When the world’s oldest profession fails, what’s a girl to do?
Take up with the second oldest profession, of course.
Fashion, that is.
Santa Monica. Sunday afternoon. Third Street Promenade, where hippies, hip-hoppers, hustlers and yupsters merge into a multi-culti California brew.
There was the street musician who hung suspended upside-down from two kitchen chairs, legs stretched to the sky as he strummed a guitar and yodeled. A sidewalk New Agey jazz group, whose buff and belly-dancing male members were decked out in loin cloths, hair weaves, false eyelashes and red lipstick.
And there she was, in the midst of such bizarre commerce, tucked behind the cash register of the HEIDIWEAR boutique–the infamous Hollywood Madam.
Heidi Fleiss. The one with the little black book.
Still smarting from last week’s prison sentence (three years), Fleiss held court in her tiny storefront, showing off her line of surprisingly sedate loungewear for guys and dolls.
Dressed in virgin white–sweats–Fleiss looked prettier than her don’t-mess-with-me pictures would have you believe.
Friendlier. More accessible. And ready to talk.
“We’re appealing,” said Fleiss, who remains out on $200,000 bail. “Even the people who don’t like me think this sentence is ridiculous.”
Including the nun in Pasadena who, Fleiss said, bought a slew of HEIDIWEAR to show solidarity for Madam Fleiss.
Not to mention the gaggle of tourists who swarmed her with entreaties for her to sign their just-purchased flannel HEIDIWEAR boxers. She obliged.
It was a kinder, gentler Heidi.
And why not?
More Top Picks Sonos Beam
This is, after all, La-La Land.
A land that reinvents itself, again and again.
Earthquakes rattle and shake it. Riots engulf it in flames. Floods attempt to drown it.
Blink your eyes, and everything is fresh and shiny brand new again.
Well, almost.
Post-quake freeways are pieced back together. Malibu mud is scrubbed clean. Nicole Brown Simpson’s house is now just another stop along the tourist route.
And so, if this city looks like one giant movie set, it should come as no surprise that its inhabitants dress–and act–like extras outfitted for a never-ending, city-wide flick.
Like the middle-aged dudes, with their graying ponytails and backwards baseball caps, who all look like agents on their days off. The Kato lookalikes. And the proliferation of boob-implanted blonds who stare into restaurant windows, tossing their hair at their reflections while their bored dinner companions ignore them.
You had to be there.