Painted Musky

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Posted by Jack | Posted in Baits & Lures | Posted on 28-10-2009

Painted Musky

The look of the Evaluation

Eye contact in communication can be risky. A look can be an invitation or an invasion, a challenge or an evaluation. A lot of evaluating happens in Los Angeles.

I flew out there recently from Pittsburgh, visiting Diana, a friend of mine to which the producers had not seen in years. The trip was a combination of research for a screenplay I'm rewriting, meetings with industry people, and catch up on old times. Part of the research was to investigate the culture of Hollywood.

One night we dined at the Palm restaurant, a rustic watering hole expensive semi-billed as a gathering place for celebrities. Diana wanted to check out the background for the characters in the script. The assessment started as soon as they took us to our table.

Every once in a while, people tell me I look "distinguished." I am in my sixties, and I prefer to believe that means that the sentence is not code for "getting up there." As Diana and I went to our table, we passed a couple sitting in a booth. She sat there I looked – this is the best I can get to adverb – in depth. It could have been my musky animal magnetism, but more likely she was wondering if I was nobody.

That feeling was suddenly two-way when we were sitting at our booth. After checking the more or less identifiable caricatures of movie stars painted on all walls visible, I looked around real people. A young man was sitting in a booth diagonally from us with another man who had his back to me. The looks nice young man looked familiar: dark hair, movie star. I knew he was somebody. Periodically, I glanced at him randomly, trying to remember name. The interesting thing is that he kept looking at me, I was trying to figure out who I was.

The same thing happened the following night in the restaurant the Four Seasons, but with a difference. Diana wanted to show me the famous hotel, so after a charity screening of a place in the sun of the Paramount, we the four seasons for dessert and coffee.

This is a totally different place of the Palm: elegantly decorated with lots of glass and dark wood, high ceilings, lighting tenuous, and a nice jazz sound coating. As we walked through the bar, I realized the difference of the Palm. The previous night, the eyes were evaluated subtle and oblique. Here the looks of some customers do not say anything, but directly without doubt, questions: "Who are you and what you can do me "(We saw no celebrities at the Four Seasons, but the chocolate cake of butter was the quality of stars.)

Of course, not everyone in LA looks to other people. Depends on where you are. I had to make some phone calls and writing to do during the day while my friend was at work, so I found a Borders bookstore in Sherman Oaks, a few miles from my hotel.

While working on a coffee table, I realized that there was no player or covert glances from other customers. Nobody looked at anyone else, apart from the normal everyday looks. It is true that many of the customers were doing things LA: a man reads a book to be a producer, another was talking on his cell phone on production values and creative strategies, and a third fellow was riffling through the pages a script. But speechless and without evaluating, but they were busy. (Apparently, I was the only one who was gawking.)

The entertainment industry is as competitive as NASCAR, racing with everyone around, trying to inch ahead of the rest, and with a dash in the back seat. So there are places you go in Los Angeles to evaluate and be evaluated, such as the Palm Restaurant and the Four Seasons. No Borders.

Oh, back to the Palm restaurant. I did find out who was this young when I got a look at his dinner companion. The man was John Stamos, and he was having dinner with her "Full House" co-star, Bob Saget. (Now you know, I 'll drop a name in the drop of a hat.)

But to prove I'm not star struck, I will not dwell on the fact that Ray Liotta was on my flight About the Author

Jay Speyerer has been a writer, a speaker, and an educator for more than 30 years, successfully helping people achieve their communication goals in body language, memoir writing, e-mail, cross-cultural communication, and presentation skills. Want to communicate better? Find out how at his web site: =>
http://www.jayspeyerer.com