My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

L.A. faces, paying gigs with names you know: “I’m Dustin Hoffmann’s gardenerâ€. You don’t think you care, but here you are repeating it. It means something…you just met Dustin Hoffman’s gardener…it means…Dustin Hoffman. He played in Tootsie. He’s famous…

When you say his name, a lot of people know him. He’s A list. Then you meet someone, the rapper MF DOOM, only a few recognize his name. Someone had to tell you. Now you feel like you share a secret. Both Dustin Hoffman and MF Doom make people feel connected. They can be talked about. When will your name be recognized?

L.A. Los Angeles. City of lost angels. Lost souls. So many people wanting to be talked about that never will be. Why you here? Because a city can do something for you. Why this one? Because Boston will make you mad, San Francisco will make you gay, New York will make you tough, Seattle will make you cool, but not cooler than Portland. Austin gives you Texas and that’s gonna be hot, but Boulder will give you calm, and that’s cool, and LA. LA will make you famous. People will talk.

So you chose LA.

You are here because you hope to move next door to someone who can make your childhood turn out correctly. The guy at the coffee shop will teach you the lost chords to make your song a hit, the woman you meet at the farmer’s market will sell your boarding school coming of age script, then standing in line for street dogs someone signs you to their fashion label.

Maybe you learned to tap dance and speak with four different accents. Maybe you can juggle midgets on fire. Maybe you want to write something that will be turned into a big screen production.

So you move to LA. You aren’t the best tap dancer. They don’t need Austrian accents this year. You drop too many midgets. You can’t write quite well enough. But you stay here. Because you believe in magic. And chance meetings. Here’s where things get bizarre.

You move in next door to professional skateboarders. That was a childhood dream…for a year. You’ll switch dreams. Why not? You had so many back in that little town. As long as something happens to make you feel like you finally did something right. Whatever it takes to make your name something people can talk about.

Maybe these neighbors will teach you how to acid drop or land a 1980’s judo air which you never could do, not back in New Hampshire in that two hundred year old barn full of apples and hay where the Kroitzsh boys built a half pipe. A full size plywood skate ramp on the second floor of an old cow barn. There was a cider press in the basement. Tractors and apple sorters on the first floor. Twelve boys trying to be a part of American youth culture in town full of dirt roads and hard workers. Twelve boys learning how to drop in around banned pesticides and broken farm implements.

The smell of cider is a cold one. The apples are ready late in the season, and it is cold in New Hampshire late in the season. The cider press is in the basement, granite slabs pulled from the fields are the foundation of this barn and it keeps the air cold down here. It’s dark in the corners.

Cider is made from drops – apples that have dropped off the tree. They bruise so easy, just a little fall from the tree, and no one buys a bruised apple. Drops are thrown in large laundry service wheeled carts. These bruised fruits that aren’t good enough to be sold are fed into a grinder. The pulp is sprayed on trays, the trays are stacked and hydraulically squeezed. Filters keep seeds, stems and skin from flowing down into the stainless steel holding tank with its two spigots at the bottom that release sweet dark brown liquid the color of a bruised apple. A hundred apples to the pint. Pure apple cider is a dark storm river water brown. The compressed pulp is scraped into buckets and fed to cows.

This is you in Los Angeles. The little bit of sweetness is squeezed out then you are fed to cows. Because you aren’t a perfect shiny apple sitting in a bushel basket at the farmers market.