I shop at Marshall's. What am I doing here?

After living in such plebian locales as Palms, West LA, and Hollywood (the "real" Hollywood, complete with dour Russians and transvestite prostitutes), I moved to a small one-bedroom just a block away from paparazzi central: Robertson Boulevard, between Beverly Boulevard and West 3rd Street in Los Angeles.

This LA hotspot is at the crossroads between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, and is suitably expensive and trendy. Originally from Long Island, I went to Brown and then lived on the Upper East Side and worked for an art museum before migrating to the city New Yorkers love to hate. So while I'm familiar with the moneyed class, glitz is new to me. Too-perfect noses are not, but injected lips are. Star sightings no, flash bulbs and yelling, yes. What's a nice WASP like me doing here, anyway?

Well, I'll tell you: I wanted to walk to work. That's an anomaly out here, but 5 years of driving everywhere had shown up on my hips. And to quote my friend Mark, "I belong to a gym just so I can pay for it. Not so I can actually go."

My office was located exactly 13 minutes away by foot, and as luck would have it, I was laid off 5 months after having moved. So since February 2006, I've had heaps of time to develop my ethnographic study of this magical block known simply as "Robertson."