Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: We stopped pretending we were just friends. But was it too late?
I still think about the night before I left Los Angeles — the way Matt and I finally stopped pretending we were just friends and how his pit bull, Jesus, slept curled at the edge of the bed while we held each other, fully clothed, knowing we were out of time. It wasn’t a grand ending. There were no fireworks, no cinematic declarations. Just the quiet hum of the city outside and two people trying to stretch a single night into forever.
I had met Matt years earlier, back when I first moved to Los Angeles and the city seemed determined to break me. I’d been apartment hunting for months, a process that had devolved into a series of small humiliations. Landlords’ smiles would fade the instant they saw my brown face. The decent apartments — ones with working showers or a refrigerator — were always “just rented.” The ones I could actually get were dark, smelly or unsafe.
I was starting to think I’d made a mistake leaving New York. Then my friend Shannon sent me a Craigslist listing that looked —miraculously — normal. “Hollywood/Little Armenia,” she read. “Centrally located. Two blocks from the 101.” The rent wasn’t outrageous. The photos didn’t make me shudder. I pulled out my Thomas Guide, traced the route to Lexington Avenue and drove there with more hope than I wanted to admit.
The building exceeded my expectations. It was white, mid-century, with quirky castle-like touches that gave it personality. The street was alive with Armenian markets and mom-and-pop bakeries. For the first time since arriving in L.A., I could picture myself living somewhere that felt like a community.
Then Matt appeared.
He was tall, clean-shaven, reddish-haired, with warm brown eyes that made you feel immediately seen. “You’re here about the apartment?” he asked. I braced myself for the usual letdown. Instead, he smiled and said, “Let me show you around.”
He was the building’s superintendent, but that felt too small a word for him. He was also a documentary filmmaker who’d studied at UCLA, was fluent in three languages and had an easy charisma that drew people in. His dog, Jesus, a striking black-and-white pit bull, followed him everywhere, tail wagging like a punctuation mark.
The apartment itself wasn’t perfect, but it was a palace compared to what I’d been through. It was a studio with a big kitchen and actual sunlight. I signed the lease that week. Shannon warned me, only half-joking, “Don’t fall for your building super.” I promised I wouldn’t.
That promise lasted about two weeks.
The first night I moved in, I realized my bedroom window was broken — not just cracked, but open enough to make me feel unsafe. I knocked on Matt’s door, probably sounding sharper than I meant to. I’d been through too many slumlords to expect much. But he listened patiently, nodded and had it fixed the next day. That small act — his professionalism, his steadiness — disarmed me. It was the first time in months that someone in this city had made me feel cared for.
We were both smokers then. The building had a little patio where residents would gather, and before long, Matt and I started running into each other there. Those encounters turned into conversations about film, queerness, art and the strange loneliness of being transplants in a city obsessed with dreams. He told me about Costa Rica, where he grew up, and about how he loved and resented Los Angeles for its contradictions. I told him about New York, about how it shaped me and why I had to leave it.
Our connection deepened slowly, marked by cigarettes and laughter, and those long, suspended silences when neither of us wanted to say goodnight.
By the time the holidays rolled around, I’d stopped pretending that I didn’t look forward to seeing him. As a thank-you for all his help that first year, I bought him two bottles of Grey Goose: lemon- and orange-flavored because I’d noticed he liked citrus. He invited me to help him drink them on New Year’s Eve.
We spent the night talking about everything and nothing: music, travel, ambition. Midnight came. We hugged. And in that long, lingering embrace, I felt the spark we’d been trying to ignore. But we let go, careful not to cross the boundary that had quietly become sacred between us.
For years, we danced around it. We’d share a beer, a smoke, a late-night talk and retreat again to our corners. I respected his professionalism; he respected my space. But under all that restraint was something undeniably alive.
Then came the accident. A driver T-boned my Volvo on my way home from work at E! Networks, and I was left with two herniated cervical discs and a terrifying warning from my doctor: one wrong move, and I could be paralyzed. I decided to move back to New York to recover.
The night before I left, Matt came by to say goodbye. We knew it was our last chance to stop pretending.
“I love you,” he said quietly.
“I love you too,” I told him.
We kissed, finally, with the kind of tenderness born from years of self-restraint. But we didn’t take it further. We just lay there, spooned together, holding on as if stillness could save us.
After I moved back east, we kept in touch for a while, then drifted apart. He eventually married a Frenchman and moved to Europe to make films. I stayed in New York and wrote my stories.
Sometimes I think about that broken window — the one he fixed the day after my first night in the building — and how it set the tone for everything that followed. Love doesn’t always announce itself with drama. Sometimes it’s in the quiet repair of something broken, the small acts of care that build into something profound.
Matt taught me that. He made a city that once felt hostile finally feel like home. And even now, years later, when I think of Los Angeles, I don’t think of the rejection or the struggle. I think of him.
The author is a freelance writer. He lives in New York City and is working on a memoir. He’s also on Instagram: @thebohemiandork.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Dylan Dreyer
Savannah Will Likely Come Back … Just Not Sure When
Published
TMZ.com
Dylan Dreyer is giving a small update on her embattled “Today” co-host, Savannah Guthrie, as the search continues for Savannah’s mom, Nancy — telling TMZ she does believe she’ll likely return to the show at some point.
We caught Dylan leaving NBC Tuesday afternoon, and she said while she thinks Savannah will come back, the timing is totally unclear — adding everyone at the show is simply giving her the space she needs because they care about her so much.
TMZ.com
Dylan also reflected on Savannah’s emotional visit to the “TODAY” studio last Thursday, saying the hug they shared was something they both really needed in that moment.
Catch the full clip — Dylan says the visit was incredibly emotional, adding Savannah clearly wants to get back to some sense of normal life … she just doesn’t quite know how yet.
Still, Savannah managed a few smiles during the brief stop by the studio, doing her best to keep moving forward during an incredibly tough time.
TMZ.com
As we reported, Nancy was taken from her Tucson home in the middle of the night on February 1. She was last seen entering the house just before 10 PM on January 31 after dinner with her daughter Annie and Annie’s husband, Tommaso Cioni.
Kevin Kline plays actor Richard Bean, and Laura Linney is his sister-in-law Kristen, in American Classic.
David Giesbrecht/MGM+
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David Giesbrecht/MGM+
American Classic is a hidden gem, in more ways than one. It’s hidden because it’s on MGM+, a stand-alone streaming service that, let’s face it, most people don’t have. But MGM+ is available without subscription for a seven-day free trial, on its website or through Prime Video and Roku. And you should find and watch American Classic, because it’s an absolutely charming and wonderful TV jewel.
Charming, in the way it brings small towns and ordinary people to life, as in Northern Exposure. Wonderful, in the way it reflects the joys of local theater productions, as in Slings & Arrows, and the American Playhouse production of Kurt Vonnegut’s Who Am I This Time?
The creators of American Classic are Michael Hoffman and Bob Martin. Martin co-wrote and co-created Slings & Arrows, so that comparison comes easily. And back in the early 1980s, Who Am I This Time? was about people who transformed onstage from ordinary citizens into extraordinary performers. It’s a conceit that works only if you have brilliant actors to bring it to life convincingly. That American Playhouse production had two young actors — Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon — so yes, it worked. And American Classic, with its mix of veteran and young actors, does, too.
American Classic begins with Kevin Kline, as Shakespearean actor Richard Bean, confronting a New York Times drama critic about his negative opening-night review of Richard’s King Lear. The next day, Richard’s agent, played by Tony Shalhoub, calls Richard in to tell him his tantrum was captured by cellphone and went viral, and that he has to lay low for a while.
Richard returns home to the small town of Millersburg, Pa., where his parents ran a local theater. Almost everyone we meet is a treasure. His father, who has bouts of dementia, is played by Len Cariou, who starred on Broadway in Sweeney Todd. Richard’s brother, Jon, is played by Jon Tenney of The Closer, and his wife, Kristen, is played by the great Laura Linney, from Ozark and John Adams.
Things get even more complicated because the old theater is now a dinner theater, filling its schedule with performances by touring regional companies. Its survival is at risk, so Richard decides to save the theater by mounting a new production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, casting the local small-town residents to play … local small-town residents.
Miranda, Richard’s college-bound niece, continues the family theatrical tradition — and Nell Verlaque, the young actress who plays her, has a breakout role here. She’s terrific — funny, touching, totally natural. And when she takes the stage as Emily in Our Town, she’s heart-wrenching. Playwright Wilder is served magnificently here — and so is William Shakespeare, whose works and words Kline tackles in more than one inspirational scene in this series.
I don’t want to reveal too much about the conflicts, and surprises, in American Classic, but please trust me: The more episodes you watch, the better it gets. The characters evolve, and go in unexpected directions and pairings. Kline’s Richard starts out thinking about only himself, but ends up just the opposite. And if, as Shakespeare wrote, the play’s the thing, the thing here is, the plays we see, and the soliloquies we hear, are spellbinding.
And there’s plenty of fun to be had outside the classics in American Classic. The table reads are the most delightful since the ones in Only Murders in the Building. The dinner-table arguments are the most explosive since the ones in The Bear. Some scenes are take-your-breath-away dramatic. Others are infectiously silly, as when Richard works with a cast member forced upon him by the angel of this new Our Town production.
Take the effort to find, and watch, American Classic. It’ll remind you why, when it’s this good, it’s easy to love the theater. And television.
The ritual of meeting up and hanging out at a coffee shop in L.A. is a showcase of style filled with a subtle site-specific tension. Don’t you see it? Comfort battles formality fighting to break free. Hiding out chafes against being perceived. In the end, we make ourselves at home at all costs — and pull a look while doing it.
It’s the morning after a night out. Two friends meet up at Chainsaw in Melrose Hill, the cafe with the flan lattes, crispy arepas and sorbet-colored wall everybody and their mom has been talking about.
Miraculously, the line of people that usually snakes down Melrose yearning for a slice of chef Karla Subero Pittol’s passion lime fruit icebox pie is nonexistent today. Thank God, because the party was sick last night — the DJ mixed Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” into Peaches’ “F— the Pain Away” and the walls were sweating — so making it to the cafe’s front door alone is like wading through viscous, knee-high water. Senses dull and blunt in that special way where it feels like your brain is wearing a weighted vest. The sun, an oppressor. Caffeine needed via IV drip.
The mood: “Don’t look at me,” as they look around furtively, still waking up. “But wait, do. I’m wearing the new Dries Van Noten from head to toe.”
Daniel, left, wears Dries Van Noten mac, henley, pants, oxford shoes, necklace and socks. Sirena wears Dries Van Noten blouse, micro shorts, sneakers, shell charm necklace, cuff and bag and Los Angeles Apparel socks.
If a fit is fire and no one is around to see it, does it make a sound? A certain kind of L.A. coffee shop is (blessedly) one of the few everyday runways we have, followed up by the Los Feliz post office and the Alvarado Car Wash in Echo Park. We come to a coffee shop like Chainsaw for strawberry matchas the color of emeralds and rubies and crackling papas fritas that come with a tamarind barbecue sauce so good it may as well be categorized as a Schedule 1. But we stay for something else.
There is a game we play at the L.A. coffee shop. We’re all in on it — the deniers especially. It can best be summed up by that mood: “Don’t look at me. But wait, do.” Do. Do. Do. Do. We go to a coffee shop to see each other, to be seen. And we pretend we’re not doing it. How cute. Yes, I’m peering at you from behind my hoodie and my sunglasses but the hoodie is a niche L.A. brand and the glasses are vintage designer. I wore them just for you. One time I was sitting at what is to me amazing and to some an insufferable coffee shop in the Arts District where a regular was wearing a headpiece made entirely of plastic sunglasses that covered every inch of his face — at least a foot long in all directions — jangling with every movement he made. Respect, I thought.
Dries Van Noten’s spring/summer 2026 collection feels so right in a place like this. The women’s show, titled “Wavelength,” is about “balancing hard and soft, stiff and fluid, casual and refined, simple and complex,” writes designer Julian Klausner in the show notes. While for the men’s show, titled “A Perfect Day,” Klausner contextualizes: “A man in love, on a stroll at the beach at dawn, after a party. Shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, the silhouette takes on a new life. I asked myself: What is formal? What is casual? How do these feel?” What is formal or casual? How do you balance hard and soft? The L.A. coffee shop is a container for this spectrum. A dynamic that works because of the tension. A master class in this beautiful dance. There is no more fitting place to wear the SS26 Dries beige tuxedo jacket with heather gray capri sweats and pink satin boxing boots, no better audience for the floor-length striped sheer gown worn with satin sneakers — because even though no one will bat an eye, you trust that your contribution has been clocked and appreciated.
Daniel wears Dries Van Noten coat, shorts, sneakers and socks. Sirena wears Dries Van Noten jacket, micro shorts and sneakers.
Back at Chainsaw the friends drink their iced lattes, they eat their beautiful chocolate milk tres leches in a coupe. They’re revived — buzzing, even; at the glorious point in the caffeinated beverage where everything is beautiful, nothing hurts and at least one of them feels like a creative genius. The longer they stay, the more their style reveals itself. Before they were flexing in a secret way. Now they’re just flexing. Looking back at you looking at them, the contract understood. Doing it for the show. Wait, when did they change? How long have they been here? It doesn’t matter. They have all day. Time ceases to exist in a place like this.
Daniel wears Dries Van Noten tuxedo coat, pants, scarf, sneakers and necklace and Hanes tank top. Sirena wears Dries Van Noten jacket, micro shorts, sneakers and socks.
Creative direction Julissa James
Photography and video direction Alejandra Washington
Styling Keyla Marquez
Hair and makeup Jaime Diaz
Cinematographer Joshua D. Pankiw
1st AC Ruben Plascencia
Gaffer Luis Angel Herrera
Production Mere Studios
Styling assistant Ronben
Production assistant Benjamin Turner
Models Sirena Warren, Daniel Aguilera
Location Chainsaw
Special thanks Kevin Silva and Miguel Maldonado from Next Management
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