And, today, to give Pharrell Williams some money, we have his 2014 album G I R L. (and also some non-breaking spaces I wonder if they worked?)
3:00 pm Ah. Okay. This is the part with the choir from the video. We stay inside the church for a while, finally emerging into the afternoon sunlight at around 3:13. We head north on Marengo until 3:16.
3:16 We’re somewhere else. Again. Are we still somewhere in Pasadena? Are we back on Vermont? Dunno. It looks like a residential neighborhood with broad streets. I can see a street name. It starts with an “A.” “Algernon”? “Algonquin”? “Aloysius”? No parking. Bike route. A guy doing The Pony this time. Another illegible street name. Pine trees.*
3:20 Wow this guy’s backlit. It’s almost like one of my photos. Wait – there’s a sign. Let’s go back. It might be a hospital sign I can see “Main Entrance” and “ICC.” Another agave. There’s a big building with a tile roof in the background.
3:24. We’re not in the same place, but it sure looks like the same big building there. From this angle it looks like maybe an apartment building? Yet another illegible street name. And another – no, wait. Does that say “Mt. Pleasant”? Let’s try that out.
This could be it. We start out on Campus Road and Alumni (that’s our “A” street name) near Occidental College.** We follow the street (which is lined with pine trees and has a sign that says “ICC” on it) and just before we make a left onto Stratford, we can see a large building with a tile roof behind us. Mt. Pleasant makes a T junction with Stratford.
3:32 We’ve moved again. I think. Did we move at 3:28? No, I think that’s where we left off. We cross Avenue 49 in the right place. The background matches. The fences match. That’s the same mailbox.
That flowering shrub is the same.
So that house on the corner must have really changed.
I guess that is the same house. Amazing what a coat of paint and a deck will do.
The train of her wedding dress will be really grubby after dragging it along the street like that.
Oh! And we’ve turned onto Avenue 50 and are headed southeast. Then we make a left onto Meridian. I wonder what this bride’s story is. Is she a model or is that her wedding dress. Pharrell got married in 2013, didn’t he? Is this his wife?
No it doesn’t look like her. And that’s doesn’t look like what his wife wore at their wedding so probably not.
3:36 Rush hour must be starting or something. Those vehicles are driving right past that young woman (and, presumably, the entourage walking ahead of her). I wish I knew where in the block she was right now. ‘Cause there’s something in the middle of the sidewalk there and I wonder if it’s a permanent fixture or what. Oh, wait. We’re at the end of the block. And I don’t see anything on the sidewalk there, though it could be behind one of those cars***.
We cross Avenue 51 and I really need to go to bed. We’re hoping to go state parking tomorrow.
(the next day)
We make a left onto Avenue 52 and we might not have time to go state parking today. We both overslept.
We eventually find ourselves making another right back onto Stratford. Our next dancer is wearing high-heeled footwear of some sort (we’re still pretty backlit here, but I think they’re boots) and she looks a little unsteady on her feet, like she has either walked or danced in these heels but not both together.
3:48 We’re on a sidewalk. Are we still on Stratford? I see a steeple-looking thing there. Let’s see if I can find it on Google Street View. Yep. There it is. I wonder what it is. I know how to get back here from there.
It’s the Iglesia Adventista de Highland Park. It’s kind of a cool-looking building. Their Facebook has the name in English (Highland Park Seventh Day Adventist Church) but the information on the page is all in Spanish.
Oh, I can hear my late mom now. “She’s not dancing. She’s just posing.” We get the occasional dance step from this young lady, but overall, it feels more like she thinks she’s a model in a fashion shoot than a dancer in a music video. We continue following Stratford after it jogs slightly north at Avenue 55. How far back do these numbers go? Is there an Avenue 1 somewhere? Looking it up, the “North Avenue #” names only look to go as far back as 16.
3:52 We’re leaving Highland Park and now we’re at a cemetery? I wonder what cemetery we’re in. It’s not Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills, I don’t think. Time to hit Google Image Search.
*I still don’t know where we were, months later.
**Alma mater of Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Barack Obama.
***for varying definition of “cars.”