Thursday, December 25, 2025: Diana Rosen's "Remember That Time in LA?"

Diana Rosen writes poems, essays & flash (nonfiction & fiction, but she won't tell you which is made up and which might very well be real.)  She lives and writes in the land of stars, Los Angeles, where her backyard is the country’s largest urban green space, Griffith Park, whose mammoth observatory telescope can show you the real sparklers. Her work appears in journals published in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India & the U.K. To read more of her work, please visit www.authory.com/dianarosen

Remember That Time in LA?

Remember when Johnny Mathis greeted me like a long-lost friend at a Hollywood party chattering away for a few minutes before he saw someone else he thought he knew? It made me think of him entertaining at The Twin Coaches, that Pittsburgh-area nightclub, my first grown-up venue, seated so close to the stage I can tell you every detail of his black patent leather shoes, how his nostrils flared out when he hit the high notes, how he threw his head back, stretched his arms out to the audience welcoming us like lovers.

Remember that time we saw Tony Danza talking animatedly with some blonde-haired lady in Safeway and, as she passed by us afterward, we asked if it was for sure Tony Danza and she exclaimed, “Of course!” she said, hitting her hand to her forehead. “I’m a costumer at the studio,” she added; “all men are waist, arm, and pant length sizes to me.” We all laughed yet you and I couldn’t understand how anyone couldn’t recognize that body, that face.

Remember when we first came to LA? Everywhere we went we saw someone from TV like a smiling Angie Harmon driving her convertible down Fairfax Avenue, those long dark tresses flying behind her like a blue-black blouse hung out to dry on a windy day. Or, Dan Johnson, still handsome, still trying, sitting between two starlets at Musso &Franks drinking their famous martinis or Michaela Conlin choking up in Trader Joe’s when I told her how great she was in “Bones” which I’d just binged on for the umpteenth time.

I didn’t ask what she was up to now; this is LA; everyone’s always auditioning, taking a meeting, shopping around a screenplay that has Oscar written all over it. When I met my accountant this afternoon, I joked, “You and I are the only ones in this town without a screen-play dormant with dust in the dresser bureau,” to which he replied, “Only you, kid, only you.”

© Diana Rosen