Jaxson's USC Acceptance Letter: How We Made the Trip About Him
Jax got into USC for film. The admitted-student weekend, the LA stops, what he shot on his iPhone, and the parental moment Mark and I had at the Rose Garden hotel bar.
Jax opened his USC decision letter at 6:14 p.m. on a Tuesday in the kitchen, with Mark and me on the other side of the counter pretending to fold laundry. He read it twice without saying anything. Then he said, quietly, "yeah." That was the whole reaction. The kid does not do theater. The next morning he asked if we could fly out for the admitted-student weekend, and three weeks later we were at the gate at SLC at 6 a.m. with one camera bag and a duffel.
The question I keep getting from friends with juniors is: when your kid gets in, what do you actually do with the trip? The instinct is to make it a celebration, with photos and reservations and family-bonding moments. The thing I learned in three days in LA is that the right move is the opposite. You make it his trip. You bring yourselves as logistics. You stay out of the photos.
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The arrival
We flew Friday morning, picked up the rental, and drove straight to the School of Cinematic Arts. Jax wanted to see the campus building first, before the hotel, before food. We stood on the courtyard between the SCA buildings for forty minutes and he didn't say much. He filmed about six minutes of B-roll on his iPhone — the fountain, the brass star map, a guy with a 16mm Bolex walking out of a sound stage. I kept Mark from interrupting. That was my contribution.
The hotel choice
I booked the Rose Hotel in Pasadena — not on campus, not DTLA, a thirty-minute Uber to USC with adult-level light and a real garden bar. Mark and I wanted somewhere to sit after the day where we could have the conversation we were going to have, not a kid-friendly hotel lobby with twelve other parent-and-senior pairs.
What Jax actually did in three days
I'm listing what he did, not what we did, because that's the point.
- SCA building tour — official admitted-student session, ninety minutes; I sat in the back row and did not raise a hand.
- Met three current SCA undergrads through the student-host system. He had coffee with two of them and walked the campus with the third. I did not meet them. He came back to the hotel with a different look on his face after each conversation.
- Filmed on the Paramount lot — the tour I'd booked as a backup and which he asked us not to skip. Fifteen minutes on his iPhone; the tour guide, a current AFI student, gave him her email at the end.
- Walked Venice and Abbot Kinney alone. We dropped him at 1 p.m. and picked him up at 5 p.m. Four hours of LA on his own, eighteen years old. Mark and I had margaritas at Felix and tried not to text him.
- Griffith Observatory at sunset. Marine layer rolling in, skyline in pink. He shot a roll of actual 35mm on the film camera Mark gave him at Christmas. This is the part where I cried a little behind sunglasses.
- Langer's on Sunday morning before the flight. Pastrami at 10 a.m. as the LA send-off because he'd read somewhere it was the actual deli, not the tourist deli. He was right.
The Mark-and-Tricia moment
Saturday night. Jax had gone back to the room. Mark and I were in the Rose's garden bar with a Manhattan each. I said something neutral, like "he seems happy." Mark said: "he is leaving in five months."
That was the moment. I'm not going to overwrite it. We sat there for ten minutes and neither of us said much. Then he said the line he doesn't usually say — that he'd been counting the years, we have two left with Maddie and one more summer with both kids and then it's over, in terms of having them in the house. I knew this. He knew I knew. Naming it out loud in a Pasadena hotel garden on the night our son chose his college was a different thing than the silent version we'd been having for a year. I will not give you a clean ending on this paragraph. We finished the Manhattans. We went up to the room. Jax was asleep with his earbuds in.
The trip wardrobe — Modern Western for LA
Park City Modern Western reads in LA as either costume or as a flex, neither of which was what I wanted. Three outfits, all built from pieces I owned.
Day one, campus: Navy Theory blazer over a white tee, dark straight-leg jeans, brown Tecovas chelseas, turquoise stud earrings. Reads professional-mom-East-Coast in LA, Modern Western at home.
Day two, Venice and Griffith: Cream silk button-down knotted at the waist, same jeans, my Lucchese caiman boots — full Western — and the Kemo Sabe cream straw hat. The hat got looks in Venice. Two strangers asked where it was from.
Day three, Langer's and flight: A Pendleton wool overshirt in faded sage-and-cream, black jeans, the Tecovas chelseas. Photogenic enough for the Langer's family selfie.
If I were packing from scratch: I'd build out from Sheplers for Western pieces and Theory for tailored. The thesis: one Western signal per outfit. A boot, or a hat, or an overshirt, never all three unless you are on horseback. One signal is intriguing. Three is costume. This is the only Modern Western styling rule I'd defend in court.
And — practical, not stylish — I put an Apple AirTag in Jax's camera bag before the trip. He found it day two and rolled his eyes. He left it in there.
What I'd tell another PC parent doing this trip
- Make it their trip. Build the itinerary around what they want to see.
- Stay off-campus. Get yourself a bar and a garden. You will need to sit down on night two.
- Leave them alone for at least one half-day. The independence rehearsal is part of the trip.
- Don't take group photos. Let them take photos of the place. One parent-and-kid shot at the airport is enough.
He committed two days after we got home. Deposit in, orientation on the calendar, drop-off mid-August the line we are walking toward. He shared three of the iPhone videos with me — one Griffith, one Venice, one campus B-roll — and they are good. He is the filmmaker his teachers said he was. The aspens haven't leafed out yet. He's upstairs editing senior project. I'm at the counter looking at the photo Jax took of Mark from behind on the SCA courtyard — Mark in his old gray Notre Dame quarter-zip, hands in his pockets, looking up at the building his son chose. One of the better photos anyone has ever taken of him. I am going to print it. I am not going to tell Mark I'm doing it. — Tricia P.