STEVIE RYAN, 22, with bright red nails and auburn hair tinted crimson, sits outside at a far table, dressed in a black T-shirt and skinny jeans. Sleek cars roll by on the street. Pedestrians stroll along the sidewalk.
A waitress in sheer black stockings attends to her customers. RYAN smiles. I love Victorville.
I mean, it's home. But I always just felt like there was nothing there. .
.. When I was growing up there, it was like dirt roads, nothing there.
There was desert, and we'd ride our motorcycles, and we had a go-cart, and it was just empty. RYAN orders a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich on wheat bread. She talks a while longer, then goes to feed the parking meter.
Sitting down again, she pulls out a cigarette, and after repeated attempts, lights it with a match. The desert has a way of swallowing you up. Like the weather - scorching when it's hot, freezing when it's cold - Stevie Ryan's memories of Victorville reel between extremes.
On one end lay the isolation of a place where kids had little to do on weekends but hit the craft store and "go crazy in their bedrooms," she says. Then, there were the gangs and methamphetamine that seemed as much a part of the desert as the smashing winds. The arts scene Ryan wanted, Victorville didn't have.
So she left the High Desert about four years ago to pursue acting in Huntington Beach and then in Los Angeles, where she lives now. Ryan became an Internet starlet by posting homemade flicks on YouTube, a Web site where users share videos. She hooked viewers as the feisty Little Loca, a Latina chola from East L.
A. with a 4.0 grade-point average whose YouTube channel ranks in the site's top 50 for all-time subscriptions.
Ryan's Internet dabbling snagged her calls from agents asking to represent her and, most recently, a gig as one of four hosts for a new television series the CW network will air this fall. Life today is good - a spacious apartment on a tree-lined street off Melrose Avenue, holiday drives to see family in Victorville, days spent filming and brainstorming for projects. But what Ryan has now didn't come easily.
Ryan says she felt like a misfit in Victorville, where "I was just not into everything everyone else was." In school she felt stifled, with few opportunities to chase creative endeavors. She wanted to take drama, but was placed in computers instead.
She says she avoided sex throughout high school and kept away from the drugs and other dangers that swept up loved ones, including a cousin who was stabbed when Ryan was 7. After graduation, scores of friends ended up pregnant or in jail. No one seemed interested in exploring the world beyond home.
"It's just more about a comfort zone," Ryan says of why she thinks people don't venture outside the desert. "Everybody knows everybody. It's so simple and just so easy to fall into it.
" While she's glad she left, she said she loves Victorville because it made her who she is. In the YouTube personas she dons, there is a piece of her past, Ryan says. A dash of the desert.
Sun and a strand of neon pink Christmas lights exude a welcoming glow. A homemade collage of women in lingerie, a white canvas bejeweled with melted wax in bold colors and a black-and-white snapshot of Marilyn Monroe hang on the walls. A bright red rotary telephone, unplugged, receiver off the handle, lies on the wooden floor.
Relaxing on a red couch, RYAN holds up the scarlet-colored camera she uses to film her YouTube videos. LITTLE LOCA, wearing hoop earrings and thick lip liner, embarks on a two-minute rant. Anybody up here on YouTube that thinks that they're some kind of celebrity, you need to check your hits, fool.
Because everybody up on here is straight trippin', alright? Don't be thinking that you're something special when you ain't, fool. You know what, we all came up on here together.
Not even. Half of you fools are new up on here anyway. Half of you ain't even been up on YouTube since the beginning anyways, fools.
It was about a year ago that Ryan chanced upon YouTube. She doesn't recall precisely how she found the site, but she was instantly intrigued. She saw YouTube as a community where imaginative types could swap ideas and innovations.
After watching, she started posting. "My taste is a little bit different, so I wanted to see if anybody was digging what I was making," she said. Ryan created Loca last spring after critics wrote mean comments about short films she had put up on stevieryan, the first of her YouTube channels.
To Ryan, Loca was a natural choice, modeled after the girls who sat next to her on the school bus each morning decked in crisp white shirts, perfecting their makeup. "They took care of me," Ryan said. "My best friend looked just like Loca.
"When I got jumped, who do you think told those girls they'd kick their ass afterwards? It was the Little Locas." Loca's spunk drew filmmakers Angel Aviles-McClinton and Paul Martinez to contact Ryan last year.
The three created a short movie starring Loca, titled "LocaMotion Derailed." Aviles-McClinton, who played Sad Girl in "Mi Vida Loca," said that while she was surprised Ryan was Caucasian, an actress's job isn't to be herself but to bring other characters to life. Besides Loca, Ryan posts on YouTube in roles including a Paris Hilton spoof - "you're hot," she repeats in a scratchy voice - and Jamie Lynn, a tipsy Southern gal who chatters about Osama bin Laden flying on a magic carpet.
Ryan says she loves to perform, to make people laugh. She says maybe she harbors multiple personalities, "maybe I'm a schizo." "I didn't just want to create a huge Loca world," she said.
"I wanted to make lots of tiny worlds." Caralee White, 29, the fianc e of one of Ryan's three brothers, said Ryan evinces charisma, that hypnotizing, rock-star quality so difficult to describe. Ryan is that person who steps into a room and takes center stage without saying a word, White said.
RYAN sits on a short flight of steps. Shoppers in stilettos and Ugg boots walk by, chatting loudly. Tourists pause occasionally on the crowded sidewalk to watch in curiosity as Ryan is photographed.
Before the camera, Ryan seems at ease, posing lazily, her gaze far away. Strolling back to her apartment, she stops to look as a woman costumed as a wind-up doll moves slowly, limbs jerking as she is filmed. The first car Ryan bought was a 1962 Ford Thunderbird, a black beauty with red leather seats.
There's something about the past, the glamour of a lost age, that she loves, she says. She admires how women used to dress up, teasing their hair and makeup to perfection. Some days, she goes down to the silent movie theater on Fairfax Avenue because "that's where film came from," she says.
"We forget about the roots of things." Some of the first movies Ryan put up on YouTube were black-and-white vignettes showing her singing, flirting, smoking a cigarette. As a child, Ryan sang and danced for family videos, remembers White, who met Ryan about 10 years ago.
Ryan was a savvy parodist, able to parrot actors and everyday people with ease. Ryan says in her youth her search for an audience to entertain seemed fruitless. Teachers didn't encourage her to explore creative careers, she says.
So at Silverado and Victor Valley high schools, Ryan says, she piped her energy into fights and ditching parties with friends. Still, with her parents' support, Ryan did independent study and graduated on time in 2002. She enrolled in photography and acting at Victor Valley College, and remembers "Mr.
F," a teacher there who told her she had an eye for the camera. He was a "very small voice that was there, telling me bigger things," Ryan says. After browsing the Internet for casting calls, she won a small part in a Hilary Duff video through her first audition.
She recalls being at Venice Beach filming, seeing herself in the lens of a giant camera. "I just remember looking at my reflection and thinking, `Oh my god. this is the coolest thing ever.
' I just remember thinking, `I want to do this ...
for the rest of my life."' About two weeks ago, in her L.A.
apartment, Ryan got a call on her cell phone. Her voice jumped at the news. Her smile, immutable.
The CW network had announced it would broadcast a show Ryan will co-host. The Sunday night series, with the working title "Online Nation," "scours ..
. Web sites, blogs and user-generated materials on the Internet to find the best, the hottest, the unique and sometimes, the flat-out bizarre, and presents it on the CW audience's other favorite screen: the TV screen," according to the network. To old friends, Ryan has done what few have been able to do.
Jacqueline Paulson, 23, who lives in Hesperia and met Ryan years ago while filming a music video, calls the pull of the desert "the curse." People move away only to come back soon after, she says. Paulson studies at Victor Valley College and dreams, too, of leaving.
But she says for now she needs to stay in Hesperia near her parents, who help care for her 2-year-old daughter. Ryan says she probably won't return to Victorville to start a life, but that she aspires, one day, to make a documentary on the area. She says if she ever gets rich, she'll build a performing arts center for local youth.
Ryan is close to her parents, who own a business calibrating truck scales, and visits them often. She says she misses the simplicity of life in Victorville. Los Angeles is busy, a world of sirens and cell phones that can leave a person longing for calm, she says.
But to young people in the desert today, Ryan says, "There is life outside of Victorville. You can always go back home. Home's not going anywhere, but life doesn't last forever.
" "There is a whole world out there," she says. "There's a big, big, big, huge world." In a homemade film posted on YouTube, the world is in sepia.
The silent movie is set over piano music, a melancholy tune that rises and falls, not quite sad, with notes swirling as softly as a quiet morning rain. The vignette features Ryan, her hair curled above her shoulders, standing against a white wall; gazing at a snapshot of Charlie Chaplin; holding a dark suitcase. In curled white letters set on a black screen, her story unfolds.
..
She enjoys the rain. She never fits in. She hasn't been the same since she got the news.
She tried to sleep. She couldn't make up her mind. She couldn't make any friends.
She asked for advice. She tried everything, and nothing worked. So she left and never looked back.
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