Glen McCurtayne

Ophelia, left, gets to work.

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*Veruca James, Accountant Turned Porn Star: 'I'd Always Been Wild'

When pink vans emblazoned with "Topless Maids" and the phone number (818) 666-HUGE parked up on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, it caused a media storm. Actor Matthew Perry and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres prank-called the business live on TV, while incensed local residents complained until the vans were impounded by the city. Now Sami Ammari, who runs the cleaning and massage firm, is suing the city after being hit with thousands of dollars in fines.

Yet this bizarre industry continues to boom. There are more naked maids in L.A. than you can shake a feather duster at, with myriad agencies springing up, including A Little Bit Dirty, Topless Maids and nudehousecleaners.com. Insiders claim there are as many as 300 freelance nude "servicers," mostly female and younger than 25.

Unlike in Wedding Crashers, real-life wedding crashing can be used for more than getting laid.

More First Person pieces:
*I Was Sick of L.A. Traffic. So I Took a Plane to Work
*I Rode the Entire L.A. Metro in a Single Day
*Why the San Fernando Valley Hate Needs to End Once and For All

Between July and October of 2011, I crashed more weddings in Los Angeles than I've probably been invited to in my entire adult life.

No, this was not some movie-inspired ploy to get laid. I was with my then-fiancé, now husband, and it didn't strike us as strange to visit these weddings uninvited. For the approximately 40,000 Iranian Jews living in Los Angeles, making an unauthorized cameo at other Persian weddings is not only a necessary part of planning your own wedding but also a rite of passage.

Relatively speaking, our wedding was to be a small affair, about 400 people, a mere get-together really. (Later our Iranian guests commended us on our "simple" and "intimate" party, while our American friends wondered where all these people came from. What did we think this was, the queen's Diamond Jubilee?)

So each Saturday or Sunday for months before our big day, the caterers, florists or bands under consideration had us come check out their work — while they were feting some other bride.

No matter now socially accepted the practice is in our community, I found myself with pre-crashing jitters each week as I slipped into a black just-pretend-I'm-not-here dress and my fiancé reluctantly put on a suit.

From the film 12 Angry Men

More First Person pieces:
*I Was Sick of L.A. Traffic. So I Took a Plane to Work
*I Rode the Entire L.A. Metro in a Single Day
*Why the San Fernando Valley Hate Needs to End Once and For All

Last month I was an L.A. Superior Court juror. It was a simple felony robbery trial, with a 20-year-old man accused of jumping a young woman at a bus stop and snatching her necklace. Because the prosecution's case was full of holes (namely, no one could make a reliable eyewitness identification of the suspect, much less place him at the scene), we found the defendant not guilty in about 15 minutes of deliberation. The case was so egregiously flawed, I frequently found myself wondering how many tax dollars had been wasted on prosecuting it. Meanwhile, the six days I missed at the office meant that a mile-high pile of work awaited my return.

Yet jury duty was one of the best experiences of my life.

PHOTO BY PAUL T. BRADLEY

See also:
*50 Reasons Los Angeles Is the Best Effing City in America
*Why Does Everyone in L.A. Drive Drunk All the Time?
*I Was Sick of L.A. Traffic So I Took a Plane to Work

I once dreamed of being a transportation planner: fast-roping into jungles, skirting ancient booby traps to snag gilded idols, natives and Nazi occultists in hot pursuit. Sadly, urban planners do none of those things. The most daring thing most of them will ever do is Sharpie "Fuck you, Robert Moses!" onto their Trapper Keepers. I'm not cut out for that.

While I'll never get to write scintillating reports on Arterial Levels of Service, I can still appreciate the bureaucratic ballet that produces public transportation. I even like riding trains occasionally.

The thing is, I rarely ride them. I barely touch the Metro. Most of the time it's too complicated to get from, say, Silver Lake to Santa Monica, Red to Expo to bus, a buck fifty per line and nearly three hours shot. Why bother when you have a perfectly decent car?

And yet there is that whole $5 day pass thing — you can ride any train, and any bus, in the entire metropolitan system, with just one pass. Which got me thinking: How far could you stretch it? You could ride from one end of L.A. County to another in a single day. Other than hustling chess at the library, it might be the cheapest way to kill a day in Los Angeles — and potentially much more interesting.

I decided to give it a try.

Photo by Joseph Lapin

It was raining in Los Angeles during the 2011 Christmas week, and the traffic on the 405 near the Getty Center was jammed. I had left Long Beach two hours earlier, and it would still be another hour before I arrived at work in Woodland Hills.

That morning the red brake lights were staring at me like blood-shot eyes. Angelenos have no idea how to drive in the rain, which causes both accidents and soul-sucking congestion. I wanted to kick out my windows; I wanted to lie on the horn; I wanted to turn around and forget about this city of freaking angels.

This wasn't matching the fantasy I'd created back in Massachusetts. Before I moved, I studied pictures of the Pacific Ocean and devoured Kerouac and Stegner, the stories of the beautiful people and the musicians, actors and writers who made their dreams come true. I had bought into the California dream, and I wanted my piece. So years later, at 25, I became one of the many who crossed the desert like ancient wanderers, driving until the Pacific Ocean, suddenly, was in view before me. I had never seen anything so vast, so stunning.

Karen Marcelo

This happened last weekend in L.A.

If you really want to see a festival that deals with the extremities of the future, any retirement home will do.

The 2nd Extreme Future Festival, which took place over two days at the L.A. Center Studios this past weekend, focused on arts and technology produced by "radical voices of the new evolution." It was in fact two days of strobe light, slam poetry and lectures on the sorry state of a world, all transfixed on fixed points in the future that, to the presenters, matter more than the crumminess of the "now."

It was also to closest thing to a reunion of the minds behind the groundbreaking industrial music and performance art book Industrial Culture Handbook from Re/Search publications, with V. Vale, Naut Humon (Rhythm & Noise), Sinan (SPK) and Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) all making various appearances over two tumultuous, chaotic days.

Anna Jones

If Kobe can fly to work, why not me?

I am flying westward over the Angeles Crest Mountains, the morning sun shining down over the San Fernando Valley as it spreads out below me and we bank south. The Cessna 152, aptly named "the Commuter," cruises at just over 3,500 feet as we travel from the Agua Dulce Airpark toward Santa Monica Airport -- a 47-mile trip that will put me just two miles from my office in Culver City.

Exhilaration rushes through me as the plane reaches optimal speed, or "trues out," at about 95 knots, the propeller spinning in a blur. The pilot, Michael Gold, checks in with air traffic control, effortlessly communicating a long string of flight information consisting of letters and numbers. I may be on my way to work, but this is definitely not an ordinary workday.

I don't usually commute by small plane. Other than the Lakers' Kobe Bryant -- who famously helicopters from Newport Beach to Staples Center -- who does? Since I started my job a year ago, in fact, I've been commuting almost 70 miles round-trip each day on L.A.'s jam-packed streets, spending, on average, three hours (or more) stuck in traffic on the 405.

Illustration by PJ McQuade

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*10 Awesome Photos of L.A. Pot Shops
*A Pot Brownie Marijuana Entrepreneur

There needs to be something wrong with me. That's the only way you can buy pot legally, even in Venice Beach.

And so I sit in the doctor's office and ponder the form I've been told to fill out: What am I suffering from?

"Anxiety," I write. "And hemorrhoids."

I didn't need an appointment to visit the Green Doctors, a shabby, open-air storefront "clinic" that has been operating right off the beach since 2005. Nor was there much of a wait once I completed the paperwork. Once inside the medical man's office -- no door handle, particleboard desk -- Dr. Lieberman, an older guy with a thick gray mustache, listens to my heart and lungs and glances at his clipboard. "Hemorrhoids?" he asks thoughtfully. "Does smoking marijuana help with that?"

He's the doctor. Shouldn't he be the authority? But I play along, as if I know. Indeed it does, I assure him.

Thanks to a combination of contradictory factors -- the L.A. City Council's attempted dispensary ban, its reversal last week in the wake of a citizen referendum, a series of raids by the federal government, state law be damned -- Los Angeles is in pot purgatory. The result is an elaborate pas de deux between doctors and patients. In some ways, buying pot these days is akin to filling your prescription for Prevacid. In others, it still feels criminal, as my buddy Keith and I discover on a Saturday morning when we set out to explore the state of the scene.

Sam Bartolone

The entrance to Adobe Guadalupe

See also:
*Anthony Bourdain's Baja Episode of No Reservations Will Make You Want to Cross the Border Immediately.
*OC Weekly's column Tijuana Sí!.

In our column First Person, L.A. writers tackle the good, the bad and the funny about life as they know it.

Anthony Bourdain made it look so great. "Baja's like Tuscany!" he'd proclaimed to the media. And right in L.A.'s backyard. I'd never been, nor had my best friend, so we booked hotel rooms for ourselves and our boyfriends in Mexico's nearby wine country. We exchanged dozens of emails and Gchats in the weeks that followed, twittering back and forth about the fun we'd have and the feasts we'd devour.

Until one week before we were scheduled to leave. That's when her boyfriend balked.

"He just refuses to go," she told me, tears welling up in her eyes. Some friends had gotten in his ear about the danger that awaited us across the border -- narco-violence, kidnappings, beheadings, certain doom. He insisted the two back out.

"But we'll be fine," I protested. How could they doubt Bourdain? Or Andrew Zimmern or Chicago chef Rick Bayless, all of whom had made recent visits to Baja with TV cameras in tow, lauding the incredible food and gorgeous scenery?

It was to no avail. They were out, leaving Sam and me just a twosome in our Mexican adventure. Still, we packed up my hatchback. "We'll be fine," I said. "... Right?"

More »

Patrick Coan

Darby Romeo

Can you remember the first time you were uncool? Most people won't remember themselves like that. Age and nostalgia dull the peaks and canyons of the past, making them look from a distance like gentle, bountiful plains.

When I first picked up a copy of Ben Is Dead in 1989, I knew I was violently and constitutionally uncool.

For 11 years -- more than 30 issues published from 1988 through 1999 -- Ben Is Dead was the zine that offered a sure and brilliant glimpse into the then-mystifying world of alternative culture. Founded by Deborah "Darby" Romeo and featuring a revolving cast of writers and artists, each seeming more crassly erudite than the last, it felt indispensable. I picked up as many as I could, as often as I could. I still remember all the places I found them -- Aron's Records. Amok Books. Record Rover. 12" Fun in Ventura.

They're all gone now.