Four years ago, we gave up the trappings of an urban lifestyle, where paint remover is an essential ingredient in keeping your sanity and your neighbor’s houseguests are living in his garage and raising livestock. Every morning, a rooster crowed to wake us. When celebrated author, humorist and two-blocks-away-neighbor Sandra Tsing Loh wrote her hilarious non-fiction send up of Van Nuys, she mentioned the rooster. Honey, I can’t believe it! The rooster! She writes about the rooster! Well, maybe it’s not our rooster. Maybe it’s a different rooster, she said. That’s when I knew it was time to move from our luxurious abode in beautiful downtown Van Nuys to our bucolic life in the foothills of Pasadena.
We put a lot of our stuff in storage to clean up the clutter that inevitably accumulates when you’ve lived somewhere for thirteen years, which in our case meant boxes upon boxes of books. The house, a 1300 square foot, 1920 Craftsman-style with a white picket fence and great front and backyard gardens, cleaned up nicely and we put it on California’s perennially hot real estate market.
After a week of endless real estate agent walk-throughs, a man appeared at my door wanting to take a look. After a quick call from his RE agent to confirm he was legitimate, I let him in for a tour. He looked around, asked a few questions and said he’d be back with his wife. They liked the place immediately and our transaction was as smooth and pleasant as could be.
A few months ago, a friend from the “old neighborhood” told me the house was for sale again and that the fellow who bought it from us was a big TV and movie star now. He’d heard the news from his “pool guy”. The Southern California “pool guy” will go down in history as the most effective communication tool in history even when you include smoke signals and cell phones. I did a little research and, sure enough, Rainn Wilson was the fellow who showed up at our door that day and whom I’d eventually hand the keys over to.
Rainn is one of the regulars on NBC’s hit series, The Office, played the odd mortician intern Arthur Martin on Six Feet Under (he always looked vaguely familiar to me whenever I chanced upon watching that show), and is now the co-star, along with Luke Wilson and Uma Thurman in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, a new feature directed by Ivan Reitman.
Just another day in Hollywood…