During my sophomore spring at Tufts, there was one question on everyone's lips: "Are you going abroad?" My best friends were on their way to exotic places like Chile, Egypt and Australia; they had chores like visa paperwork and updating their passports. I just sat and watched them all freak out.
"Am I going abroad?" I said. "No. Well, kind of. I'm going to L.A."
Because I want to sit around in the sun on the beach all day? Because I'm hoping to get a glimpse of my favorite celebrities? Because I'm lazy and all of that leaving-the-country paperwork looked pretty daunting?
No, not quite.
See, I want to work in TV. I want to go to meetings and give script notes and hear pitches and then be mean about them later. I want to have a hand in deciding what everyone else will watch. But I go to Tufts, where discussion of the impact of the media is analytical and theoretical. Here in L.A., everything is so very real. I could touch it ... if I weren't just a lowly intern.
As an abroad experience, it's kind of a cop-out. I was born here and didn't move east until I was five. But Los Angeles as I'm experiencing it now feels totally different from my first home. And my experiences and impressions here could determine the course of my life — both in terms of my career and my home — after graduation.
So I'm taking a few Hollywood career-focused classes through Boston University and then working almost full-time during the day at two different internships. One of them is in a department I very well may want to work in one day: comedy development at 20th Century Fox Television. It seems like a boring office, but in the half-hour I was there for my interview, I saw framed photos of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1997) on the walls and heard an upcoming episode of the brand-new show "Glee" blasting from an office. The potent air of the real center of the television world gave me a little shiver of excitement. I'm that kind of nerd.
My other job is one part education, one part for fun, and three parts dream-come-true: I'm the only intern for one of my favorite TV shows, CBS' "How I Met Your Mother." Like everyone working in this town, I got the job because I knew somebody on the show already. But it's easy to shrug off the guilt brought on by nepotism when you're sitting at a desk with the clear view of the robot prop from your favorite episode. And then, when someone asks you to go down to set to ask the director what she wants for lunch ("And the actors, too, but only if they approach you first!"), that guilt is all but forgotten.
Everything about that job — even the downtime at my desk, frantically reloading Facebook and Google reader so I can find something to read — is either surreal or sublime, and it's usually both at once. And doesn't that, in a way, make it a microcosm of L.A.? A place where so many things that seem real turn out not to be. A place where the highest reverence is reserved for actors and writers. A place where hard work is balanced by fun.
Ah, but now I'm profiling the city. Are the things everyone knows about L.A. actually true? The beautiful people, the stars, the superficiality? I don't know; I've only been here three weeks. I guess that's what the rest of this semester is for.
As they say in the movies: Bring it on.
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Rebecca Goldberg is a junior majoring in American studies. She can be reached at Rebecca.Goldberg@tufts.edu.
