Keiko Agena likes to create moments of comfort, not only on Sundays, but whenever she can.
“Oh, there's my rice cooker,” he says when he hears the sound in his Arts District home. “We're making steel-cut oats in the rice cooker, which, by the way, is a game-changer. I used to have to take care of it and watch it, but now I can just put it in there and forget about it.”
In Sunday Funday, the people of Los Angeles tell us step by step their ideal Sunday in the city. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
The 52-year-old actor, who played music-loving best friend Lane Kim on the beloved series “Gilmore Girls,” delights in specific comforts like a bowl of hot oatmeal, talking about Enneagram numbers and watching cooking competitions with her husband, Shin Kawasaki.
“It sounds very simple, but I really want to spend time on the couch,” says Agena, laughing.
It's time for her to set out to protect, especially amid her kaleidoscope of projects. In recent years, Agena starred in Lloyd Suh's moving play “The Chinese Lady” in Atlanta, acted in Netflix's “The Residence,” and showcased her artwork in her first exhibition, “Hep Tones” (some of her ink and pencil drawings are still for sale), and performed regularly on the Los Angeles improv circuit. And her work endures with “Gilmore Girls,” which turns 25 this year. Agena narrated the audiobook for “Meet Me at Luke's,” a guide that draws life lessons from the series and appears in the upcoming “Gilmore Girls” documentary, “Drink Coffee, Talk Fast.”
She shares with us her perfect Sunday in Los Angeles, which begins before dawn.
5 am: morning loneliness
I like to get up early, like 5 in the morning. I like that feeling that everything is silent. I'll go into the other room and do Duolingo on my phone. I'm a bit of a social media addict, so Duolingo is not only for learning Japanese, but also to keep me from scrolling. If I'm going to do something on my phone, this is better for me. I think my streak is 146. Shin is Japanese, from Toyama. I have been wanting to learn Japanese for a long time. For him and his mother.
then I will do it [the writing practice] Morning pages. I don't know when I found out about Julia Cameron's book. [“The Artist’s Way”] – probably around the year 2000. I know a lot of people handwrite it, but I'm a little paranoid about people finding it after I die. So if I have it on my computer and it's password protected, I can be really honest.
Then I often go back to bed. Shin, as a musician, works at night and therefore wakes up much later. So I'll go back to sleep and wake up with him.
9 am: Give me that bread
I don't drink coffee anymore because it's too hard on my system, but I will walk with Shin to Eightfold Coffee in the Arts District. It is small but very cold. So let's go Happiness Bakery inside the Tokyo small market. We got these tapioca bread balls. If you make any type of sandwich you would normally make, but use that bread instead, you'll up your game. It's a life change. The Little Tokyo Market Place isn't fancy or anything, but it has everything you could want. There is Korean food. They have a small sushi place there. You can get pre-made Korean banchan and hot food in their hot food section. They also have a very good dried fruit section. It's just a big table with all these nuts, piles and piles.
10 a.m.: Nature without leaving the city
we will go to Los Angeles State Historic Park near Chinatown. I like that place simply because it is very accessible. They have accessible bathrooms and I'm always checking to see if a place has good bathrooms. We call it Flat Park because it's a great walk. You are not really in the middle of nature, but there is a lot of vegetation. You can take off your shoes and at least touch the grass for a second.
11:30 am: Lunch and cooking shows on television.
One of my favorite salad and sandwich combinations is in Sweet Coffee in Little Tokyo. A Korean cheesesteak and a kale salad. That's always like a… bang, bang good combination. So we could go there or Aloha Coffeealthough it is not fully open on Sundays. But I love it because I grew up in Hawaii. They have this great Chinese chicken salad and spam musubi and other Hawaiian food that is very good.
We'll bring food home and watch something. Cooking competitions are the best of the best. My favorite right now is the “Tournament of Champions” because it is a blind tasting. For me, that's the best way to do it. “The Great British Bake Off” is Shin's favorite. He loves nature and accents as much as the kitchen itself. He loves the vibe, the slow pace of it all.
I'm a TV girl. I love spending time on the couch, eating and watching something delicious with my favorite person in the world. I'm lucky because I get to do that a lot.
2 p.m.: Browse the hallways
I'll go to this bookstore called hennessmyand + Ingalls. I love art, architecture and design, but you can't always buy these huge books. But you can walk into this bookstore and look at them and it's always cold.
If I have time, I'll wander around the art supply stores. Supply for artists and craftsmen It's a good one. I will look at pens, pencils, stickers, masking tape, washi tape, different types of paper, charcoal. In my art, I try to find things that are not intended for that particular purpose, like little things in a hardware store that I will use in a different way.
5 pm: Downtown Los Angeles in its glory
We really love walking around Sixth Street Bridge. It's architecturally beautiful and they're building a huge park there, so we walked around and looked at it, like, 'What trees are they planting?' Can you see? We sort of dream about how it's all coming together. But the other beautiful thing about that walk is that if you go at sunset and walk back towards downtown, it's just beautiful. Los Angeles doesn't have the most majestic skyline, but it is very picturesque at the time.
6:30 p.m.: Cornbread and Enneagrams
I will go to the best of the park In Echo Park. It's Filipino barbecue. It is so tasty, rich and special. Their cornbread is really good. Oh, and meat with coconut, but I'm trying to eat less meat. They have a medley of hot links. OMG, just looking at this menu right now makes my mouth water. Okay, I'll stop.
One of my favorite activities is to ask my friends about their Enneagram number. So the idea of sitting down with friends over a good meal and asking them a bunch of personal questions about their childhood and what motivates them and what their parents were like and what their biggest fear is and then finding out what their Enneagram number is? That's a top-notch activity for me.
9 p.m.: Rally for improvisation
Since I get up so early, if it's 9 o'clock, I'm ready to go to sleep. But I'm obsessed with improv, so on my ideal day, there would be a show to do. There is a place called The largest improvisation school in the world in Los Feliz. It's small and they just opened a few years ago, but the atmosphere there is spectacular.
Then there's another place my heart is so invested in now called outside inside Theater in Highland Park. Tamlyn Tomita and Daniel Blinkoff created it together and not only is the space beautiful (I mean, they built it from scratch), but they also have interesting programming there all the time. They are very supportive of communities that are not seen in conventional art spaces. It's my favorite place. Sometimes I find myself in their lobby until 12 at night. The type of people I like to be with are the ones that hang out in that space.
11 pm: Turn ASMR on and off.
I am firmly an ASMR girl and have been for years. I have to find something to watch that will slow my brain down. So it's pretty consistent. It doesn't last long once I turn something on. My eyelids become heavy and I get chills.
