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“Only they’re not mirrors. They’re a curtain of negative matter you could put your hand right through. You need to get a studio exec on the make to explain it to you.”
    “Isn’t it dangerous?” she said, looking down at the yellow warning strip.
    “Not unless you try to walk through them, which ravers sometimes try to do. There used to be barriers, but the studios made them take them out. They got in the way of their promos.”
    She turned and looked at the far wall. “It’s so big!”
    “You should see it during the day. They shut off the back part at night. So the druggates don’t piss on the floor. There’s another room back there,” I pointed at the rear wall, “that’s twice as big as this.”
    “It’s like a rehearsal hall,” Alis said. “Like the dance studio in
Swingtime
. You could almost dance in here.”
    “‘I won’t dance,’” I said. “‘Don’t ask me.’”
    “Wrong movie,” she said, smiling. “That’s from
Roberta.”
    She turned back to the mirrored side wall, her skirt flaring out, and her reflection called up the image of Eleanor Powell next to Fred Astaire on the dark, polished floor, her hand—
    I forced it back, staring determinedly at the other wall, where a trailer for the new
Star Trek
movie was flashing, till it receded, and then turned back to Alis.
    She was looking at the station sign. Pasadena was flashing. A line of green arrows led to the front, and the tourateswere following them through the left-hand exit door and off to Disneyland.
    “Where are we going?” Alis said.
    “Sight-seeing,” I said. “The homes of the stars. Which should be Forest Lawn, only they aren’t there anymore, They’re back up on the silver screen working for free.”
    I waved my hand at the near wall, where a trailer for the remake of
Pretty Woman
, starring, natch, Marilyn Monroe, was showing.
    Marilyn made an entrance in a red dress, and the Marilyn stopped practicing her pout and came over to watch. Marilyn flipped an escargot at a waiter, went shopping on Rodeo Drive for a white halter dress, faded out on a lingering kiss with Clark Gable.
    “Appearing soon as Lena Lamont in
Singin’ in the Rain,”
I said. “So tell me why you hate Gene Kelly.”
    “I don’t hate him exactly,” she said, considering.
“American in Paris
is awful, and that fantasy thing in
Singin’ in the Rain
, but when he dances with Donald O’Connor and Frank Sinatra, he’s actually a good dancer. It’s just that he makes it look so
hard.”
    “And it isn’t?”
    “No, it
is
. That’s the point.” She frowned. “When he does jumps or complicated steps, he flails his arms and puffs and pants. It’s like he wants you to know how hard it is. Fred Astaire doesn’t do that. His routines are lots harder than Gene Kelly’s, the steps are
terrible
, but you don’t see any of that on the screen. When he dances, it doesn’t look like he’s working at all. It looks easy, like he just that minute made it up—”
    The image of Fred and Eleanor pushed forward again, the two of them in white, tapping casually, effortlessly, across the starry floor—
    “And he made it look so easy you thought you’d come to Hollywood and do it, too,” I said.
    “I know it won’t be easy,” she said quietly. “I know there aren’t a lot of liveactions—”
    “Any,”
I said. “There aren’t
any
liveactions being made.Unless you’re in Bogota. Or Beijing. It’s all CG’s. No actors need apply.”
    Dancers either, I thought, but didn’t say it. I was still hoping to get a pop out of this, if I could hang onto her till the next flash. If there was a next flash. I was getting a killing headache, which wasn’t supposed to be a side-effect.
    “But if it’s all computer graphics,” Alis was saying earnestly, “then they can do whatever they want. Including musicals.”
    “And what makes you think they want to? There hasn’t been a musical since 1996.”
    “They’re copyrighting Fred Astaire,”