Hollywood Forever Cemetery (Santa Monica and Gower)

It’s one of those soooo nice summer Saturday nights in LA. The Muppet Movie is at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It’s BYO everything. It’s outside. It’s under the stars. It’s the muppets for crying out loud! And there’s just something so summery and good clean fun about watching a movie outside (Good clean fun despite the racey 50s past for drive in movie theaters. And that it’s in a cemetery. But just for the record, you’re on a lawn, not posting up on someone’s gravestone. That would be a little messed up.)

So we all jump in our cars, heading from far and wide LA outposts to slowly converge on the cemetery. And I do mean slowly. 2 lane accident slowly for the last half hour. It is packed. There are snaking lines at the Disneyland level, zigzagging in front of the entrance and trickling far down the sidewalk.

In a lot of ways it’s refreshingly un-Hollywood. Apparently all kinds of people think “hey it would be fun to watch The Muppet Movie in a famous Hollywood cemetery and pay a mandatory $10 donation for the privilege.” There are families with kids young enough to be introduced to the muppets. The expected skinniest of skinny jeans and deep v necks on guys. Dates galore - middle aged with legit bottle of wine to high school with what I suspect is a wine cooler in a brown paper bag.

And everyone is so unabashedly dorky about their picnicking supplies. The same guys with their intense architectural haircuts have those beach chairs you can wear as backpacks while you walk. People are dragging those soccer mom super coolers that have serious off-roading wheels. Everyone is lumbering around with arms full of blankets and pillows and baguettes and booze and fried chicken.

Everyone is just so gosh-darn happy to be seeing the muppets. No one is pissed about the line. It’s almost…heart warming?

But then Hollywood rears its ugly head. Sold out! Apparently even the Muppets can be exclusionary in Hollywood.

We did not stick around to see how Hollywood it got. Maybe the line turned angry and there was the standard bribing and charming of the gate keepers? Who knows.

Instead, I participated in one of the saddest LA moments in my time: the dejected walk back to cars with un-used picnicking supplies.