Watching the Golden Globes in southern California is not that much different from watching the show in South Florida. It's on earlier out there, of course, and if you miss the beginning you can just stay on the sofa because they show the whole thing again as soon as it finishes (which makes sense in a land famous for clogged freeways). And then, just like at the movies, you can say: This is where I came in.
The next day, driving the coast from Long Beach to Belmont Shore, I came upon a film crew working on the beach. I parked and walked toward two men in leather jackets. I was wearing a scarf against the cold wind.
"What are they filming?" I asked.
"CSI Miami," one of the men said.
"Miami," I said. "That's where I'm from."
"Bet you wish you were there now," he replied, hands in his pockets, hair blown by the wind.
I walked along the sidewalk, passing carts holding bagels and bowls of tossed salad. Out on the sand, two Miami Dade police cars were parked, and two actors in MDPD T-shirts walked two lovely bloodhounds. A bundled-up young woman sat on the sea wall. I asked what time they had arrived there that morning.
"Around 6:30," she said. "And we'll be here till around 5."
They would be filming, she said, about six scenes. I quieted when one of them started: a woman was carried off on a stretcher and two men with shovels dug a hole in the sand. They looked cold in their short sleeves. After a couple minutes, someone yelled "Cut!"
"That's about as exciting as it gets," the woman said to me.
Exciting, no, but definitely instructive - what every viewer of the Golden Globes should see the morning after.
