Inside Miss Los Angeles

Response/Summary

In the essay Inside Miss Los Angeles by Jerry Stahl he shows us the dark side of Los Angeles. He tells us different stories of different girls that come to Hollywood for the glitz and glam but they don’t realize the struggle it is to get in. He tells us about a girl named Tammi, who had two faces. She came to Hollywood “to get in the business” to look like Farrah Fawcett but had met a plastic surgeon and got plastic surgery hoping that would help her.  She ended up working at a strip club before she got a break. Years later she was retired with cosmetic casualty. Then he tells us about another girl named Tanya and how she ended up in Cedars Sinai dope ward, with all her trust fund blown away. She left her house at sixteen to make her way into Hollywood. He even says that Los Angeles is “[…] the town built on the horrifying reality that reality is so horrifying we need an industry to re-create it, in brighter hues, preferably with spin-off action figures to generate that all-important merchandising revenue”. His essay shows that a lot of people that come to L.A and want to make it big rarely do. After reading this essay, it didn’t surprise me, I knew that a lot of people come to L.A and end up doing something completely different than what they came for. 

What I understand about the essay?

I think this essay tells the truth about L.A and Hollywood and what people think when they come here for the glitz and glam. A lot of people come to L.A to see the city and the celebrities or they come to become famous. What they don’t understand that L.A is not just Hollywood and Beverly Hills, there’s so much more.  This is the side people forget that is a part of L.A. It’s Carson, Torrance, East LA, Crenshaw, Dodgers, Clippers, and Laker games. So reading this essay showed me the other side of Hollywood the side that I knew was there but never really saw it.