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With stars in your eyes

Photos: Sudhish Kamath

In the lanes of fame All that you wanted to see in Hollywood

A week seems like enough time to go around the City of Angels, the second largest city in the U.S., but not when you have a weekend trip to Disneyland, Anaheim, right in the middle of the trip. Our hosts, The Walt Disney Company, put us up at a boutique hotel called The Grafton on Sunset (named after the Sunset Strip on the iconic Sunset Boulevard), all I had to do was trip and fall to find myself outside a popular night-spot.

The Strip is home to The House of Blues, Roxy and The Hyatt West (the sacred ‘Riot’ Hyatt that was home to many legendary rock musicians in the 60s and the 70s and if you are a Cameron Crowe fan like me, you may consider yourself blessed to have lived next door to where he shot quite a bit of ‘Almost Famous’).

Well, these are one of those few places in the world where people queue up every single day to watch a raw young band performing. Depending on how much you are willing to spend and what the label on your shirt says, you could choose where you want to eat. A little downtown, you could ask for Nobu (Robert De Niro’s restaurant), or catch Alyssa Milano perform at One Sunset (the sight of skinny supermodels at their sassiest best waiting on the street to get in is not just intimidating, it’s outright depressing especially if you’re walking past it in three-fourths sucking a cappuccino softie from a waffle-cone) or just chill with beer and friends by Red Rock, like we did the next evening, listening to one of the much-abused play list of rock anthems on the planet.

During the day, we were doing fun things like hanging out at the set of ‘Brothers and Sisters’ or having lunch next table to Teri Hatcher (only that I had no clue who this “Desperate Housewife” was) at one of Disney’s offices. We met Dave Annable, the star of Brothers and Sisters (“Wasted on you”, as my colleagues tell me) and Emily VanCamp, the pretty starlet opposite him who might just make me watch the show.

Later that weekend, during dinner at Napa Rose in Disneyland, we shared the roof with Mariah Carey and craned our necks to get a proper glimpse at the diva… with very little luck. That’s pretty much all the celebrity spotting we did in Hollywood. On our return from Disneyland, our hosts checked us into Hotel Renaissance in the heart of Hollywood, and the curtains of my 15th floor studio suite opened to give me a view of the legendary Kodak theatre, the home of the Academy Awards located on Hollywood Boulevard.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is by the sidewalk outside Kodak Theatre and is populated by movie buffs trying to get pictures taken with buskers posing as Jack Sparrow, Batman, Robin and the likes. After an elaborate photo shoot outside Kodak Theatre where we kneeled to pose by the ‘stars’ of our favourite filmmakers and stars, we follow the sign that says “The Road to Hollywood” and read short accounts of success stories along Hollywood and Highland.

Reading more of these, we walked past the fountains and stores selling souvenirs and ultimately reach a giant couch with a sign painted below: “The Road to Hollywood: How Some of Us Got Here.” Later in the evening, we had the best Indian meal ever at a restaurant called Electric Karma that specialised in Indian village cuisine.

Not feeling juvenile enough to hit Hooters, we decide to find a classier nightclub to hangout. We find just that one block south of Hollywood Boulevard at a parking lot on Las Palmas Avenue. We walk in to a haunt called Les Deux as the usher warns us that it was the hard rock theme night. Little do we know then that admission isn’t usually that easy.

Les Deux is considered by some as “the mother of all night clubs” in Hollywood, frequented by the likes of Kim Kardashian, as a post-visit research on the Internet tells me. We had a great time watching the place turn lively and noisier into the night as the brick wall screens “Almost Famous” minus the audio (they played the regular rock anthems over these visuals). A lesbian couple indulging in a passionate public display of affection hogged everybody’s attention for a while and soon a lonely man decided to strike conversation with: Is this always like this here? I wouldn’t know, I told him politely. I had no clue, to be honest. I had no clue either that West Hollywood had a gay population of 41 per cent.

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