Real People Don't Kick Back.(American attitudes about vacations)(Brief Article)

Long is a screenwriter in Los Angeles.

Ask someone from Hollywood, "how was your summer?" and you're actually asking a complicated question. Out here, the elements of summer-- sunshine, bare feet, salt water, procrastination, laziness, salads--are pretty much year-round. And since "doing nothing" is an accurate mission statement for most Hollywood executypes, it's hard to get too excited about the interval between May and October.

Put it this way: in Hollywood the only difference between summer and the rest of the year is that in summer, when we drive with the car top down, we also have the air conditioner on. For real people (defined as "those who do not work in or around the 310 telephone area code"), the ideal of summer is like fun itself. It's hard-wired into their brains the moment they have their first Sno-Cone, or hear their first ice- cream truck, or smell the distinct scent of chlorine, Coppertone and hamburger.

Which is why it's so puzzling to Americans to watch Europeans on vacation. Is it fun, trooping along the Cinque Terre as the Italians do each August, shouting into their cell phones at Mamma back home, "Fa caldo, Mamma?" Or marching along the meltingly hot streets of New Orleans, as I saw some German tourists do, with a loaf of bread and a grocery bag of sandwich fixings? "Lassen uns haben ein Picknick," the father kept grimly intoning to his drooping, miserable family.

Americans--at least the real ones--race through the rest of the year, work well in excess of the standard number of hours per week (memo to French readers: this number is a good deal larger than 35), commute long distances to work, take piles of work home, think about work and even dream about work. So when summer rolls around, sure, they pack up the car and drive somewhere hot and crowded like the rest of the world. But the true essence of the American summer is spent lazing around the backyard (we have bigger ones than our European friends, much, much bigger ones, and pity those poor Japanese and Chinese) drinking beer and watching the kids jump in the sprinkler.

That's why my best friend, an actor, was once told by his agent that "vacations are sacred." The agent had announced that he was going on an African safari for three weeks. "I'm going to be totally out of the loop!" he cried. "Time for me to get ...