Via Metroblogging Orange County, I was led to this article from The New Zealand Herald(!) on what life is like in the real Orange County versus what's depicted on the TV show The OC.
It's clear that the author spent her time in an alternate-OC (Newport Beach? Laguna?) that bears no resemblance to the Orange County I'm used to -- an OC where everybody is driving Porsche Cayennes, drinking lychee martinis, getting cosmetic toe-shortening surgery, using vegan condoms, and can take seriously admonitions like "mini antlers! Wear them instead of gold anchors or horseshoes, which are so last year." Does the author live here? Or did she just visit? And if so, how long? Is a crowd of teenagers somewhere in South County still giggling over just how badly they were able to put one over on the gullible foreigner?
I'd be tempted to write the whole thing off as a fantasia if only it weren't for the fact that a yurt in Costa Mesa is home to one of the hippest (according to what I read, at least) vegan restaurants in Orange County.
We'll have to get around to watching an episode of The OC one of these days just so we can see what the heck everyone else is talking about (actually, first we'll have to get around to getting cable/satellite/whatever -- that one kind of fell off of the to-do list). For all of the Orange County natives who've spent their whole lives saying "oh, I come from ... near Los Angeles" (or "I come from ... near Disneyland") as an answer to "so, where are you from?" every time they leave California, it looks like The OC may have finally put us on the map worldwide -- but if this is what people will think about when they think about us, maybe being from "near LA" isn't such a bad deal after all.
Posted by Kevin at February 4, 2005 08:38 AM