<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Salt Lake City is like a little sister who is completely enamored with her older sister, Los Angeles. She watches everything her older sister does and does her best to copy her and maybe even improve on her actions. Of course, she’s always behind, which in city-time, that means that Salt Lake is always twenty years behind L.A.

I remember someone telling me this when I was a teenager and back then, I believed it. L.A. had so many cool things that I was sure that Salt Lake would take twenty years to catch up. But then I noticed some cracks in the theory. Lagoon, our amusement park is now twenty years in the future and it isn’t half as cool as Disneyland from 1984. On the other hand, the Internet has allowed me to shop as well as those folks there in Los Angeles. Given fifteen minutes and fifteen hundred dollars, I can have that cool Louis Vuitton Multicolore handbag sent to me. I no longer have to drive to L.A. to see the cool stuff. I can see it in my living room, in my gym clothes.

Then again, Salt Lake is having a sushi crush right now. There used to be only a couple of places in the city to get sushi, and quite frankly, they weren’t very good. Now, I can get fresh sushi with immaculate presentation at Smith’s grocery store on 500 East and 500 South. There are several restaurants that have the absolute best for me. At this point in time, Salt Lake is infatuated with sushi.

Now, you could say it’s because we had the Olympics here a couple of years ago and the international influence just stuck, but I’m not buying that for a minute. If that were the case, those sushi restaurants would be out of business by now. They would have cashed in during the Olympics and cashed out two months later.

Hey, if we’re going to talk about the Olympics, we hosted the Winter Games almost exactly twenty years after Los Angeles. The monuments built to that event (i.e. The Museum of Science and Technology) were crumbling and outdated when Mike and I visited them in 1990. Goody. I can’t wait to see what the Skating Oval is going to be like in 2008. We’re not obsessed with sushi because of the international influence of the 2002 winter sporting event. We’re obsessed with sushi because we’re the little sister.

Remember back to 1984? I do. I remember that scene in Valley Girl where Julie’s mom served sushi at the party that Randy and his friend crashed. The Valley kids were all stoked about it, but Randy thought it was weird or just something that rich kids ate. I remember that scene in The Breakfast Club where Claire explains her lunch to Bender. The rich bitch won’t let a guy’s tongue in her mouth, but she’ll eat sushi. That movie wasn’t about Shermer, Illinois. That movie was L.A. Los Angeles was obsessed with sushi back in the eighties and poor Salt Lake City is barely catching on that it might be fun to eat raw fish and seaweed. Always behind…