And in Los Angeles (Cue drum roll here, please):

"The mayor climbed up the side of a mountain to give a speech, and no one came," chuckles Ray Bradbury, recalling the city's much maligned millennium celebration. Its centerpiece, the lighting of the Hollywood sign in the hills above Griffith Park, was later ridiculed as the municipal equivalent of shining a flashlight in the dark.

"Our city is so dead," said Bradbury, the noted science-fiction writer who has lived here all his life, "that when we saw what Paris and London and Rome were doing, how beautiful it all was, we just gave up and went to bed."

Is that what will happen when L.A.'s next big moment in the sun, the Democratic National Convention, arrives Aug. 14-17?

No, says Toni Guinyard, who is compiling a list of celebrations for the convention committee. There will be dozens of events all around the area, including more than 30 delegate receptions. There will be fireworks and music at the Hollywood Bowl, jazz festivals in South Central Los Angeles and Long Beach, even a tofu festival in Little Tokyo.

But nothing in the center of town that shouts out "This is Los Angeles!"

Oh, there were plans for a big-deal community-wide festival. The $150,000 event would have been a bash that anyone could have attended and, presumably, gone away from with a feel for what the nation's second-largest city is really like behind those crowded freeways, smoggy skies and movie-star sunglasses.

But it was canceled last month after convention organizers couldn't find a suitable place to hold it.

Which might be one summation of Los Angeles in itself. This is a city, after all, that was once described by writer John Gunther as 21 suburbs in search of a metropolis. But that was years ago. It could be up to 40 or 50 suburbs by now.

It is a city that had no major sports team until the 1950s, when baseball's Dodgers and football's Rams arrived from Brooklyn and Cleveland. It didn't seem to much care, either, when the Rams packed up and left for St. Louis in the 1990s, having already driven baseball's Angels to Anaheim with indifference years before.

It's been called a city with all the personality of a paper cup -- by Raymond Chandler, no less, who may have been the city's best writer. (But like so many other L.A. residents, he moved here from somewhere else.)

Some view it as a city too lazy, too diverse, too dysfunctional or simply too spread out to throw a really good party.

"Don't bother looking for a center in L.A., there is no center," says humorist Stan Freberg, a lifelong resident.

Still, he expects there could be a rollicking time to be had here in August, particularly in light of June's small riot outside the Staples Center convention site. People celebrating the Los Angeles Lakers basketball championship got out of hand and began dancing on limousines and setting fire to police cars.

"Don't worry about getting lost, there's a police car on every corner," says Freberg. "That's the good part. The bad part is you may have to help out by bringing an extra fire extinguisher."

With the convention's outcome -- Al Gore being nominated for president -- already sure, there's really no event to start the dancing in the streets, says veteran political observer Mort Sahl.

Not that people who come here can't still have a good time, say several veteran Angelenos. They'll just have to find it themselves, like everybody else who came here before they did.

Go to Johnny Rockets in Beverly Hills, Sahl says, adding he's frequently bumped into law-enforcement people taking a break from escorting Gore to celebrity fund-raisers there.

"Get up on Mulholland Drive and go look at the lights," says Bradbury, naming the mountain road that separates one side of Los Angeles from the other.

"We really are a city of light," he adds in a rare moment of hometown cheerleading.

Then, to even things out, he adds:

"Stay off the freeways. Drive around the ordinary streets. All the morons are on the freeways. And stay off the new subway, it doesn't go anywhere. And don't worry, our climate here is always wonderful."