Between Santa Monica and UCLA sits the massive campus of the West Los Angeles Veterans Center. There's a hospital, housing, recreational facilities, and quite a few buildings I didn't quite understand the purpose of. The buildings are numbered, and go up into the hundreds. The main entrance is from Wilshire Blvd., which cuts through the middle of the campus as its speeds towards the 405. Follow the meandering road north into the hills and at the very northern edge, nearly a mile away, up against the beginning of a canyon, sits the Brentwood Theatre.
Today's event: a special hearing held by the chairs of the US House and Senate transportation committees. Barbara Boxer played host. Miriam was most most definitely the only toddler in the room of a couple hundred players. She was the only minor, for that matter. I was one of the few without a suit jacket, though I did think to dress up and had a collared shirt on.
We checked in outside with the young senate staffer, got the once over by one of the six LA County sheriffs standing around under a tent just outside the entrance, and walked in to the hearings, already an hour into the proceedings by the time we got there. On stage in front of a half full comfortable auditorium of perhaps 400 seats, sat around 20 people in two rows, the first row behind panel discussion tables, the second kind of lurking in the shadows behind them.
Hoping to find an empty area where Miriam could run up and down the aisles for the few minutes before she started making distracting levels of noise and we would go to the next stop on the morning's itinerary, Aidan's Place, the fantastic playground in Westwood, we went up to the top row. This afforded a lovely view down into the half dozen Blackberries lit up and in use of the other people with a predilection for sitting in the back of the room. So it was a little hard to make out who was who. Luckily, politicians use one another's names all the time when speaking and tend to gesture broadly.
I missed hearing Mayor Villaraigosa, who I would like to learn more about. He got himself quoted in the LA Times article about the hearing. Speakers seemed like a who's who of transportation planners, like the head of the Metro, of a Southern California planning commission, Orange County's Transportation Department head, etc. Out of twenty or so people on stage, three women, one black person, two hispanic people. Lots of white men. The level of discourse would be about average for an NPR talk show, minus the call-ins. Each speaker got around five minutes, and maybe they were going to take questions after all ten had spoken.
After two and a half speeches, Miriam realized we weren't in a park, reading a book, or playing with Legos, and signaled that it was time to go. So we left.
Who were all those people in suits silently watching the proceedings? Elected officials and their staff? Construction magnates hoping to bid on future infrastructure projects? Unemployed and curious citizens with a free day and a good feel for fashion?
Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Kate's yogurt cake and a banana
lunch: the end of the tofu yaki soba
dinner: cheesy potato
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