Being a dreamer is a weird, tough, stellar and tragic place to be. Hollywood, is where that place becomes real. And the dreamer becomes true.

I don’t think that these years in LA, the silly job as hostess, the why do I do this?!? dance classes, the writing (why do I do this?!? n.2), the multiple obsessions, the yes and the nos, the angels and the monsters would feel the hot and the deep they feel right now if I didn’t start acting class, get into this play right away and spend some real, quality time in Hollywood. The Hollywood streets, not the hills.

The only regret I have is that I didn’t pick up acting before; I was ashamed of being “another actress” in Hollywood. Yes, it is definitely something to be ashamed of. And, I’m so proud of it!

Let’s just talk about last night, for example. My two friends who came to see me, Hillary and Katie, confessed me that, under a series of hilarious-beyond-believable coincidences, at first thought that the theater where I play, The Next Stage Theater, was a shady cover for “porn movies” and I had been “coerced” and I was “getting fucked backstage”. OMG, 3 am in the middle of the night, after a huge pizza—me, who would never eat and sleep that late unless dirty Hollywood is involved—I went to bed still laughing at this and I did the same this morning, first thing when I opened my eyes.

Two hours earlier, 1 am, let’s watch this: the homeless guys who live right around the corner from the theater, the ones that when I walk by during the day sleep and smoke and then sleep again and pee in their pants and I have to jump over their pee to make it to the theater, were serenading us with a guitar and a Christmas song. It was the first time I was seeing them alive and smiling and didn’t feel my heart cramping while looking at them wondering if they are ODing right there, on that dirty sidewalk, under my “pee leaps”.

One hour and a half earlier, 11.30 pm: the cool (“cool” for that Sunset-La Brea block standards) bar my friends took me to after the show, The Woods, has nothing but the same name of the place where the Cinderella’s Stepmother I play in the theater upstairs lives. But, looking around the bar, I’ve decided that I’d rather live in my character’s woods, than in that bar. Supposedly, in her woods there is a Nobleman to seduce and marry at any cost; in that bar, instead….

And, what about the handsome, harmless, hopeless young man wearing a “Fatal” t-shirt getting arrested for stealing a kid bike?!? That happened right in front of me while walking to the theater before the show, six hours earlier, 9 pm. For a second I thought that the sirens and the cops suddenly cutting my way were after me! But then I noticed the “fatal” figure and… I got it. I mean, how can you even hope to not get busted if you are a 5′ 10″ man walking down La Brea holding a tiny kid bike you just stole?!? Oh boy… fatal, he was and, indeed, fated. So beautiful, so vulnerable, so trapped. God bless him.

And then, this morning, back to “normal”. The clean and neat streets of Santa Monica, the English grace, wit and impeccability of Ballet Mistress Margaret Hill’s ballet class at Westside Academy, the Christmas shopping under a VIP sun on the Third Street Promenade… and last night feels like it never happened. But, it did. Because, since then, an obsessive thought has been following me up to here: this town belongs to no one—no one!—no one but the lost, the lonely, the hungry, the dreamer.