Tony Peyser: The Reed, White & Blue

The old line about Hollywood is that buildings you see in passing may just be sets: the front part seems real but there's nothing behind it. Call it the show business version of those Potemkin villages used to fool Catherine the Great into thinking her latest conquests were valuable. This story about a Los Angeles area middle school winding up in John McCain's convention speech even had an actual Potemkin touch of its own: additional shrubbery and foliage were put in digitally that isn't normally there.

When I heard about McCain standing against the backdrop of Walter Reed Middle School, I couldn't believe it. As my wife Kathy told me about it, I figured what she read was just the handiwork of some overheated, tin hat-wearing, left wing blogger. (I call those people "my base.") Over the last seven years, my family has driven past the school hundreds of times on our trips around town. But Kathy, Jeremy, and I had never seen the front of the school, just the back.

What we've glimpsed is a huge grass field and basketball courts that turn into a community sports hub on Saturdays and Sundays. It's not a school-sanctioned activity since the participants arrival on the courts is made by climbing cyclone fences, not walking through gates. Aging old matrons try to feel young with plastic surgery. Aging young dudes do it by playing weekend basketball.

This part of the San Fernando Valley is no stranger to Hollywood. The funky Village Market a block south was used in a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode and across the street from that is the red brick, Colonial-style First Christian Church where episodes of "7th Heaven" were shot. The school itself has been seen in many TV series and movies such as "Head Of The Class," "Growing Pains," "Malcolm In The Middle" and "Transformers."

The day after McCain's limp oration, the Peyser family headed over to check out the location. Jeremy, who some of you may recall has autism, typed "park" on his portable talking computer to make sure our detour would still end in the same destination. We assured him it would. We headed down a side street new to us that ran alongside the school and then made the next right. From the corner, I thought we'd made a mistake. There was the front of one long building but it didn't look like the one the RNC deployed. Ah, but directly next to it was the front of the campus. It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful schools I've ever seen in Los Angeles.

Having used this school's exterior at the Republican convention is a blunder that knows how to multi-task. First of all, Democrats held a press conference and had a field day there last Friday to point out the GOP's mistake. Second of all, the school also decried its unofficial usage by a campaign. It's unfortunate that Principal Donna Tobin was unable to invoke retroactive detention. Third of all, it looked like one of McCain's seven houses, not a school. (Those houses are currently being hidden more effectively than Vicki Iseman.) Fourth of all, do we really want a man to be president whose handlers don't known the difference between Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood full of students and Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington full of injured soldiers? And finally, it was spectacularly idiotic of the McCain campaign to screw up in front of over 30 million people in a way that additionally underscores their candidate's mental frailties, let alone his long-standing unwillingness to provide proper care for our war-injured troops.

Tony Peyser provides daily poems and weekly cartoons for BuzzFlash and also writes the BuzzFlash column, "Blue State Jukebox." He was a daily cartoonist for the L.A. Times from 1994 to 1997. You can e-mail Tony at tonypeyser@yahoo.com.