Yo! Nice time yesterday in the upscale (south of the Boulevard!) Los Angeles neighborhood of Encino, where young Leo Richard Mitchell, stepgrandson of the criminally tan man in your photo lede here, threw a party in celebration of his 6th birthday, the date of which takes place this Friday, March 6, 2025. Felicitations, youngster!
A lot of one’s life is all about the mazel. Who your parents are, what zip code you resided in, fellow-travelers along for the ride from different stages of social development: school, employment, cliques & in-groups & out-groups. You can do all the good work in the world, massive hours of effort & toil, and it might not make for meaningful advancement all because of where on the dreaded socioeconomic ladder you happened to start. Succeeding downwards & failing upwards are real outcomes in the Game of Life, especially in these here United States of America, and now more so than ever.
Stepson Samuel Alexander Mitchell, father of stepgrandson, has already reached the pinnacle, and while he has had the mazel, most of that mazel has resulted from good, concentrated, positive activity & action. No, he didn’t claw his way up from the squalid streets of Mumbai or Manila; no, he didn’t have to start earning his own keep in the tobacco fields of Kentucky or Virginia when he should have been attending elementary school. He has had some advantages, but not all those advantages you see from all these oligarchs today: no slumlord-millionaire parents, no diamond-mine poachers for forebears. Solidly from the middle, maybe upper-middle, not striver-class, but not stratosphere-scraper, either. He leveraged what breaks he had, played them pretty much perfectly, not a foot wrong. A good work ethic to get the motor running, and then some really good fuel from connections & mentors, which then turned into unbelievable job-placements & the savvy & skill to get the most out of those placements. He paid his dues, but pretty damn quick, with the current position landing at private-equity-firm partner at 35.
In that figurative neighborhood, sometimes there has to be a migration to a literal neighborhood in which the outward trappings of superstar achievement are apparent at-a-glance. In other places, that’s your own island, thousands of acres of ranch land, a penthouse suite uptown; but here in La-La Land, sunny Southern California, the migration is, if the money is new and from now and not intergenerational, not to cliched Beverly Hills or Bel-Air, but to farther-west outposts like Encino, Calabasas, Hidden Hills.
So now the young man truly has gone west, from the seemingly declassé hick burg of Studio City (!) to a palatial, floor-to-ceiling glass-cubed modern fortress in Encino, an obscene amount of square-footage, and the ginormous monthly mortgage payments that come with it. Salute!
Now, as for us elders who have known him now the longest, when we would toss him wiffle balls over the backyard fence, or, later, challenge him by serving-and-volleying so as to groove his passing-shots from the baseline, we should like to report that we have received much reflected glory in all his newfound residential opulence; however, the mirror would merely show us completely glassy-eyed, with mouths agape and seeping drool at this monument to the youngster’s achievement here. This is something he wanted to obtain, and for that we have nothing but big congratulations.
Secretly, however, in our hearts, we kvell much more at the fact that he did all this on the up-and-up, no mean-spiritedness or getting-over on others, and that he continues to support his pet causes generously and anonymously, the way it ought to be. For that, then, a toast, and continued mazel.
The party itself was nice, with Leo getting the birthday theme he wished for: Cybertruck! Again, for this kid at this age, it’s not anything political or classist, merely some fascination with how the vehicle is different from every other vehicle out there. One day, looking back, maybe an older Leo will cringe at some aspects of his 6th-birthday party, or maybe not. It’s not for us to judge or decide. But as long as he still looks up to his aba and tries to follow in footsteps or decency & generosity, kindheartedness & openness, Leo’s journey to becoming a mensch will be the only way for him to go.
Some obligatory upcoming Thoroughbred horse-racing content now!
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