Looking For Venice

I used to go to Venice Beach fairly often in the late Sixties/early Seventies. It was a much hipper place to hang out than the Gidget-and-Moondoggie beaches of my Orange County home with all that good clean surfer fun. Venice Beach was a little darker, sometimes a little dangerous but always exciting. Long-haired hippies and sandal-clad beatniks strolled along a boardwalk lined with shops full of headbands and hookahs, psychadelic posters and paisley shirts. The Doors and the Grateful Dead played the Cheetah., and street musicians lined the boardwalk playing bongos, guitars, harmonicas. My girlfriends and I felt it was a place where adventure might be waiting behind every bead-curtained door.

I hadn't been there in years, but my daughter and her family have established a tradition of spending New Years Day having lunch at a favorite Marina Del Rey restaurant, then checking out the Venice Beach boardwalk. this year they invited me to go with them. Sure, I thought. I'm always up for a nice family lunch, I'd been hearing such good things about the restaurant, and I was a little curious to see if Venice Beach had changed.

The restaurant lived up completely to it's reputation...great food, plenty of it, wonderful atmosphere. Almost too stuffed to move, we trekked on to the boardwalk. My first shock was the parking lot. Nine dollars to park? Maybe my memory is faulty, but I don't remember a parking fee. As for the boardwalk itself, much more crowded than I'd ever seen it, both the street and the shops. My son-in-law mentioned that one of the shops he liked had partitioned itself in half since last year, and I thought OK, maybe that's why there seems to be so many more of them, and so much smaller, maybe several of them have done that over the years.

The merchandise they carried had changed, too. Gone was the drug paraphanalia cleverly disguised as something else, the rows and rows of stick, cone and powdered incense, the tie-dyed tapestries. Instead, nearly every block had it's medical marijuana facility, complete with pitchman urging passersby to throw away their aspirin, their tranquilizers and painkillers and to come in and sample the product.

Indian saris replaced by cheap Mexican blankets, stall after stall of junk jewelry, faux leather, plastic sunglasses....I felt as if I were in Tijuana. As for the street entertainers, except for the long haired guy playing piano, singing Leonard Cohen and looking like he'd been there since 1973, the musicians were pretty much all rappers and in your face. The act that got the most attention was the fool with the sign that said you could kick his butt for a dollar. A bunch of spectators stood around waiting to see if anyone would take him up on it and of course eventually someone did.

Disoriented and disappointed, I trudged on, trying not to show my daughter and grandson how let down I was feeling. This was not what I had expected. Where was the Venice Beach I remembered? Had it ever existed, or had my memory colored it, made it more romantic and edgy than it really was. Then my grandson pointed toward the sand where a big crowd had gathered.

"Let's go over there and see what's going on," he said.

As we got closer I heard the sound of drums, just a cacophony at first but as we got closer I began to isolate different rhythms and voices. There were full drum sets, doumbeks, bongos, bodhrans and tablas. There were maracas and rattles, flutes, and one man sat on the ground cradling a saxaphone in his lap, though I never saw him play it. People were dancing, chanting, laughing and swaying, smiling at each other, and I thought well, it does exist, it's still here after all. People not trying to be cool, not afraid to look silly, just being in the moment, having fun. This was the Venice Beach I remembered.