Parenting & Family Quote by Jami Gertz

Gertz frames celebrity life with an almost stubborn normalcy: yes, the party is "rockin' and rolling" in LA, yes there’s a DJ, but the real flex is that the DJ is her childhood friend from Chicago. In one move, she swaps the usual Hollywood status markers (who you hired, who showed up, what it cost) for a different currency: who knew you before the spotlight hardened into identity.

The geography matters. Chicago isn’t just a hometown; it’s a shorthand for pre-industry selfhood, for relationships that weren’t brokered through agents or proximity to power. LA, by contrast, is the ecosystem where everything can start to feel transactional, even joy. So when she says, "For me it was different", she’s admitting how rare it is for an event in that world to feel unperformed. The party is loud, kinetic, easy to picture. But her emotional center is quiet: "just to have family with us."

That "just" does a lot of work. It downplays the sentiment even as it reveals the hunger beneath it. She’s signaling a kind of survivor’s gratitude: fame gives you access, but it also rearranges intimacy. The quote’s intent isn’t to romanticize family as a platitude; it’s to assert a boundary between public spectacle and private grounding, using a dance floor as the stage where authenticity can still sneak in.