's acting.

After the movie, Christine, Liz, Marilyn, Amy and I walked over to the Original Farmers Market for lunch. We ended up at Monseur Marcel. I just love that restaurant! It's so French. After seeing the "Devil" movie where one of the locations was Paris for fashion week, we thought Marcel's would be appropriate. Everyone ordered something different: Quiche, Brie Salad, Endive Salad, and Croque Monseur....yum...delicious.

After lunch with the Goils, I raced home and picked up Larry. We zoomed downtown to see the Ed Rauschenberg show at MOCA.

It was amazing. The show consisted of Rauschenberg's "combines" or combination collages. Very inspiring. It was hot, hot, hot downtown, so we had to take a break for an Orangina at the MOCA restaurant. The MOCA gift shop is always fun. They had these plain canvas bags in the same shapes as designer bags. There was a Gucci, Balenciaga, Chanel, etc.

The MOCA Plaza also has this fabulous structure by Nancy Rubins made from stainless steel and airplane parts. I must admit, in the words of Charles Phoenix, "it made my spirit soar!"

THEN, we came back to our neighborhood and met Audrey and Jeff for dinner at Luna Park. This is the restaurant on the east side of La Brea, just north of Wilshire, in the bottom of this huge art deco office building. I always call this building The Mutual of Omaha building, 'cause that's what the sign on top of the building said for years. Then, it became the Asahi building. Now, I think it's the Samsung building.

Anyway, Audrey chose Luna Park and it was quite good. She had Salad Nicoise with a side of Broccoli Rabe with chile and garlic, Larry and I had the Cobb Salad, Jeff had fish, I think...maybe it was mahi mahi, in a supposed picatta version. It looked great, but it was breaded....not the picatta-style we remember. Everything was very good though. I'd definitely return to this restaurant.

Like I said, the 3rd was super busy and the 4th wasn't.

Larry and I just laid around the house watching Sci-Fi's "Twilight Zone" marathon. I feel like I've seen every episode ever broadcast (play creepy theme music here). The marathon was on all weekend, from Saturday thru the 4th of July. I must admit, we watched alot of it during the weekend. It was just so hot...it was so comfortable just lolling on the couch like slugs with the fan pointing directly toward us. We dragged ourselves from the living room to Downtown Culver City's Pacific Theaters at mid-day to see "Cars." This is an extremely fun movie...very cleverly done. We loved it. We had dinner at home and when it finally got cooler and dark, we made our way over to Larchmont Village. We stopped at Baskin-Robbins for a cone then walked up the block to view the fireworks display at the Wilshire Country Club. It's awfully nice of this laa-dee-dah, exclusive club to shoot off faboo fireworks on their golfcourse so that the whole neighborhood can enjoy them. It was spectacular and a bang-up end to a long 4th of July weekend.