Costa Mesa 92626

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

92626 isn’t a bad zip code at all. It’s got the Orange County Fairgrounds, which has been known to book both X and Isaac Hayes. It’s got an incredible Japanese supermarket (which is really more like a mall), the Mitsuwa Marketplace, should you find yourself with a hankering for ramen from the bitchen food court, sushi-grade fresh fish from the grocery, a bookstore, a video store, many gorgeous tea sets (I love tea sets!), and, you know, other stuff.

92626 has some sweet chic bars, like Jack Flynn’s Kitsch, some terrific galleries, like Jack Flynn’s J. Flynn, and lots of hipster hair salons. To my knowledge, Jack Flynn doesn’t own any of them. (I could, as usual, be wrong.) He does own the Rooster Café, though, should you get a yen for deli sandwiches.

92626 has lots of stuff. Most of it is good, high-quality, creative. It’s got the Lab (Anti-Mall); the Camp (enviromall); it even has South Coast Plaza. You don’t care about South Coast Plaza, do you? Good.

Most of 92626 is do-it-yourself—if do-it-yourselfers got a little seed money from Dad. It’s very expensive DIY on a very polished scale.

And nothing is more polished than OCPAC.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center, with its grand high curves and its showy Richard Serra out front, isn’t the kind of place you’d normally associate with Costa Mesa’s hip indie DIYers, who so far haven’t been caught dead in the highrise condos that are supposed to liven Town Center (where OCPAC, Isamu Noguchi’s California Scenario and South Coast Repertory lie) into a real-life citylet. But for once in its vaunted life, the Performing Arts Center has done something unboring: It’s brought in Ashley Eckenweiler to book shows for The Kids.

And so we dressed up and drove in a thundering rain Thursday night for PB&J, the latest it band from Sweden. (What were the previous it bands from Sweden? Well, if you go back in time past the Swedish speed metal and early star DJ Swedish Eagle, I’m pretty sure you got Roxette.)

Whether due to the rain or an overeager fire marshall, the floor was nowhere near crowded despite a show so sold-out Ashley couldn’t even sell me a ticket, much less comp me one. (My homegirl Arrissia came through with plus-one.)

PB&J (Peter, Bjorn and John), it turned out, were plenty boring, despite their hit “The Whistling Song,” and so it gave us all the time in the world to hang out with every cool hipster person we’ve ever known (gallerist Peter Blake, Riviera’s Arrissia Owen-Turner, Verizon marketing director Conley Smith, photog to the stars John Watkins, a bunch of dudes from Detroit, and Ashley herself) in the new Samueli Theater, a gorgeous, rich (RICH) concert hall that was standing-room-only (just say no to concerts in chairs) while people bought us Champagne and sneaked us up to VIP.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so good about Costa Mesa before, but then, the VIP section used to sit easily within my range. I date my first time as an old person to the day my friend John Pantle, a menace who used to book the Mouse House of Blues, got us up away from the madding floor crowds and into the genteel environs of the balcony. My ego was puffed, but I never sweatily enjoyed a concert again, or made quite so many friends for an hour. Sneaking up seemed to bring back that frisson.

And when Ashley came to borrow two VIP passes from our group so she could sneak up friends of her own, we got to laugh at OCPAC once again. Stupid OCPAC old people. You give Ashley what the hell she wants.

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