When I was 30 years old, my agent told me I needed to go to Los Angeles to get some “West Coast credits.” I didn’t want to go because it meant I’d lose my precious rent-controlled apartment on Central Park West as well as the supportive New York theater community I’d worked so hard to get into. After graduating from Juilliard five years earlier, I was getting theater work in and around the city.

I didn’t think I was pretty enough to get work in Hollywood, but my agent disagreed. She had faith in me, so I reluctantly packed up my stuff and moved to Santa Monica with Gus, my German shepherd. A week after we arrived, the Northridge earthquake happened. I crouched under a table, holding Gus close. Aftershocks filled me with terror, and I wondered if California was telling me I wasn’t welcome.

Over the next few months L.A. slowly recovered, and I started going on auditions. Much to my amazement, I got hired to do a new play and got a couple of small roles on some sitcoms. In between gigs, I took Gus on long walks along the beach and found that I was starting to like California.

One afternoon, I went to a coffee shop in Santa Monica where a middle-aged red-headed guy with a beard was playing Van Morrison songs on his guitar.

After he finished, I thanked him, and we started talking. He explained that he was a neurologist at USC but loved to play guitar in his free time. I was intrigued. So when he asked me out, I said yes. He took me to dinner a few times in his snappy red Porsche, then invited me to join him for a weekend in Yosemite National Park.

As we were eating dinner in the quaint little cabin on our first night, he said he really liked me, but if our relationship was going to go anywhere, he wanted me to “get out of show business.” Did he seriously think I’d give up acting to be his girlfriend? That was a role I couldn’t and wouldn’t play. After that, I stopped taking his calls.

A few weeks later, I had to travel to Indiana for my grandfather’s funeral. On my way back to Los Angeles, I changed planes in Cincinnati, and as I sat down, a nice-looking, 30-something man with a boyish smile in the next seat gave me a welcoming nod. I nodded back, got a script from my bag and tried to read but promptly fell asleep.

Half an hour later, I woke up with a little drool seeping from the corner of my mouth. I laughed at myself, and the man with the boyish smile laughed with me.

“Sorry about the drool,” I said, wiping my face.

“It happens to the best of us,” he said with a smile.

I noticed a book in his hand. “What are you reading?”

“The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.”

“Sounds good.” I thought, “This guy must be pretty cool if he’s reading that book.” I looked forward to sitting next to him for the next three hours.

“I’m Martha, by the way.” I offered my hand.

“Nice to meet you Martha-by-the-Way. I’m Don.” We shook hands.

“Do you live in L.A.?”

“Silver Lake, and you?” he asked.

“Santa Monica. Are you a native Californian?”

“No, I’m from Pennsylvania. That’s where I’m coming from now,” he said.

He seemed so nice and normal. I worried he might be married, so I asked, “Do you have family in Los Angeles?”

“No, just me,” he said with a smile. I hoped that meant he was single.

He gestured to the script on my lap, “Is that a script you’re reading?”

“Yeah, I have an audition for ‘Diagnosis Murder.’ Maybe I’ll get to work with Dick Van Dyke.”

“I hope you get it.” He sounded genuinely supportive, which was so different from the neurologist’s response to my work.

“Thanks. Me too. What do you do?”

He said he’d studied filmmaking at the University of Texas at Austin and had made a few films, but now he split his time between the press box at Dodger Stadium, charting pitches for Major League Baseball, and judging scripts for the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I was impressed.

The rest of our flight felt like a first date, complete with dinner and a movie. When we landed at Los Angeles International Airport, I got nervous because I wanted him to ask for my number but worried he might consider me geographically undesirable since we lived on opposite sides of L.A.

As we headed toward baggage claim, he asked if I wanted to get together for coffee sometime. I said yes, and we exchanged numbers. Don’s smiling blue eyes and witty conversation had me feeling giddy at a time when I least expected it. The universe had taken my grandfather but had given me a new friend.

A week later he drove all the way to Santa Monica to take me to coffee. When we finished, he suggested we go to a movie, so we went to see “The Last Seduction,” a neo-noir thriller. During our discussion afterward, I learned how much Don knew about filmmaking, and from then on we started spending Saturday afternoons at the academy, watching screenings of new films for free since he worked there.

Don also introduced me to the joys of hiking in Griffith Park and the Santa Monica Mountains. Being with him felt so right. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met, childlike and grown-up at the same time, goofy and intellectual. But the most important thing was that he wasn’t asking me to change. He accepted me for who I was.

As Don and I grew closer, my desire to return to New York faded. After six months of dating, we decided to live together and rented an old Craftsman home in Echo Park, which sat at the top of a hill that overlooked Dodger stadium and Elysian Park.

A few years later, we got married and bought a house in Glassell Park, where we still live today. I came to Los Angeles to find work, but ended up finding so much more.

The author is a freelancer and storyteller who lives in Glassell Park with her husband, two dogs and four quail.
She’s on Instagram: @marthathompsonbooks.

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.

For her 6th birthday party in January, Amy Tzagournis’ daughter Hazel wanted special guests: the characters from “KPop Demon Hunters.” Six months prior, while Tzagournis was out of town, her daughter and 4-year-old son had become obsessed.

“I came back and all of a sudden they knew every word to the songs,” she says with disbelief. “I was like, ‘Where did this come from?’ It was literally out of nowhere.”

So Tzagournis, of Redondo Beach, hired Funky Divas & Dudes, one of the many characters-for-hire companies in the Los Angeles area that had started to offer “KPop Demon Hunters”-inspired performers. At her birthday party, Hazel and her friends danced to songs from the movie, including “Golden” and “Soda Pop,” alongside the entertainers.

“We’ve pretty much been doing nothing but ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ parties,” Dana Marie Lazzareschi, one of the co-owners of Funky Divas & Dudes, says. “Every party we’re doing has been ‘KPop.’ It’s insane. We’ve had one party that was Broadway-themed and another that was tropical-themed, but other than that, it’s all been ‘KPop’ every single weekend. Sometimes we have five ‘KPop’ parties in one day.”

Released last June, “KPop Demon Hunters” is a bona fide global sensation, a status that not even Netflix, its distributor, anticipated. By August, when Tzagournis’ daughter first saw it at a friend’s house, the movie about three glamorous K-pop stars doubling as brave warriors to defeat nefarious demons had become Netflix’s most-watched movie ever. And in March, the musical picked up two Academy Awards, one for best animated feature and another for best original song for “Golden,” an empowering anthem turned chart-topping hit.

Nearly half of all of the birthday parties Tzagournis has taken her kids to in the last six months featured some “KPop Demon Hunters” element, whether just the theme or performers (for her daughter’s party, she hired all three demon hunters and a Saja Boy). The parties are so frequent that parents are even sharing decorations to reduce costs, she says.

The party included Saja Boys-themed party favor bags and “VIP” passes for guests.

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“One of my daughter’s good friends had a party two weeks before hers and we basically recycled all the ‘KPop’ decorations for her,” Tzagournis says, laughing. “We used theirs and then I passed them off to another mom. These ‘KPop’ decorations for the birthday party got recycled at least two or three times.”

Operating since 2002, Funky Divas & Dudes, like most of these party businesses, offers princesses, superheroes and other pop culture-inspired characters. For a long time, Elsa, the Snow Queen from Disney’s “Frozen” franchise, ruled over little girls’ parties. “We joke that it’s a generational thing, every 10 years a girl with a braid shows up and takes over every kid’s birthday party playlist. There was Elsa back in the day, and now there’s Rumi,” Lazzareschi says, referring to the main heroine in “KPop Demon Hunters.”

The displacement of “Frozen” was also evident to Tzagournis. “The year before, when my daughter was almost 5, everyone was dressed up like Elsa. There were like five Elsas in her class at Halloween,” she recalls. “And this past year, more than 50% of the girls around her age were one of the ‘KPop’ characters.”

Aside from party entertainment, Funky Divas & Dudes also hosts extracurricular dance classes at L.A.-area schools, including the one Tzagournis’ daughter attends. Lazzareschi realized the popularity of the movie when children started requesting “Golden” and other songs from the soundtrack during dance classes. While “Frozen,” she thinks, was geared toward younger audiences, “KPop Demon Hunters” has a broader appeal. “It’s very attractive to all ages, not just the little kindergartners and first graders, but all the way up to third, fourth, fifth graders,” Lazzareschi says. “There are just so many different aspects, like the martial arts, and kids just love that stuff, boys and girls.”

Companies like Funky Dudes & Divas had to quickly meet the demand for the “KPop” characters at L.A. kids’ parties, sourcing costumes from Halloween stores or online retailers. On top of the three demon hunters (Rumi, Mira and Zoey), Lazzareschi also offers male performers resembling the Saja Boys (the rival group in the film) that teach kids breakdancing.

“The whole dance element made it even better than just hanging out with characters,” says Tzagournis.

Madelynn Wheater, 7, left, and Parker Apel, 7, center, show off their best moves in the dance circle.

The “KPop Demon Hunters” theme continued onto the plates and cake at Parker Apel’s party.

For Katherine Diaz of Torrance, the “KPop Demon Hunters” craze has been a welcome lifeboat. Diaz manages her 18-year-old daughter Kiara Asiel and several other teenage girls who perform at birthday parties. Diaz’s operation caters to Latino customers as Asiel (an aspiring dancer who plays Rumi) offers bilingual shows. In the wake of the immigration raids last summer, many of their potential patrons refrained from hosting celebrations, dampening their business. Over the last few months, though, demand for the “KPop” characters has generated new opportunities.

“It has been a boom. We have people in our area calling us saying they wanted our ‘KPop’ show because my daughter speaks Spanish,” Diaz says in Spanish.

In addition to birthday parties, Diaz’s team was recently hired to appear at several McDonald’s restaurants around Los Angeles, where hundreds of children and their parents lined up to take photos. In December, the city of Gardena invited them to perform for the community at a Christmas event.

“They specifically requested the ‘KPop’ girls. We said, ‘But it’s Christmas?!’ and they replied, ‘Yes, but kids are dying to see Huntrix [the phonetic name of the musical group in the movie].’ My girls went dressed in their ‘KPop’ outfits, but I made sure to put little Christmas hats on them.”

To avoid legal repercussions, some of these businesses might offer generic versions of popular characters. In 2017, Disney sued a New York company offering “Star Wars” and “Frozen” character knockoffs at birthday parties, but voluntarily dismissed the case a year later after a judge axed most of its trademark claims. The amount of these companies, not only in L.A. but around the world, might also present “practical difficulties” for copyright holders to take action, says Mark Lee, a partner at corporate law firm Rimon PC who has taught entertainment law at USC.

“To give you an example, I had a client who co-wrote a very famous song,” Lee says. “1.2 million people posted that song on YouTube without authorization. You can send what’s called a DMCA Takedown notice, which is like a cease-and-desist letter to YouTube, but you have to do it 1.2 million times.”

At the same time, these small businesses are helping keep the characters popular.

Eliana Fraser, dressed in a Rumi costume, paints 6-year-old Ariya Taylor’s face at a party for Parker Apel, right.

Both Lazzareschi and Diaz have more “KPop Demon Hunters”-inspired events coming up, but Tzagournis believes the peak of the fad has already passed — at least for now. “I feel like this might be very short-lived, which would differ from ‘Frozen’ and the Disney movies,” Tzagournis says. “The kids are kind of over the ‘KPop’ thing now, but the sequels are probably going to reel them back in.”

A new “KPop Demon Hunters” movie is already in the works.