This weekend trip was the first without Lois. Still woke up at night when she would have woken me up normally. Typical.
Stayed in Santa Monica. Lovely place. Joggers are out bright and early, bums sleep under streetlights, and places to eat are open most of the night. Won a giant stuffed animal on the Santa Monica pier at the ring toss booth. Fair and square.
If you've never seen the academy award winning documentary The Cove you should. It's heart wrenching and eye opening. We where invited to a fundraiser/benefit event for Ric O'Barry's Dolphin Project in Beverly Hills on Saturday night.
I gotta say, rich/famous people are fun. And weird. In a fun way. Mostly.
After finally settling on what to wear (scared of being too dressed up or too dressed down) I started to get excited to meet Ric. Soft spoken and gentle in his demeanor he thanked me for coming as I thanked him for being a champion for creatures who cannot defend themselves against humans. Remarkable man with a remarkable life story.
Of course some of the typical women where there. 50+ giant blond hair type, 40+ too much facial surgery type, 60+ loud colorful activist extraordinaire type, 30+ tall blond ex-model type.. and so on and so forth. Stereotypes come from somewhere in every culture I'm afraid.
There were some familiar faces there as was expected but some less than others and I found myself trying to place people to remember where I'd seen them before. Impossible.
I talked to some actress for 10 minutes about art and had no idea who she was until just now when I saw her face on IMBD... Slightly embarrassing in retrospect.
I was standing in a doorway when the (then unbeknownst to me) senior producer of The Bachelor/ette told me I had "good hair" and asked if that was a weird thing to say to a person. I told him it might have been weird had he patted my head at the same time and then I said that I though he had a good beard. He thanked me and mingled on.
There was a Swedish (of course) male model there who I recognized but again couldn't place. I said soccer player. Kimball said surfer.
The soccer player guess came around again for a French fashion photographer who looked Moorish. I was a little bit afraid of him (as would you be!) after having made eye contact a couple of times. Spent the rest of the time trying to avoid him until I accidentally backed into him while trying to get out of the way for someone passing by. Luckily two girls came out of nowhere and started talking to him so I could hide again. Odd moment.
Sophia Bush. Abigail Spencer. Jillian Michaels. Michelle Rodriguez.
Michelle was the DJ, having philosophical conversations with people while mixing tunes and drinking something clearly pretty strong... Nice gal though.
Wish I could have seen Kelly Slater but he wasn't there.
All in all, it just goes to show that people are just people no matter where they are in the world and as far as I could tell these people were generally good people trying to do the right thing by supporting a friend and a cause.
The dolphin hunting is on a slow but steady decrease as the demand for dolphins and other sea mammals is becoming less and less due to the documentary and raised awareness.
Way to go Team Dolphin!
