Los Angeles

Myself, wearing a brown cowboy hat, a green patchwork cowboy shirt, with a red tee underneath reading "Red Dog Saloon" and featuring a cartoon image of a dog, and green courdory pants, standing in front of a museum exhibit wall that has a large image of a bear wearing a pink cowboy hat, and text reading "Imagined Wests If you close your eyes and picture ‘the American West,’ what do you see? A desert landscape? A frontier town and tumbleweeds? National parks and majestic mountains? How about the Kansas prairies, the forests of the Olympic Peninsula, or the Hawaiian Islands? Do you picture a cowboy on horseback? Native Americans? Or the variety of people in Los Angeles or another Western city? This gallery explores the tales we tell about the West, both he ones we call ‘Westerns’ and the wide rage of other stories rooted in the region. Many of our ‘Imagined Wests’ - the places and characters we picture when we close our eyes - come to us through popular culture. Film and television, music and writing, visual art and fashion, performance, and even museums have given us so many Wests. When we mix these stories together, the American West may look different from our first associations. But the West has always been home to a variety of interconnected peoples and the stories we all create here."

The Autry: A Look at the American West, both Real and Fiction

, 1 Comment on The Autry: A Look at the American West, both Real and Fiction

With a love of westerns, it’s no wonder one of my favorite museums in Los Angeles is The Autry, which is dedicated to the American west. Recently they opened Imagined Wests, an exhibit that showcases how the American West is presented in pop culture. In addition to Imagined Wests, there were a few other interesting exhibits,…

Read More…
A singer in a sequin gown stands at a microphone.

Angel of Light: A Walk Through Horror Experience at the Historic Los Angeles Theatre

, 1 Comment on Angel of Light: A Walk Through Horror Experience at the Historic Los Angeles Theatre

While Knott’s Scary Farm may be the oldest Halloween haunt experience in Southern California, it’s far from the only one. From home haunts to the movie set horrors of Universal Studios, Southern California is full of a wide range of spooky experiences at a variety of venues. Recently we had friends rave about Angel of…

Read More…
Myself, wearing large pink sunglasses, a white cowboy hat, with blue stars edged in rhinestones, a white and light blue patterned suit with silver thread running through it, and a blue satin shirt.

Rocket Man

, 3 Comments on Rocket Man

In 1975, after climbing America’s music charts, Elton John stepped onto a stage at Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium to a crowd of over 50,000. In the audience for one of the two sold out shows was my mother-in-law, and last week she got to do it all over again, as her, Patrick and myself went…

Read More…