Our Day in Hollywood

Dear Friends and Visitors,

Hello! and Whew!! We are finally more back to normal after returning from our trip to California to a contractor nightmare. It was awful. I would give you the details about that fiasco, but I am tired of talking about it. So, on to fun stuf...

Before we left for our trip, our family decided to take the motto: "Stay close to the Lord and open to the day," meaning that we would put aside our preconcieved notions about what we thought should happen on the trip and just go with the flo, believing the Lord would bring good things to us. Of course, this was to be a working trip, with us packing up much of my mother-in-law's house and preparing it for sale. But we did take some afternoons for fun.

One of the first places we took the children to visit was Hollywood Blvd, in downtown Hollywood.

This was one of my favorite stomping grounds when I was living out there as a single adult. I love history and in those days I loved the history of Hollywood during the Golden Era of the studio system. However, by the time I got there in the 80's, Hollywood Blvd had deteriorated to a kind of seedy place. I prepared the children for this before we got there. However...

There has been much revitalization done there now that the Oscars are held at the new Kodak Theater right next to the famous Grauman's Chinese. It is jam-packed with tourists, food carts, tour busses, street musicians...

and something else new to me, ordinary citizens all dressed up like famous characters from movies or famous stars (both old and new), there to have you take pictures with them...all for a nice tip of a dollar or more.

This interesting character sidled up to Robert...

Sarah also had her picture taken with this little cutie...







And this little cutie...

While we were on Hollywood Blvd, we saw a man handing out free tickets to the taping of a game show, Family Game Night. Hey, it was free, my favorite price! So, we accepted the tickets, which were for the very next day.

The next day, we arrived for the game show and I kept having this funny feeling that my Sarah was going to sing on it. I know that this makes no sense at all, because why would my Sarah sing on this game show that we had never heard of before, especially because we were to only be audience members, not contestants. However, half-way through the taping, which turned out to be loooooong and boring, the dear MC (God bless that man for having to keep the audience up and happy for 5 hours) opened up the stage, during a set change, for audience members to showcase their talents. Two cute little kids came up to sing funny songs and to dance and everyone clapped. Then, my Sarah raised her hand. She was called up to the stage and sang this song a cappella...

She brought down the entire house! I couldn't believe it.

After the show, the head of sound for the studio, gave us his phone number to call him about her. We haven't done that yet. Life got more complicated in California as we took care of our responsibilities there. But he was interested and Sarah still sings and we will see...

Love,
Elizabeth