People leave New York like Napoleon leaving Russia, under cover of night with as little fanfare as possible. People leave Los Angeles with brass bands playing and flags waving, as if it were some sort of moral achievement. This woman apparently intends to keep the parade going for a year. One does have to wonder just how many names she's going to find to drop in Portland, and just how much contracting work that husband of hers in going to find in a slumping economy. Ten years ago I understand they did a pretty good business in Californicating houses for other expatriates, but I expect that business had dried up by now. He may be finding a client who keeps you waiting for a check is better than no client at all.

My rule of thumb is no one can truly be said to have left Los Angeles until they've been gone for at least five years. What happens, I think, is that Los Angeles gets slagged so much that people expect the next is going to be wonderful by comparison, and it ain't necessarily so. Remember when Steve Erickson did that big kiss-off in one of those "Best of Los Angeles" issues of the Weekly, assuring us we'd never see anything but the back of him again? Did he ever actually leave town? I guess the upshot is that people slink back into Los Angeles the way they leave New York (see above).

One less person in LA is always a small step in the right direction. Sounds like the writer had a good run here and I wish her well in her new life in Portland. The weather there would kill me but in between the drizzle-drops it's a beautiful place.

Is it LA she is leaving or the entertainment industry? The two aren't the same, despite the popular misconception fostered by writers who fly in, interview one loathsome and/or clueless celebrity, and then fly out after fighting traffic to get to LAX.

What a tiresome and phony pose, this pretense that Los Angeles is a place to be respected only by the stupid and the shallow. It's a position that is constantly being taken by people who, for whatever reason, aren't thinking for themselves. Maybe that's why they're so uncomfortable there, because the geography and privacy of L.A. tends to reward self-starters who don't need the scaffolding of a known culture(such as, say, Manhattan's) to tell them who to be and how to be it. If you want to be a New Yorker, there's a sort of formula for that. Not so in L.A. When I left L.A. due to a job change, I pined for it for years, and still feel wistful.

I don't know about the "stupid and shallow," but U.S. census data on Los Angeles and other statistics on the type of people most likely to move here indicate the town is respected primarily by the poor and uneducated, mainly from Mexico.

Racist.

Honey, Don't Leave LA

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/james-taylor/69175.html

I think people on the fringes of entertaiment or sporadically employed in entertainment think about leaving all the time. Even with runaway production in film to Canada, there's still work in TV, but you can't wait for jobs to drop, like ripe fruit, into your lap. The telling phrase is "misquoted the box office"--if you're trying to be a reporter in show biz, don't get the numbers wrong.

A friend from NYC was just visiting. She would love to move to LA. Though I disagree, she thinks even the shopping is better here. My friend is a real New Yorker and loves it here. Viva LA!

Nancy answered these comments with a pretty much segue-from-Mars blog entry. Why? God knows. She's got to be the 10,000th person to have discoverd the Short Stop. Has she covered bail-bond ads in the Yellow Pages, too?
I'm sure she's a decent writer, lovely person and all, but her leaving LA isn't going to leave much of a hole.