Nicholas Quirke was thrilled to be back in LA on the 11th March and at the wheel of a fancy looking Soft Top Ford Mustang.  Due to time zone changes he effectively went back in time from leaving Doha to getting to LA on a flight that felt endless and lasted 16 hours. In total he spent 26 hours in one day!!!  Getting onto the flight from Doha seemed to be an enormous hurdle in which even to get through the Gate the passengers suffered a horrendous indignity and Nicholas found himself facing the possibility of not being on the flight because he didn’t have a paper copy of his flight out of USA and he found himself having to go through the process of checking in all his technology a 2nd time. Consequently he was one of the last people on the plane and discovered his window seat was occupied by an ancient Indian with his wife next to him. He felt bad but had them move. Not a word of English between them but he helped them with food and technology throughout the endless flight and the managed to form a bond. Naturally once at LA airport there were problems with picking up the car. He was meant to be at a launch party for the workshop which began the next day but first had to check into an Air B & B and was running late, the consequence was he felt extremely flustered but these evaporated when he discovered his car had been upgraded to a Ford Mustang. He arrived at the launch 2 hours late and was introduced to John Patrick Shanley who he was going to be looking after during the week, driving him to the venue and making sure he had lunch etc , etc, He then spent the evening chatting with some of the actors involved, one of whom, an older actress, said that he looked like someone she would want to date. It transpired that she had dated Robert Mitchum and Clint Eastwood, that gave his ego an immense massage. He had intended to severely trim his beard but time ran out and he had to continue to look like a genie particularly as once he was back at his accommodation after a chat with a fellow lodger, who was a film reporter, he went to bed to make sure he was up in time to Pick JPS and Kim up from the glamorous Sunset Marquis Hotel, which would also be his home for the next week. He got to the hotel on the 12th of March and they got to the theatre in Los Feliz, which he had been to in December, without any traffic violation. Nicholas had read the 7 amazing new plays that were going to be worked on and had found them a harrowing read, so it was with some surprise, once they had started working them how human, funny and vital they were. Of course, the work was confidential and he would not be able to reveal what they were working on but the themes throughout the plays provoked deep and exciting conversations and the work that the actors were doing with JPS was really inspiring. Nicholas made some vox pop videos to use in the continuing promotion. At the end of the day they went back to the hotel which was a famous mecca for the music industry’ with past and present greats such as Jim Morrison and Bruce Springsteen on the books as regular guests. It really was a Hollywood lifestyle, and as he pulled up in the car he was able to take advantage of the ‘Valet Parking’ which gave him another thrill. Kim ordered a Chinese meal and they were finally able to catch up on their activities over the past couple of weeks. Kim ran him a bath and he finally had the ritual of rmoving his beard. That chatted till late and finally got to bed around 1.30am.  With all the activity and work on the workshop his commitment to his daily blog was waning particularly as he had booked his flight home and now knew that by the 19th of March he would be as his days were full of the workshop and he was going to have to make shorter irregular updates as the last days of the odyssey passed.