I once went on a blind date with a doctor who had recently relocated to Los Angeles from the east coast. Halfway though the date, he adopted a conspiratorial tone. “Tell me something… Are all celebrities stupid?” he asked across the table. I paused. This guy was an Ivy League-educated plastic surgeon. He wrote op-ed pieces for the New York Times.  Was he for real?

Alas, he was. And his question was reflective of an attitude about the entertainment community that pervades the world outside LA. As if we are all living in the pages of US Magazine, or even some of the tawdrier grocery store aisle reading material. As if we had chosen to live on a different planet.

So let me tell you what I would’ve told the plastic surgeon had I not been using my brainpower trying to figure out how to end the evening asap: The entertainment industry is no different than the rest of the world. Though it is a creative industry, it is no more populated with whackjobs than the hospitality industry, or automotive, or legal, or financial. (Okay, maybe we have a few more whackjobs than the financial industry.)

Some of the people in the entertainment industry are nice, some are jerks. Some are helpful, some can’t be bothered. Some are whipsmart, others are dumb as a box of hammers (though not many of the successful ones- it take brains to negotiate the Hollywood waters). I think you get the idea.

And to top it all off, many, if not most, of the people in the entertainment industry have come to Southern California from another part of the country, sometimes another part of the world.

So the next time you tell people you want to be in entertainment – or that you are in entertainment – be ready for the eye rolling or the derogatory comment, but don’t take it too seriously and don’t let it discourage you. You’ll find, once you get out here, that the industry is mostly populated with hardworking, ambitious people with a passion for what they do.

I don’t know whatever happened to the plastic surgeon. The last I heard was that he finished his residency at UCLA and then left the area. Needless to say, we didn’t go out again after that first date. Truth be told, I found him to be a bit of a whackjob. And with all that education under his belt, also a little stupid.

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Tags: bad dates

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 5:32 am and is filed under miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.