Here's one of those stories of how things happen. How things just kinda come together. Not in a particularly significant or meaningful way, but it just an interesting way.
The whole way the
Tony/
Carolyn/(and not)
Neal drinks night happened was this: Tony wrote something on the BusBlog. I don't know what it was and it's not really important what it was, but whatever it was it caused Carolyn to post something in reference to it on LAist. Within a day or two of that, Neal had posted something about Tony, and Tony, blog-mensch that he is, linked back to Neal.
Well, I read all this and found it interesting and coincidental. Neal, Carolyn and I went to college together and I used to work with Tony, but Carolyn and Neal didn't really know Tony in person, just from what William Gibson once referred to as "cyberspace." So I zapped out an email to all of them, introducing them electronically. Then it came up that we should all meet up and finally we did... except Neal didn't make it.
So, like I said, not really significant or meaningful, just interesting. So, I found it interesting again, two days later, when the new issue of the
LA Weekly came out. It was
their first "Who We Are" issue, focusing on "the people who give Los Angeles its character," profiling the famous and unfamous and the should-be-famous and the infamous. Okay, I don't know if there's anyone who's really infamous on the list because I haven't read the whole issue yet, but you get the idear.
The interesting thing about this LA Weekly is that two of the people who are profiled were also at our little gathering on Tuesday. Of course
Tony got profiled. He's Tony. Name a more famous blogger in LA.
The other listee is
Reuben Rueva. "Reuben who-what-now?" you ask? Well he's the man who mixed our cocktails at Musso & Frank Grill and has been providing the same service for Angelenos famous and infamous and... you get where I'm going with this. Have this man mix up a drink for you and you know it's gonna be mixed right.
Along with all the folks that the Weekly profiles, it's this kind of confluence of people and events and whatnot that make me love this town.
A few others I want to point out are
Fred Eric and
Petros Papadakis. Way back in the dark ages, before the internets existed for most people, circa 1989, I worked in this club in downtown LA. Fred Eric (far left in the picture collage at the top of this post) and his chefing partner
Octavio Becerra were the rock 'n' roll cooking team who were a big part of what made Flaming Colossus THE place to go at that time.
Petros... well, I don't actually know Petros, but as a USC grads, we're both part of the Trojan family. I've been a die hard Trojan football fan, even through the time that
Petros was captain of, what he often calls, "the worst football team in USC history." I've enjoyed his on-air antics going back to when he showed up as the USC side of the equation of the broadcast team during the post game of the USC v. ucla game. He seemed drunk in those early appearances, but after watching him for many years on Fox Sports West and listening to his show on 1540 the Ticket, I'm thinking that that was just Petros. You can catch him as the host of
Pros v. Joes on Spike TV.
That's Petros (#35) on the right. The crazy lookin' one.
Photo from
USCTrojans.com
