$23

Yep, $23. That's how much it costs to park your car overnight in a Westwood parking garage. (Westwood is UCLA's neighborhood). I learned this the hard way. Here's the story...

Thursday night I drove over to Westwood to see a movie with my Tuesday night film class. Our homework for Monday night's class was to see two movies this week: Ghost Town and A Flash of Genius, and to write a paper on both. I'd already seen Ghost Town and was really excited to see the movie about the man who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, had the idea stolen by Ford Motor Company, and proceeded to represent himself in a lawsuit against them.

So I get to the theater to find out that our movie isn't playing at 7:30, only at 10pm because of a charity screening of This is Spinal Tap. And since a member of my class is also a lawyer, we end up with free tickets to the $30 charity event, and the movie we originally went there to see. Not a bad deal. So we go in to watch Spinal Tap and it was fun. I'd never seen the movie before but this was an interactive show benefiting the Hollywood Rock Academy Foundation for kids so they had a high school version of Spinal Tap and they gave us props. We got to throw bread at each other, and fake money, and sit on whoopee cushions, all good stuff. Plus they had free food, I mean, really, it turned out to be a good deal!

After the charity event the theater screened Flash for my class (all four of us who stayed) for free which turned out to be really fun. I love having my own screening room! Plus, I got my homework done! It was all going great until I headed to the parking garage. That's where the $23 comes into play. The garage is gated. Yeah, locked up real tight. And it's 12:30am by now. Luckily my classmate Heather and her sister had walked with me so they ended up taking me home, all the way across town. Fantastic.

Of course I have to get a ride back to get my car the next day but my good friend Emily helps me out and when I get there to retrieve my car and find out the small fortune this is costing me I ask the guard if he can help me out. He says no, maybe a manager can, if he can find him but that I should have just walked around the parking garage last night and I would have seen the open gate. Yeah, that's a great idea. Especially since the tiny sign we found out front listed the hours as 8am to 10pm and by that point Thursday night it was 12am. And then add that to the fact that there was no way I was walking around a block-long parking garage, in the middle of the night, with two other girls, in Los Angeles. So I paid the $23 and left. Just goes to show there's no such thing as a free lunch, or movie.