The Wacky, Wonderful City of Angels

Those who do not live in Los Angeles seem to know only the worst of our city.

She is frippery and Frisbees, they say, palimony and the Polo Lounge. We are parents between common-law partners with a monopoly on criminal madness from the Black Dahlia to the Billionaire Boys Club. We remain victimized by commentators who pick, pick, pick at our wackiness, our smog, our former governor, until that’s all anybody in Zagreb knows about Los Angeles.

We who live in Los Angeles know the best of our city.

She is pungent eucalyptus and scrolled corbels of older times and the architecture of Los Feliz. Mariachis and Melrose. Warm tans and Westwood Village. Shades of Dashiell Hammett and echoes of jazz in the hills. Dandies in Beverly Hills aspic and saber-toothed tigers in La Brea tar.

And we live as a peculiar (as in distinctive, exclusive) Southern California people blessed by a full series of personal corners for weekend activities that are more rites than pastimes.

Saturdays and our ceremonies start early, at or a little before dawn, when the only creatures in the parking lot at Griffith Park Observatory are squirrels and the disciples of 82-year-old Charlie Turner.

We walk a trail to a high slope of Mt. Hollywood. It is called Dante’s View. It is an arboretum of magnolia and pine that pensioner Charlie Turner, ever a gentle man, cultivates for no reason beyond his love of people, plants and a bottle of wine to better enjoy both.

In its 23 years, Dante’s View has become a commune where gentle and discerning folk, some older than Charlie, a few carried in Snuglis, come to . . . well, commune. On Christmas Day. On Charlie’s birthday. Whenever we need to be reminded there was indeed a being, conversation and a life before power lunches.

On the other hand, a power breakfast is allowed if you promise not to become part of the clique--at Patrick’s Roadhouse on Pacific Coast Highway where Santa Monica becomes Pacific Palisades.

There is a tendency--after Arnold Schwarzenegger found the place and People magazine profiled the discovery--to dismiss Patrick’s as a current hangout.

But to us habitues, Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Streisand are the novitiates, and we the tolerant denizens there for the ultimate weekend habit--an $8 breakfast known to slow down any teen-ager; the scent of fine coffee on coarse sea breezes; dreadful arias by owner-tenor Bill Fischler (“My parents gave me $10,000 for singing lessons. Do you want to know what I did with the money?”); amid a cluttered decor that is early Sanford & Son.

Southern California is the only place in the world where you can rent a pink 1959 Cadillac convertible (from Dreamboats on Wilshire Boulevard) and drive it to Torrance Airport for a whale-watching flight (by Vintage Aero) in the open cockpit of a 1940 Waco biplane.

No other region has the Queen Mary with its original, bird’s-eye walnut cabins stiff with memories. Close your eyes. Sniff. There. Smell Noel Coward’s after-shave?

In this basin, a soul can gallop a horse on Malibu Beach (Malibu by Horseback) or rent former Wimbledon champion Alex Olmedo (at the Beverly Hills Hotel) for an hour of tennis or hike a canyon (in Malibu Creek State Park) until one bend in the road, a mountain skyline and a flattened hillock seem so familiar. They should. This is where the “MASH” TV series was filmed.

A day’s thrills by the Southern California dozen: Reclaiming childhood with a whirl on the perfectly restored carrousel on Santa Monica Pier. Sitting before Gainsborough, Rembrandt and Da Vinci at the Getty Museum and welcoming one’s insignificance as a form of self-discipline.

We are, quite individually, the four seasons of Descanso Gardens and a Chinatown that is another nation and the Victorian gingerbread of Carroll Avenue on Angelino Heights.

And the weekend closer--dinner to the ring of a Celtic harp at the Inn of the Seventh Ray in the tummy of Topanga Canyon.

The wine is local, the vegetables back yard and if you eat alfresco you just might see a coyote loping up the creek.

It is California. It sure beats a wet weekend in Detroit. Or a dry one.