“Evening in LA”: Wicked and Cuban Restaurant

On April 29^th, 2007, I joined “Evening in LA,” an event held by Minority Mentor Program at CGU. The event included a martini show of the musical Wicked followed by dinner at a Cuban restaurant nearby. In the beginning, I assumed that both the musical and a Cuban restaurant were “selected” to represent L.A. by MMP staffs, since the title of the event was “Evening in LA” after all. It seemed to be an interesting but reasonable choice, because Wicked is based on The Wizard of Oz, which immediately reminded me of Hollywood, and a Cuban restaurant stood for the ethnic diversity of L.A. I also expected to meet many international students and planned to ask their impression of LA.

However, it turned out that all my assumptions were wrong. At the moment I talk to the supervisor of the event, I learnt that neither the choice of the show nor of the restaurant was so conscious at all. She told me that she simply chose Wicked because the participants of the MMP program recommended it. The restaurant was chosen because one of the MMP staffs knew their manager personally and could arrange the dinner at a discounted price. Among the twenty people who joined the trip, only five were not American citizens (they were from South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Equador, and Saudi Arabia): the rest was African Americans or Hispanic American citizens. Most of them have been to L.A. many times. I talk to them on our way to L.A., and found out strange fact that no one considered the ““Evening in LA” as about L.A. Some of them were excided to see the musical; most of them are looking forward to the dinner.

In the Pantages Theatre, before the show started, I attempted a conversation with a woman standing next to me while waiting in a line to use restroom. She said she that she lived in L.A., had seen this musical before, but came again to show it to her son (who was out of mi sight all the time).

In intermission I found two middle-aged women from South Korea and exchanged a lengthier conversation in Korean. They were on a package tour arranged by a Korean tourist company. They said that they dropped out from their group to see the musical instead of visiting other places, such as Korea Town and China Town. One of them said that she did not need to visit China Town because she already knew what it looked like: she had “seen it on TA.” I asked them how they liked L.A., and was answered: “Hollywood (by which they probably meant Universal Studios) was great!” It seemed that L.A., to them, was an assembly of tourist spots and events such as Universal Studios, Korea Town, China Town, beach, and musical. They liked both Universal Studios and Wicked (so far), and therefore they found L.A. very satisfying. However, it was not just L.A.: after a few more minutes of listening to them, I found that they perceived the entire U.S. in the similar way. As they said, “the U.S. and Korea are not so different these days.” Then what is the point of spending money to travel the U.S. other than to “see what they don’t have in Korea?” Two days were their entire stay in L.A. Next morning, they were leaving for San Francisco, where they were going to stay less than a day.