An Open Letter To The Resident of Los Angeles Who Broke Into My Rental Car and Stole My CDs

Dear Sir or Madam:

My recent weekend trip to the fine city of Los Angeles was otherwise stellar. With the exception of the maniac who slipped an avocado into my garden omelet, no so-called "Hollywood type" worked my nerves beyond the occasional name-dropping of an actor about whom I care nothing (Matthew Lillard? Still?), and my self-esteem suffered only marginally at the pervasive sight of heavingly false-breasted blondes so thin that the top part of their arms had the same width as the bottom part. I was having a lovely time. And then, you had to go and break into my rental car and steal my CDs.

The morning of the theft wasn't entirely rotten. I'd risen at an early hour in order to make it to a Yoga class in the trendy Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, and make it I did. As my hamstrings loosened in time to a young Australian woman's soothing advice to consider the meaning of the word "openness," I retreated into the kind of bliss that can only be achieved by wearing low-slung pants and squatting on a rental mat in a strip mall next to an auto repair shop and a Baja Fresh.

I left the class with a characteristically clear head and deep sense of pity for anyone not flexible enough to execute a Crow pose before 10 AM when I approached my primo parking spot for my rented Pontiac G6. It was then I noticed that my book of CDs I'd brought for the trip was not on the passenger seat where I'd left it. Gone, too, was the GPS system I'd rented from the good people at Alamo, and had cleverly hidden in the glove compartment of the car: a hidey-hole not unexplored by the fiendish Meth aficionado who decided to root through my car while I was yards away, in downward facing dog.

Instantly gone was my stretch-induced sense of calmness, as I called the Alamo customer service people and reported the GPS theft, saving myself the trouble of filling out a form at the airport but, sadly, not the 300 bucks I agreed to pay in case I returned the car without the directions robot you plug into your lighter that tells you to make a left.

Forced now to listen to the radio (Jack FM? Is that really the best name you can find for a station that plays Steve Miller Band? Actually, my mistake: that is, indeed, the perfect name for that station), I drove back to my hotel on Sunset Boulevard, fuming at the loss of a substantial assortment of my music collection, and seething with contempt for the derelict who thought he was making out like a bandit with some of my favorite cast recordings from Broadway shows. "Hope you like show tunes, asshole," I muttered to myself, making a right on a red light.

A note to the reader unfamiliar to my admittedly rococo musical tastes: I am an unabashed devotee of musical theater, to the point where if I were to misplace my ipod in a crowd, the person who found it might take a quick glance at my playlists, then search around the room for the 50-year-old gay man who presumably dropped it. Are three versions of the Sweeney Todd score necessary on a Nano, one may ask? It depends on whether you edit around the Helena Bonham Carter songs, I would snarkily reply, cracking myself up in a way utterly repellent to men who like having sex with women.

So, to the rogue currently programming "Meth Hut" into his newly-acquired GPS system and, doubtlessly, listening to Once Upon a Mattress on top volume, all I can tell you is I hope the inspired whimsy infused in the Original Cast Recording of The Drowsy Chaperone does you half the good it did me. And perhaps the impassioned bleats of the proletariat from the sonorous score of Les Miserables will encourage you to divert your energies into stealing bread alone.

In the meantime, don't cry for me, Los Angeles: it's been proven that the soundtrack to Cats was designed in a lab to drive a person criminally insane upon repeat exposure. So the LAPD might want to look out for the asshole singing along to "Memory" before he hurts somebody.