Last night I dreamt that I was dating George Clooney, but he didn't love me. I would say "I love you," and he wouldn't answer. I think it was the most realistic dream I have ever had.

You know, except for the bit about dating George Clooney.

So yesterday was finally movies at the Academy day! Usually I come in on the weekend and see them then, but since I was doing the show and had to come in on Monday, I missed them and had to wait until now to go there.

I love the Motion Picture Academy, it feels like home, I've been going there most of my life, and it's a big sweeping auditorium with a red velvet curtain and huge Oscars flanking the screen, very fancy. The lobby usually has an art show connected with the movies, and upstairs is a bunch posters of Academy Award-winning movies, the first and the latest Best Picture posters right by the top of the stairs.

When it's a family film, the member can bring as many people as they want to a morning screening, and this was Lord of the Rings, so Mom was able to bring both me and her friend Norma.

I haven't seen Norma since I was about 6 or 7, but a few years ago Mom and she hooked up again and started hanging out. Or you know, whatever it is that mothers do with their friends, it's not like they go to the mall and cruise boys or something. Or at least I hope they don't.

Anyway, Norma is the mother of Sherry, a great friend of mine when I was 5, and Norma and her boyfriend Preston were these big old hippies with long hair and a huge beard, (Preston that is, not Norma) and on more than one occasion they took me and Sherry to a nudist colony where we got body painted. It sounds strange, but it was a family nudist colony, with lots of shaggy-haired children racing around.

This was my hippie childhood, though my parents weren't hippies themselves, but it would have been a shame to have been around in 1969 and not have had at least a taste of a hippie childhood. It wasn't the Manson family at the Spahn Ranch, but you can't have everything.

But can you imagine today any parents letting anyone take their children off for a day of outdoor nakedness? Shit, I can barely believe that it happened back then with my uptight, non-hippie parents.

And this wild, long-haired groovy chick in my mind? Well, it's 30 years later, and she's a bobbed Jewish matron. Of course, I'm not an adorable blonde tot, either, so I don't know why I'm surprised.

Anyway, so we saw Lord of the Rings!

Now, I have said it before and I'll say it again, I hate the books, and I mean I really hate them, and yes I read them all even though I hated them, and yes I know how silly that is, but it made sense at the time. I would see the trailers and roll my eyes, and finally after seeing the last one I said, "Alright, I'll see it, get off my fucking back!!"

And you know what? Loved it loved it loved it! I had a feeling that I would like it, that the pedantic nature of the book, and losing track of who's who wouldn't be so much of a problem, and I was right. The effects were amazing, and didn't really look like effects, which are the best kind, the art direction was quite stunning, and the acting just spiffy.

Elijah Wood was basically called upon to look startled all the time, and since he has eyes the size of hard-boiled eggs, that worked out nicely. I loved Ian McKellan and Ian Holm and Hugo Weaving and even Sean Astin, whom I usually find tiresome, and all of the accents were really tight, except for Viggo Mortensen's, which was really in and out, but he is just a big manly ball of sex and all is forgiven.

Yes it's long, yes it has a real non-ending, but it's great fun and exciting and didn't make me want to put my eyes out with a dull spoon one bit! And what more could one ask for in a movie-going experience.

I did hear that the nine actors playing the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring all got tattoos with the number nine in elvish after making the three movies, but I should think that it shouldn't have only been the nine actors, but also the four hobbit stand-ins used in the long shots, because they did about half the movie.

Then we went home because Melanie and I were going to get together, but she called and said that she had mistook her schedule, and had to go to a party and do laundry. Separately, it wasn't a laundry-doing party, though that certainly is an interesting concept for Xmas merriment.

I have a feeling it's going to be one of those difficult years, though, where I have to end up driving quickly by their house while they run to the door and wave and I pitch their presents at them out the car window.

I already have their presents to me, though, since Melanie dropped them by the house when we were out the other day. I could barely lift the present from Melanie, I asked her when we spoke if she realized that I had to bring it back to NY and she said that it just jumped out at her. "Did it break your toes?" I asked.

Mom had a letter from a new steak house on Wilshire offering us a free steak, and we decided, since I wasn't having lunch with Melanie, to go there and have an early dinner.

I can say without question that this was one of the greatest meals of my entire night. The restaurant is called the Porterhouse Bistro, and it has a really tiny menu, it serves very few things, but they are all exquisite. They serve one meal, a 24 oz. porterhouse, though there is also a rack of lamb or some sort of fish that I have forgotten, but if you go to the Porterhouse Bistro and you don't care for steak, you really should go somewhere else. It's like going to a sushi restaurant when you don't like fish. This is why I don't go to sushi restaurants.

So, there's the glorious porterhouse, really the only entree, one soup, one salad, four side dishes, three desserts, and that's it. I had the mashed potatoes and Mom had the sauteed mushrooms, neither of which we could finish, the portions were so large, and Mom also had the onion soup, which she said was magnificent. But that steak was unbelievable--I am sitting here trying to think of some way to describe this amazing steak, but it is, well, indescribable.

And for dessert they have some sort of mango sorbet that we didn't have, and a chocolate lava cake and a plate of cotton candy that we did. We ordered the cake, but they brought the cotton candy for free, and when I saw it in the menu I said, "Well, that can't really be cotton candy, it must be something else," but it really was! And it was perfect and delicious and had a sparkly candle in the middle and it was just fun. I love the image of this fancy white tablecloth restaurant with a cotton candy machine in the back.

But the chocolate lava cake, o the chocolate lava cake. It blew the top of my head off. Small, not too sweet, with liquid chocolate inside (it would be an insult to call it chocolate sauce, this isn't Hershey's) and a side scoop of incredible vanilla ice cream.

And it wasn't took expensive, either! If we hadn't gotten the steak for free, it would have been $70, for two people, astounding for the quality of food and the fact that we could barely stagger out under the weight of our bulging bellies.

I want to live in this restaurant. If I lived here, I'd eat here once a month, only barely restraining myself from eating there every day. I want it to be my last meal before I die. If you live anywhere near LA and are not a vegetarian, you must go or you are only depriving yourself of a meal worthy of being served in heaven.

There was another movie at the Academy, Ali, but I didn't feel like going, though I did feel like going to another movie, so I went to CityWalk and saw the movie that I most wanted to see but didn't have time to see before leaving NY, Ocean's 11.

And it just rocked my world. I adore Soderburgh, and he and Clooney are a proven great team, and this movie was just so fun and joyful and well-done, I just had the best time.

All of the performances were great, Clooney and Brad Pitt had a great double-act going, and I even liked Matt Damon, whom I am generally not wild about, and Andy Garcia was great, and Bernie Mac and Carl Reiner and Elliot Gould, and just everyone was solid. My father would have been great in Carl Reiner's role.

The script was smart and tight, the caper was twisty, possible to follow but still surprising, and everyone got a chance to shine.

It was the perfect ending to a really great day.

Today's horoscope:
You can get a real satisfaction out of the leisure you choose today, as long as you don't expect more than is possible.

One year ago today:
So, I have purple hair.

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Last Updated Mon 24 December 20:12:09 2001