All Along the Watts Towers

Why I stayed had less to do with nostalgia for the past than the present. Leaving Los Angeles had paradoxically landed me in the city’s epicenter, for an event I never would have left my house for. Things like this have been happening for months.

“You’re going to be on camera,” the fluffer told the audience, “so if something is funny, laugh!”

He told us to applaud, and then Manilow, with a face like a cosmetically enhanced mouse, but a pretty one, was at the piano, singing a medley that began with a version of “Mandy” that made my throat swell.

Yeah, the song got me, but not as much as watching the spontaneous rush of moths to flame, of pure pop production, of people holding cell phones overhead so the folks back home could hear. This was an essence of Hollywood that in a few weeks I will not be at liberty to sample or ignore. I can’t imagine finding myself again by chance at Hollywood and Highland, crying over a song I liked 30 years ago.

Two punkettes next to me, one with a wad of bumper stickers for the band Shiragirl, did not appear similarly moved. But then the horn section went “dah-Dah-DAH,” and Manilow blasted into “Copacabana,” pantomiming the tale of passion and loss with such verve that the crowd began to cha-cha. And the Shiragirls, who weren’t even born when the song came out, started to head-bop, and then, to sing.

—Nancy Rommelmann