Leaving L.A.

Writer Nancy Rommelmann (LA Weekly, Los Angeles mag, lots of other stuff) plans to depart Los Angeles for Portland next June when her daughter finishes middle school. She is writing about the withdrawal process, and remembering how she got here, on her new JournalSpace blog Leaving Los Angeles.

Though I have said since I got to LA that I wanted to leave (original plan: back home to New York), it is not easy to do. I once heard a tape about the rise of the Third Reich, where the speaker said, "The rights were not taken away all at once, but slowly, so that you didn't notice. It was like trying to watch grass grow, and then it was over our heads." The things I disliked about LA--the constant idiotic sunshine, the appearance people like to give that notghing matters--became tolerable.

Ten years ago, I worked for an insane, old-school screenwriter named Floyd Mutrux, who, every time I said I was leaving, smirked and insisted, "Everyone says that, but no one ever does." I did not want to believe him; how could a man who wore captain's caps and chewed with his mouth open and screamed at me at the Farmer's Market when I misquoted the box office on "Thelma & Louise" be right about my life?...

This past March, when I arrived back home from an article I was researching in North Carolina, my husband--who is never rash and would sooner singe his hair to the scalp than complain--sat me on the couch and said, "I need to be out of here in one year."