My client Francie writes about how the recession has affected the below-the-line (crew)  people working in the entertainment industry.  I read part of it on my radio show a few weeks ago.  It's a poignant story of what working people are giving up.  Not the Hollywood you see on the main stream media.  Nor the Hollywood liberals that right wingers assail.  No, mostly hardworking union people and the non-union people that service the productions from the seamstresses to the caterers to the assistants.  If you get to visit a set you see carpenters hauling lumber and electricians working on lights.  You see the Teamsters driving the crew back to base camp where they get their daily lunch and costumers bringing in the  actors' shirts that they ironed the night before.
This Is Hollywood?

On our narrow street of once-modestly-priced, 1950s cottage homes, there are 23 kids, 16 of them between the ages of 5 and 9. After-school wars are waged in the street on tiny little bikes filled with light-saber-wielding, Nerf-gun-toting speed demons. In the setting sunlight, mothers in their 30s and 40s, home from work, stand guard on the corner, drinking coffee and sometimes $4 wine from Trader Joe's, yelling "Car!" when an unwary commuter approaches. Where I grew up, the moms watched from the front stoops and wine was reserved for the racier sacraments, but otherwise it's a lifestyle familiar to our mothers--albeit a little nicer around the edges.

Most passersby will only see the idyllic scene that is our street. They won't hear that the conversations, more and more, are about how we'll make next month's mortgage payments and, if we can't, whether we could afford to rent somewhere in the neighborhood so the kids could keep going to their good public school.

Gone are the days of planning vacations, plotting tiny additions to our tiny homes, weighing whether tumbled marble in the shower really does raise resale values.

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