A friend and I splurged on dinner Sunday at Red O, a high-profile new restaurant on Melrose Avenue in L.A. On the sidewalk, we passed a photographer chatting with the valets. Paparazzi? Wow. Don’t think I’ve ever seen one, given that I don’t frequent places a celebrity might be.

Disappointingly, he didn’t even lift his camera. Hey, I could be Anthony Edwards! Or Jeff Zucker! Oh well. He was still there when we left. Was anyone famous inside, or was he just hoping there might be?

The meal, by the way, was very good: upscale takes on taquitos (with duck), shrimp cocktail and tamales, in a classy setting with pleasant service. Here’s a blogger’s very critical take, with multiple photos, and a verbal throwdown between chef Rick Bayless and critic Jonathan Gold.

After Westwood’s National closed in 2008 and the Festival in 2009, without my ever having been there, I decided to catch movies at the Bruin and Village theaters, Westwood’s two other vintage single-screen theaters, just in case. (There’s also the Crest, where I saw “The Pursuit of Happyness” in 2006.) The Bruin and Village are now owned by the Regency chain, which vows to keep them going.

Early this year I saw “Invictus” (the Clint Eastwood rugby movie) at the Bruin (948 Broxton Ave.), and on Sunday I saw the latest Harry Potter movie at the Village (1036 Broxton), which is directly across the street. It’s rare that my tastes, the mainstream fare at these theaters and my schedule all align.

The Bruin is nice enough, especially the wraparound marquee, but the Village is beautiful, and much larger than it seems from the exterior. I sat in the balcony. It was a pleasant spot from which to try to remember what happened in the last Potter movie and who all these Weasley family members were.

Cinema Treasures has pages on the history of the 1,300-seat Village, which opened in 1931 as a Fox theater (the same year as Pomona’s), and the 700-seat Bruin, which opened in 1937.

Westwood also has the Regent, which from the exterior looks like a bland ’60s theater (it opened in 1966) and hence less interesting, but I’ll probably end up going there sometime too.

For you public transit buffs, I took Metrolink ($17 from Claremont) and availed myself of its free-transfer policy to ride the Purple Line subway to Wilshire/Western and then to ride the Metro Rapid 720 to Wilshire/Westwood, and then to repeat those steps on my way back to Union Station. The free transfers saved me the cost of a $6 transit day pass and public transit saved me from a $5 or $6 parking fee. Plus I could read the newspaper and part of a novel.

The 11:30 p.m. train waits to leave for the 909 from Union Station

On a day trip to L.A. on Saturday I picked up the latest timetable, the second new timetable this year. Heck, I’d only picked up the June 28 timetable in late October, on my last trip.

Anyway, for them that cares, the San Bernardino Line (the one most of us riders use) is unchanged on weekdays but has some interesting tweaks in the times on weekends. No trains were canceled, which is a relief.

Even better, the times for the Saturday and Sunday trains are generally spaced better now. For instance, rather than the later trains home from L.A. departing at 3:25, 4:45, 6:15, 9 and 11:30 p.m., they now leave at 4, 5:35, 7:10, 9 and 11:30 p.m. I’ve missed the 6:15 once or twice and had to find things to do for almost three hours, so a 7:10 train makes that less of a calamity.

Sundays, rather than the later trains leaving L.A. at 3:25, 5:25 and 7:45 p.m., the new departure times are 4, 5:35 and 9 p.m. Yes, Metrolink is giving us an extra hour and 15 minutes on Sunday night. (Final weeknight trains leave at 9:05 p.m. as before.)

I appreciate the later train and the retention of the 11:30 p.m. Saturday train. The Metrolink fare increase earlier this year, which raised the round-trip price from $11 to $17 from the Claremont station, was less appreciated, but if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes.

Foothill Transit’s round-the-clock Silver Streak bus remains a sensible alternative, and sensibly priced at only $2.75 each way.

Pomona is Everywhere, a continuing series: Reading a piece on Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s website (via LA Observed) about the pending rehab of L.A. County’s long-abandoned 1925 Hall of Justice at Temple and Spring in downtown L.A., I learned that the project manager, architect Alicia Ramos, is a Cal Poly Pomona grad.

The venerable downtown L.A. cafeteria, one of my favorite stops and perhaps one of yours too, has been sold — but despite the end of almost 80 years of family ownership, it may not be such a bad thing. The new owner promises to keep the ambience and comfort food while making better use of the upstairs and restoring the exterior. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Read the L.A. Times story here — and check out this amazing panorama of the interior.

Feel free to post a comment here about Clifton’s.

A tray at Clifton’s Cafeteria, shot in November 2009.

Strawberry milkshake from the Disney Ice Cream Parlor, next to El Capitan Theater in Hollywood, made from Dewar’s ice cream trucked in weekly from Bakersfield. Shot Saturday, but perfect to share with you here on another 100-degree-plus day. Just unwrap a straw and plunge in.

On Sunday a group of us went to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Swell Season, She & Him and the Bird and the Bee in concert, each a male-female duo. We weren’t in our seats long when a couple about eight seats away got my attention: It was Cherie Savoie and Lee Tintary, whom I know from downtown Pomona’s Arts Colony.

Perhaps even odder, I had run into them at lunch a few hours before in Claremont. Obviously we have similar tastes in food and music. But what are the odds you’ll run into somebody you know in a metropolis?

This alone would have made me think “small world.” Minutes later, however, who should come walking up the steps past us but the dancing man from the Fox Theater concert in Pomona June 5. He’s the one who stood in the balcony dancing furiously by himself until one of our group asked him to sit down. And here he was in Hollywood. We recognized him immediately.

Later we saw him take a seat in a box way down in front (in blue shirt). He sat still and enjoyed himself. Then, when She & Him launched into a spirited take on “Roll Over Beethoven,” we saw, in the twilight, from 150 feet away, the dancing man stand and begin shaking his moneymaker.

I suggested to my friend who told him to sit down in Pomona that he ought to go down and ask him to sit down in Hollywood, just to rattle him. He’d have thought, “small world.”

Here are videos from the Bowl of the Bird and the Bee performing “Polite Dance Song,” She & Him performing a sultry, spooky rendition of “I Put a Spell on You” and the Swell Season doing “Falling Slowy.”

Some friends and I attended the “Lost” finale party Sunday night at the Orpheum theater in downtown L.A. My seats were in the front row, a marvelous bit of luck (I got them through Ticketmaster like anyone else).

Before the finale aired, we heard from L. Scott Nadler, who played Rose, and Michael Emerson, who played Ben, as well as from a few minor players (Walt, young Ben, Kate’s father and a Dharma guy). Emerson, who was the audience favorite, was particularly articulate and charming.

Asked how he played the duplicitous Benjamin Linus in the times when he didn’t know whether his character was lying or not, Emerson said he simply said his lines earnestly and let the audience sort out fact from fiction.

Several people in the audience came in costume. The guy across the aisle from me was in a Hanso Corp. lab coat with the lottery numbers stitched on the back.

For an outing to L.A. on Sunday to the L.A. County Museum of Art, I used four types of public transit — a personal best, not that I was keeping track:

* Locomotive (i.e., Metrolink, to get from Claremont to Union Station)

* Subway (i.e., the Purple Line, to get from Union Station to Wilshire and Western)

* Bus (i.e., Metro Rapid, to get from Wilshire and Western to Wilshire and Fairfax, LACMA’s location)

* Light rail (i.e., the Gold Line, to get from Union Station to Little Tokyo for lunch)

The whole thing cost $11, with my $11 Metrolink ticket acting as an all-day pass for subway, light rail and bus, and of course I avoided parking fees.

The Metro Rapid bus is a wonder, by the way: The bus stops are stylish, the bus arrives every 10 minutes, it barrels along with very few stops and, as I said, it was free with my Metrolink ticket. It was my first time but I’ll ride it again.

Last weekend a Highland Park friend and I met at L.A.’s Union Station, took the Red Line to Pershing Square and then walked to Grand Central Market, the indoor produce market and food-stall emporium that’s sort of a Latin-flavored Farmers Market. We got pupusas (a Salvadoran dish) at Sarita’s Pupuseria as well as an order of plantains. A pleasant time was had by all. This blog has been to GCM before, btw.