horror at the doll house

Sunday breakfast and outing with L. She takes me to a trendy place off Fairfax on the 3rd avenue, the place is called Tart. Breakfast is as usual excessive even if you try to limit your orders and for instance renounce to French toast or the grated potatoes. The quantity of food das always in the US is beyond human need. In any case I have breakfast once a week and I think it is enough.

The crowd at Tart is very mixed in terms of age from the 4 ten years old girls having breakfast on their own, to a older couple. It is mixed also in terms of race. Many customers are well dressed and behave like if they are displaying themselves. Across the road there is Grove, a mall that has been built, as I understand on the location of one of the first farmers’ markets in LA.

http://www.thegrovela.com/ The farmers market in theory is still there but really there are no more than few stands and the rest is all coffee and restaurants, and deli shops. We buy the ingredients for a pesto, I want to show how to make fresh pesto. The mall is an open air one like the one in Glendale I have already described: a central square, fountains, shops and restaurants, in this one the statues and the buildings have a mix of styles including a sort of 1950s soviet style.

I wonder where they took the inspiration from.

Then the unexpected come. A most incredible store.The Grove mall is one of the seven locations in the entire country where a American Girl doll store is located. It is a relatively new store, people I am told come from all over the west to visit the store. http://www.americangirl.com/ It is a store where you can get a customized doll, they come with different skin colors, different hair styles etc etc. But the game seems to be that you can get a doll like yourself, thus they sell twin dress set, one for the girl (whether old or young) and one for the doll, so that the girl (young or old) can go around dressed like her doll. Inside it is full of mums and their daughters. The store offers a restaurants where you can go with your doll and eat with your little twin, a doll hospital if the doll is sick and a photoart studio to have your picture taken with your doll, of course a beauty salon….. In brief the perfect setting for horror movies and deranged stories. I would rather be shut at night in a cemetery than be trapped here when the light dims and the dolls start to talk with each other and plan how to take over the city. In the bookshop they publish the stories and biographies of individual dolls…. Each year a doll is elected miss of the year. and so on and so forth. You wanted the Americans to be American, well… they are.