LA / Matt's Tranny Past

I left NYC ass-early on Wednesday morning. Never have I ever been so thrilled to be leaving the city for warmer climates. We took off just as the sun was rising and I haven't looked back.

Upon landing I went over to Matt & Kelli's to meet their new little baby. She was sleeping so I didn't get to take any pictures. And Matt & Kelli were busy in some health insurance customer service battle which left me some time to snoop through some old photo albums and OMG am I glad I did!!!

Looking through I found some vintage pictures of Matt... in women's clothing!!!!

W.T.F??!??!?!?!?!??!

Seriously. I was like "MATT WTF IS THIS?!?!?!?"

Turns out in 2004 when they did the poster art for the movie White Chicks, the Wayans brothers were too lazy to dress up in drag themselves for the photoshoot, so their heads were just photoshopped onto some supermodel bodies.

Amaaaazing.

In the evening I met up with David Alan and Rebecca and we hit up SoHo House for a special (terrible) movie screening.

The SoHo House WeHo screening room is EPIC. (I did not take this picture. It's directly from their website.)

The movie starred Vanessa from Gossip Girl. She is the most annoying character on that show. And she was annoying in this.

Girlfriend is cute but CANNOT act.

It feels really awful walking out of a movie screening when the film's director was sitting directly behind us. But it had to be done.

Since SoHo House doesn't allow pictures, EXCEPT in the Photobooth, we did lots of Photobooth.

Oooh and we had a celeb sighting. Getting out of the photobooth as we were getting into it was Anna Faris!

Love her!!!!

3 Days in LA / SoHo Obsession

So I landed back in NYC after three awesome days in LA.

Got home and was EXHAUSTED and slept from 10am until 6pm.

Now I'm up all night working on photos and decided to take a break to blog.

You may or may not have noticed, I've started updating my blog again. I've also made an addition to the sidebar. Where I used to have a Cast of Characters, I now have Choose Your Adventure, so you can choose a tag/hashtag, and revisit those blog posts from the past. It's a really cool feature I've been slowly working on for the past year, and when it's complete it will be epic. If you have any tag suggestions, feel free to email me. I've been having to go back through the blog in my limited spare time and retroactively tag posts with labels and it's somewhat tedious but worth it in the end.

ANYWAY...

LA!

I'm in love with the 7am flight to LA because the airport is empty when I check in. And the upgrade likelihood is high (I got it, obvi) and then you land at 10am with a full day ahead of you and just in time to grab a fabulous lunch.

My first stop was SoHo House West Hollywood with Matt and Kelli.

SoHo House WeHo is arguably the most fabulous place in all of LA.

It sits high above West Hollywood at the beginning of the sunset strip and overlooks EVERYTHING. You can see the Hollywood Hills, Santa Monica, Century City, Downtown, and on a clear day even Long Beach. It is beauuuuutiful. And no picture taking is allowed, which kind of just adds to the mystique. (There are a lot of celebs there and it is probably nice for them to have a refuge where people can't snap photos of them for fear of having their memberships revoked.)

I found this photo on the the internet though. There are probably others if you google or search instagram.



It's just one of the terraces overlooking the LA skyline. As a member, you can just sit here all day and work on your computer, which I did, and plan to often.

The other thing that's awesome about SoHo House is that people are so excited to check it out that they offer to buy you lunch just for taking them. Thank you Matt and Kelli!



Celebs spotted at lunch: Omar Epps, Gerard Butler, Trudie Styler (Sting's wife).

After lunch, I headed over to Westwood where I was crashing with Matt and Adrian and took a nice long nappy nap.

Then it was back to SoHo for drinks and dinner with Danny and Steven. (Thank you D+S!)

While they don't allow picture taking at SoHo, they DO have an awesome photobooth and the hallway between the lounge and the restaurant is covered with black and white photos from the photobooth.



Celeb spotted: Ed Sheeran, Jason Lewis AKA Smith Jerrod from Sex and the City

After dinner we headed into West Hollywood where I had invited some of my friendsies out for pre-birthday drinkies. Thank you everyone who came out!



The next morning I went downtown to see KristyKwan who brought me to a hidden gem, Cook's Tortas.

And had the most delicious Steak Milanese Torta EVERRR...



Then we went back to Kristy and Mike's and she helped me hand-stitch my Worst Quality Crab costume for Ming-Na's big 50th birthday party (which I'm going to give its own post, for obvious reasons.)



Sunday morning after Ming's party, I brought my lovely hosts Matt and Adrian to SoHo for brunch. And after brunch I basically just held court there all afternoon because a bunch of people had texted saying they wanted to come by and check it out too. (You're allowed 3 guests at a time, so when one person left, I'd text the next person that they could now come over and would sign the next person in.) Gotta love social media. Such fun!

Celeb spotted: Rachel Zoe

Around 5 pm I headed to the airport for my redeye home.

And now here I am. Shivering under my blankets.

Oh...p.s...my friends convinced me to go to Vegas again this week to actually celebrate my real bday post Thanksgiving and...well...I just couldn't resist.

YOLO

Amanda & Michael @ Boston Public Library

Amanda and Prince Michael got married in Boston this weekend and it was EPIC.

The event went down at Boston Public Library. A huge beautiful historic landmark right in the center of Boston.

The wedding party was ENORMOUS.

Early in the day, before they booted all the peasants out, we went in to take pictures in the reading room.

Then we walked across the road to the church where the ceremony was to take place.

This is one of the funniest family photo outtakes I've ever taken.

And when the ceremony started, Amanda's little ring bearer nephews (3 and 5 years old) again did not disappoint as they fought over their "Here Comes The Bride" sign and wrestled in the middle of the procession.

The church was gorrrrrgeous.

As was the beautiful couple!

In the span of just a couple hours they were able to completely to convert the previously occupied Reading Room into a sprawling dining room complete with awesome accent lighting and twinkly silver-branched centerpieces.

Matt and Kelli were there, looking fiercefaced as usual...

As were some Brown faves like Liz and Jake and Chloe...

And Wes and Eric made the guestlist as well!

I'm wayyy to swamped to add more pics than the ones I already posted to FB. But it was amazing. There was great band that rocked the dancefloor...and then at 11pm we all moved into another room and had an afterparty DJ-ed by yours truly.

My favorite moment was when I played Mariah's "All I Want For Christmas" and it ended with "All I Want for Christmassssssssss.... is....... YOUUUU!!!!!" and everyone did jazzhands...

I want to post more pics later. But chances are I probably won't.

And thus ends my wedding season. FINALLY.

34 weddings. Whew!!!

LA!

My trips to LA are always a whirlwind, and that's the way I like it.

Fun, efficient, delicious.

THURSDAY

I arrived on Thursday morning off the redeye and picked up my rental and headed straight to West Hollywood to grab a scrumptious CurryBrunch with Kristy, Kelli, and Matt.



Then that evening I met up with Jesse and friends for some dancing...




FRIDAY

The next morning I lunched with Danny...




And then had an afternoon shoot at the Hotel Bel-Air.

We lunched in the new Wolfgang Puck restaurant right in the hotel and saw Wolfgang himself circulating to greet VIP guests like Les Moonves, CEO of CBS.

Food was amazing.

My friend/client wanted pretty editorial-style photos, so he had rented out the Oprah Suite. (The suite Oprah regularly stays in whenever she's in town.) It was pretttttyyyy nice.



It had its own outdoor courtyard with Jacuzzi...



And two lovely bedrooms.



We shot multiple setups all throughout the suite.



And I can't show you any official photos from the shoot, except maybe this one, of one of our pretty extras.



SATURDAY

I met up with AnnieAli to chat with her about her wedding next summer and to force her to nail down a date so I could be sure to be there to shoot it. (Already have 3 weekends in September 2013 booked up.) And Diana and Jason joined as well. We brunched over at Comme Ça on Melrose. And the Salmon Tartare was HEAVENLY.

It was a salmon-dill-caper-cremefraiche mixture sitting on top of a what was basically a giant tater tot.



SOOOO DELICIOUS

We all had foodbabies after.



Then I met up with Amanda and Michael to do their engagement shoot finally.

(Mr. and the future Mrs. Prince are quite the power couple, with her being full-time on-air talent, him being Mr. Guess-Man, and their new restaurant opening in a couple weeks, it's been hard to pin them both down for an afternoon.)

But the pictures came out amazing.



SUNDAY

The great thing about Delta Diamond is I can book the latest and cheapest flight, and then switch my flight the day-of for free.

I happened to wake up at 4am. (Probably from excitement.) So I drove straight to the airport and jumped on the 7am flight.

I just love Vegas. Every time I'm back I'm just filled with happy thoughts and memories of the best weekend of my life.

So I'm here for the next 48 hours for a couple days of relaxation, poker, and eatparties before my double-header wedding weekend back on the East Coast.

Wheee!