Haunted weekend

Even on cloudy days, Santa Monica is full of tourists, locals taking the sea air, and last weekend, LA Marathon runners.

It's getting harder to get away from it all these days.

When the "all' you are trying to get away from includes news of wholesale death and destruction — it seems churlish to be enjoying yourself. But really, I'm not trained in earthquake search and rescue, so what can I do except donate money?

And there's not a damned thing I can do about Libya, except pray. But still, thoughts and worry about the state of the world cast a pall over last weekend's excursion to Santa Monica to see the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising's annual scholarship dinner and fashion show, Debut 2011.

A Friday's conversation with my German friend Barbara didn't help. I guess they don't have natural disasters on a scale with ours in her native country, because she is freaked out about earthquakes after the news from Japan. Stupid me, I made the mistake of telling her about Jim Berkland, the former Santa Clara County geologist who predicted the Loma Prieta earthquake four days prior.

I take next-to-nothing seriously, and certainly nothing I see on Fox News, so I threw it out there in a phone conversation that Berkland had predicted The Big One for California in an interview, and that the most likely day was Saturday, the following day.

"What are you going to do?" she asked me.

"Go to Santa Monica," I replied. "If the have the 'big one,' maybe a tsunami will get me."

(I should get struck down for this flippancy, I know. It wasn't nice. She was really scared.)

I have lived in California most of my life. I have packed more earthquake survival kits and then stolen the stuff out of them than I care to remember. Out of toilet paper? There's some rolls in the backpack in the trunk of daddy's car.

I have kept emergency cash, emergency food and water, and packed small emergency kits requested by my children's school with toys, family photos and a loving note inside. But after preparing so many times  and nothing happens, you get jaded. Eventually, you stop doing all those things. I know we should all be prepared like the Mormons, but it becomes tiresome.

The terrace of Le Merigot where I
sipped a martini and imagined tsunami
destruction.

So I told her about this the way I would a novelty, like a three-headed chicken, but she wasn't amused. And the conversation haunted my reverie on the terrace of the Marriott across the street from the beach the next day, when I looked at the building and calculated how high a tsunami would hit. (I figure the third floor, right where the patio umbrella is.)

I tried to conjure up visions of deck chairs, patio heaters, tables and marathon runners being sucked out to sea by a wall of water. Oh, did I mention that 3/4 of our hotel was populated by out-of-towners bent on running the LA Marathon? It was a win for us, because the hotel had a special carbo-loading menu, and the mushroom raviolis were to die for...

I think those those poor marathon runners were less concerned about an  earthquake than they were the skies opening up on them the following day. (Which they did— a sopping wet runner stepped out in front of our car while we were exiting the hotel parking lot, and scores were treated for hypothermia on race day.)

We went out on the pier and mingled with people in Adidas sportswear and cameras, local families treating themselves to a day at the shore, and thin bespectacled Japanese teenagers holding collection  boxes marked "Pray for Japan." So, even there in that seemingly carefree environment we were reminded that the seaside was not a calm diversion everywhere in the world.

The Santa Monica carousel building in the background, and the play ship and sea monster in the foreground.

The FIDM show later that evening was the best in the nearly ten years I have been attending. Ten of the students in the third-year program do a 12-look collection for the fashion show, and the media production this year did video projection like at this year's Academy Awards, that totally transformed the stage for each designer.

We were whisked to a snowy Moscow for the woman who did an all-knot collection based on Eastern European colors and folktales, for example. A designer whose looks didn't fit comfortably into a certain place and time was treated to a background of Grauman's Chinese Theater and dancers playing 1940s reporters and photographers. The effect was amazing.

The show began with the costume design students imagining "Carnivale in Rio," and as you would expect, the results were stunning. All that talent and imagination put into service to a wide-open theme gave birth to six-foot headdresses, glitter, spangles, enough Spandex to send us reeling back to the 1980s, and more colors than a flock of tropical birds.

My personal favorites, not surprising, were done by a little goth girl designer who had a steampunk Nancy Drew-like investigator, and a huge-skirted black and red number with an Elizabethan-style ruff that looked like cemetery gates. The kicker was that the bodice had a skull bra. The whole thing looked very heavy, but I totally wanted to wear it for Halloween.

Sunday morning dawned with the Pacific a slate-gray, and a monotonous drizzle soaking the hardy souls down on the beach: tourists with baby strollers determined to get a dose of ocean, and recreational runners not out on the marathon course.

The hotel was so quiet, it felt like we were the only people in the world, but bad news in the form of the LA Times snuck into our bubble — when we last heard the news, the French and their allies were only the ones involved in Libya. Now we knew
that Uncle Sam was flying sorties, too.

That afternoon we saw the LA Opera's "Turn of the Screw," a natural for that gloomy day.
Jim, looking at the rain pouring down: "This is perfect 'Turn of the Screw' weather.
Me: "No, this is 'Wuthering Heights' weather."
Jim: ""Nope, it's 'Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' weather."

And it was — the wind was insane; the little Miata was blowing all over the road on the way home, and I had to avoid parts of trees in the road. It was rather like being a tent on a bad Girl Scout camp-out with the rain drumming the ragtop. I finally turned the radio off because I couldn't hear it over the din.

The Dorothy Chandler chandeliers from the
 level of our nose-bleed opera tickets.

The opera was satisfyingly creepy, and lunch at Pinot on the plaza was interesting. Water was pooling under the tables, and I was sitting right next to the clear-plastic wall, which kept blowing back and forth, creating a wave in the puddle right next to my feet. I felt sorry for the servers who were working in waterproof parkas.

As you may have noticed, the predicted earthquake never came, and the window that Berkland gave has come and gone. I know I should get prepared, and I'll work on that. And I resolve to be more circumspect about what I tell my German friend. My Californian blase attitude is not very helpful.