He was avoiding, like the plague, doing his routine exercise. He couldn’t stand the thought of ridding another monotonous ten miles on the stationary bicycle. You never see anything, and it’s more boring than the life of a stone, he whined to himself. What kind of world do I live in, where I must get in shape by means of artificial exertion?…

He was smarter than they thought, but dumber than he looked. It didn’t matter. Everyone thought he was a ‘dim bulb’ --- 30 watts. Just to show his detractors how wrong they were, he swallowed a 100 watt bulb—just gulped it down. ‘Brilliant’ they said. He outshined them, especially after midnight, and that really pissed them off, even when no one was looking.

“You’d be perfect,” Beth coaxed. “You’re smart and beautiful (with “beautiful,” Lola blushed into the phone, although Beth, of course, couldn’t see her pink flushed face) AND you can write. We really need someone for our e-zine who can write the advice column, you know, relationships, men, women, that sort of thing? Your perspective, as a young woman trying to make it in Hollywood, would be fantastic for our readership. You can do it whenever you’re not going to…

Lola returned home from another audition in Studio City (it wasn’t even in Hollywood), peeled off all her clothes, and laid down in an unconscious, if heavenly, crucifix position, on the living room rug. This is

insane, she thought.

She counted the number of auditions her agent had sent her out on this month, and it was not a beautiful number. It was an odd…

Richard looked into Lola’s sky blue eyes. Tonight, only a few days before her up-coming birthday, she seemed especially withdrawn and distant. Did he detect the faint shadow of a cloud? Her gaze wasn’t vacant exactly. More like a calendar, with “x”s marked through all the days of the month. Except, perhaps, for one.

Richard read that during his lifetime Warren Beatty had slept with 12,755 women—and he wasn’t even dead yet. He did a quick calculation on his Blackberry. Could it be that Warren had slept with a different woman a day, every day, for 35 years? Richard breathed a sigh of relief, Thank God, Hollywood isn’t like THAT anymore…