Doheny
My best friend lives on Doheny. Doheny runs north/south and divides West Hollywood from Beverly Hills. I don’t even know if it’s a street, boulevard, or avenue. It’s Doheny, for God’s sake. Like Cher, it doesn’t need a last name.
There are a few streets like that in L.A., streets for which no further designation is needed. Either you know Doheny, Sunset, Wilshire,
It’s funny about the Beverly Hills/West Hollywood thing. Take the prestigious Four Seasons Hotel (you can’t just say The Four Seasons, you have to say the prestigious Four Seasons Hotel, or they’ll send goons after you.) It’s on the West Hollywood side of Doheny, but they call themselves The Four Seasons of Beverly Hills. West Hollywood not being prestigious enough. So you see, Doheny is very important. It separates the wheat from us chaff.
It also provides the final test on whether or not an implant to Weho has truly acclimated and become a denizen, rather than just a squatter. The trick is to ask someone to spell Doheny. I was listening to my friend spell it on the phone to her mechanic, and I noticed that she pronounced the O in Doheny as sort of an /ew/ rather than the plain, midwestern /oh/. It’s almost British sounding but is really just further evidence of the spreading, thinning effect of Valley speak that has pollinated all of L.A. since 1980.
But with that /ew/ I knew that my friend has become a true denizen of Doheny. This means that in about a month, she’ll go up to that snooty little vacant lot north of the French restaurant Conversation and pay $300 for a Christmas tree. And it’s not even on the Beverly Hills side! Ew my God.
