There's not a great deal that one can do to disguise the very fake brick, and the mechanical, Ruskin-would-rotate-in-his-grave neo-Gothic nature of USC's new University Village - but this amazing light show did its very best to mask the reality. Eric Garcetti - Mayor of LA - may have got it right, all the same, when he welcomed us to Harry Potter's World of Wizardry (something more comprehensible, than our University President comparing what we were witnessing to "The renaissance movement of the Middle Ages.") Sometimes I just feel very, very nostalgic for Oxford (and not just for the architecture). Quite how we ended up being invited as some of the very few faculty among the endless tables of donors is anyone's guess, but it was a hugely fun evening (dancers! music! yes, fireworks! - though just at the end and this out-of-this-world light show) - and edible food (at the bottom of the menu: "Chef: Wolfgang Puck"). Oh, and - when an invitation says "black tie and cocktail attire," that actually means - wear an incredibly expensive outfit of the kind that you always wonder who buys and who wears, when you see them in stores. Ah well. We scrubbed up just fine ... it was all super-surreal, but I wouldn't have missed it for anything ... that is, perhaps, the advantage of being A Foreigner, and giving myself the excuse of anthropological participant-observer status ...
and - yes! - a colleague - Jake Soll - following straight after Eric Garcetti, and doing The Faculty proud ...
and yes! thank goodness - one or two other people whom we actually knew ... here's Dorothy Braudy, as we were being played into dinner by the USC marching band. All of them.
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