No. 9: 🥛💰🍑

When you reach the world’s idea of success at the tender age of 19, you learn the rich do indeed get richer. You always knew the poor get poorer—your family’s cereal milk went from 2% to boxed Parmalat to powdered instant. Sometimes there was no milk at all.

As life would have it, your first series is called Windfall about a group of friends who win the lottery. “Isn’t that rather analogous?” asks a reporter during TCAs.
“What?” you ask.
“Isn’t that rather analogous,” he repeats in the voice of a cartoon snob. You’re onstage blinking rapidly. You don’t know what analogous means. Snob sighs, “Isn’t playing a lottery winner rather analogous to this being your first show? Having your life turned upside down by a bunch of money?”
Oh. You agree that it is. You feel so stupid, you’ll never forget the word analogous again.

You now make in a month what your dad makes in a year. What scares you more is how used to money you could get—it must be harder to go from wealthy to poor. (It is, you’ll find.) July blurs press junkets with red carpets. Drivers pick you up and take you home and you’re not sure whether to tip. They don’t teach you these things in acting class.

They also don’t teach you how to dress. Your friend Lyndsy loaned you the silk top you’re wearing with American Eagle jeans. “It’s Poochey,” she said, graciously suggesting something other than your beloved Hanes wifebeater. You can tell you’re s’posed to know who Poochey is, so you thank her profusely and hope you don’t sweat. Later you see the label reads Pucci.

Lana—a co-star whose ass is so peachy you feel the urge to smack it every time she walks by, which startles you ’cause you’re not gay, you’re a good, straight Christian girl—becomes like a Hollywood big sister. She advises you’ll probably spend $300 minimum per red carpet outfit and that you absolutely should because this is part of your job now and you will not get far if you don’t dress the part. You take this in during a shadeless hike through Runyon Canyon, guilty-excited to go to the D&G at Beverly Center.

Analogous. Maybe it’s not that hard for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle after all.

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Alice in Hollywoodland is a memoirette series started on Instagram by Alice Greczyn, written with creative liberties such as changed names and timeline forgetfulness, alternately thought of as Los Angeles & Me: Two Decades in the City of Angels. All rights reserved by Alice Greczyn.