“You know the beginning of Beauty and the Beast? ‘Oh, bonjour! Bonjour!’ This is Glendale Boulevard for me.”
Atsuko Okatsuka is barely exaggerating her Belle-like status. The Los Angeles stand-up stops to take a selfie with a fan, bumps into the set builder for her new special, checks in with the owners of her favorite shops and tries to decipher a barely-intelligible “I love you” from some shrieking fans in a car—all in the span of about an hour in Atwater Village.
For quite a few years now, this cluster of bakeries, thrift stores, bookshops and restaurants just across the L.A. River from Los Feliz and Silver Lake has been the stomping grounds for her and her husband, Ryan Harper Gray. “I grew up in Japan where I got to do all of my business within steps of my home,” she laments about America’s gotta-drive-everywhere culture. “And so I try to keep things convenient, I just keep it on Glendale Boulevard.”
We’re meeting ahead of the then-upcoming release of Father, her new stand-up special that just hit Hulu on June 13. You’ve possibly seen Okatsuka’s viral videos on Instagram and TikTok, often dancing with her grandma or killing it in a colorful outfit—or both. But her comedy routines transcend phone-sized screens—there’s a reason she was in our 2019 class of L.A.’s “comedians to watch”—as I was invited to see at one of the Father performances, taped last fall at Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre (where she became the first female comedian to perform at the Disney-owned movie palace). I won’t dare attempt to butcher her expertly-delivered bits on tandem bikes and laundry machines, but in short, expect to hear about her arrival in L.A. at age eight from Japan, the people-pleasing skills she picked up as a cheerleader at Venice High School, her dual daytime and nighttime personas, and just really enjoying sitting on the couch and being surrounded by ranch.
On a sunny afternoon in Atwater, we start our neighborhood tour outside of Swan Day Spa, which Okatsuka relies on for her post-touring R&R. “I have an issue: My shoulders are made out of rocks,” she says, as she contorts her back against the window of the storefront. “It’s virtually impossible to get the knots out of me.” But there’s one person she trusts to fix them: Swan Day Spa masseuse May. “I don’t even know what she does, because honestly I fall asleep halfway through. All I know is that I’m a changed person by the end of it,” she says of May’s customized massages. “That’s my girl—now, I like to think we’re closer than we probably are.”
(Okatsuka might be selling herself short here: While planning for our interview, I gave a heads up to all of the shops that we intending to visit, and everyone I spoke to just adores her.)
“Fun fact: This is where me and my husband came to celebrate after my husband got a vasectomy. Thank you, HomeState.”
We keep venturing down Glendale Boulevard, past Holy Basil (“amazing Chinese Thai food” and a gluten-free favorite for her husband) and breakfast taco specialist HomeState, a staple in the couple’s lives for over a decade. “Fun fact: This is where me and my husband came to celebrate after my husband got a vasectomy. Thank you, HomeState,” she says out front. “Snip snip,” Gray adds nonchalantly.
He makes a stop inside Bill’s Liquor while Okatsuka tells me that they must be there at least four times a week. “Oh, there’s an egg shortage?,” she asks. “Tidbit: They sell eggs here, always stocked. You know why? Because nobody ever thinks a liquor store would have eggs. But Bill’s does.”
As Okatsuka admires the mannequins in the window of Out of the Closet (“Look at these beautiful creations. It’s a museum, it’s a work of art.”), we chat about her love of thrift store finds. And even in the middle of our tour, passersby take notice of her sharp fashion choices: “Two people passed me and said ‘that’s such a fire fit.’ Thank you so much.”
In Father, Okatsuka laments not being able to grow her hair out because her bowl cut has become her brand. But she admits that’s just faux frustration; people come to her shows wearing wigs of her bowl cut, and it’s become a point of pride. “Can Dora the Explorer change her look? Does Minnie Mouse stop wearing her red bow?” she asks. “It’s limiting in a ‘ha ha’ way, but I think it is very empowering. I feel finally seen, and I think in turn other people do too. Rock the thing that makes you feel you, you know?”
We head into Vietnamese lunchtime favorite Indochine Vien (“Pho is life.”) and stop across the street in front of what used to be Heartbeat House, where Okatsuka would teach dancehall dance fitness, a zumba-like workout class. But things changed after the pandemic: “Everyone got into pilates, nobody wants to dance anymore. So now it’s a butcher shop [McCall’s]. They just sell meat. We were in there being sweaty pieces of meat, now they just sell pieces of meat to cook. That’s life.”
Thankfully, though, New Way Nails still holds strong a couple doors down, where Okatsuka gets her monthly creative fix via nail art. She shows off the sculpted hot dog on her fingernails—the handiwork of owner Roger—as we peruse the colorful wall of paint selections. “They keep it cute: The pink vibes, the Hello Kitty on the menu,” she says.
As we approach the southwestern edge of the boulevard’s most walkable stretch, we wind down inside one of the newest storefronts—and maybe the one where you’re most likely to find Okatsuka at night (“Rarely do people see me during the day. I’m very pale for a reason.”). Venture inside of Nico’s, a bottle shop in the center of a strip mall, and you’ll spot a staircase down to Baby Battista, a handsome, red-hued wine bar hideout in the basement that sports a small performance space with no more than a couple dozen chairs.
“Hello from underground somewhere in Atwater Village,” she says from the small stage down here. It’s mid-day, so it’s quiet and empty (and, thankfully, air conditioned after our on-foot tour during the tail-end of a heat wave). But by night, Okatsuka takes advantage of the low-pressure environment to often test out new material here. Our conversation veers into some of her other favorite clubs: She’s a regular at the Comedy Store and Largo—two traditional markers of success in the L.A. comedy scene. “When I got to start performing [at Largo] I was like, ‘oh, cool, okay, I am L.A. now, I’m an Angeleno,” she says. “Because all of my life I always was like, ‘oh, maybe I’m here temporarily.’ Twenty-seven years later I was still saying that, and I was like”—she then turns her attention to our walk through Atwater—“look at this, I did a whole tour of this street for you. I didn’t know I had it in me. Turns out I know it like the back of my hand.”
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But L.A. is still vast (she dares any out-of-towner to point to Pacoima on a map), and so too are her roots within it. She grew up on the Westside—in Father, she recalls growing up undocumented and rolling with her girl gang, her mom and grandma—and remembers visiting Hollywood and feeling like a tourist in her own city and unable to afford to see a movie at El Capitan. That’s certainly not the case now, though: “Years later, I get to perform in there and invite other people to enjoy it with me?” she muses. “That’s a really cool, full circle moment.”