_Get in, loser, we’re going to Hollywood._
After my last class Friday, I, like many of you, promptly left Columbia for spring break. My friends and I piled into the car and headed to Kansas City, where we’d stay for the night before taking the red-eye from Kansas City to Los Angeles.
But make no mistake: Although I was all the way in Orange County (sadly, sans Seth Cohen et al.), it was as if I never left CoMo. While I was 1460 miles away from my (adopted) home, I ran into reminders of Columbia and MU everywhere I went.
Whether it was the many Tiger bumper stickers I counted on I-70 West to Kansas City, the woman in airport who recognized the logo on my Maneater sweatshirt (“Oh, that’s from Mizzou! I believe my granddaughter used to write for that!”), or the alumni who commented on my friends’ various items of MU apparel, I saw just how massive and far-reaching the proverbial Mizzou Mafia really is.
For instance: While on a Venice Beach expedition, between dodging snake tamers and people dispensing things that are completely legal in California for medical use, I counted five people rocking MU gear. Later that evening, my host’s father mentioned a former coworker whose daughter moved all the way from SoCal to CoMo for MU’s J-School. Despite being a long way from home, “She’s loving it,” he said.
On Tuesday, the six of us took a trip to the Happiest Place on Earth. You know, that theme park started by that guy who grew up in Kansas City. Yes, ladies and gentleman, though Walt Disney was born in Canada, he and his family moved to Missouri when he was 4, first to Marceline in Linn County and later to Kansas City, where Disney first encountered theater and film.
Disney attended Saturday classes at the Kansas City Arts Institute and spent much time at Electric Park, a now-defunct amusement park in Kansas City that Disney credited with influencing his designs for Disneyland.
Later that week, we ventured to Los Angeles, taking super tourist-y pictures of the Hollywood sign, El Capitan Theatre and TCL Chinese Theatre (formerly Grauman’s Chinese Theatre) — famous for its cement slabs featuring hand and footprints of various celebrities, including MU (almost) graduate Brad Pitt. Pitt, who would have graduated in ’86, dropped out of Mizzou’s J-School one credit shy of graduating, although it doesn’t seem to have hurt his career prospects.
On our last afternoon in California, we braved the famed LA traffic — think Stadium Boulevard on a game day, times 100 — to Los Angeles International Airport. As I struggled to get out my laptop and TSA-approved liquids, I heard someone call my name.
I spun around. Halfway across the country from the MU’s campus, I was greeted by Maneater copy editor (and, full disclosure, one of my favorite people) Colette Rector. We’d both been in Los Angeles at the same time. We’d even Instagrammed similar shots of LA sights, yet we never expected to run into each other in such a huge city.
But I guess it’s true what they say: It’s a small world, after all.
