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When I show up, two guards are directing traffic into the parking lot and around the drive-up window line of waiting cars that snakes back on itself. In the shop, as many as 75 people wait in line and watch little rings of dough drop into a vast vat of hot oil, get automatically flipped over and then pass under a Niagara Falls of opaque white glaze.

Somehow, the marketing guys at Krispy Kreme have turned this into a mystical process, a sacrament in the worship of doughnuts that has found a devoted following in L.A., America's doughnut capital.

Krispy Kreme is where the melting pot truly melts. Fidgety kids, women in crisp business suits with $100 haircuts, beer-bellied couch potatoes and 20-somethings dressed always in black and shades all take their place in line. All skin colors, languages and education levels have a place at Krispy Kreme.

People don't seem to mind the line; I imagine New Yorkers grumbling and yelling at the workers to hurry up already. There's plenty of doughnut chatter, comparing notes and trying to figure out just why these doughnuts are so good. One couple brags that they once waited three hours in line at the drive-up window. Hot Krispy Kremes "melt in your mouth, they're light. I'm not a heavy-duty sweets person, but you can eat a couple of these," says the woman. When her husband suggests she actually could put away a half-dozen, she refuses to give her name.

"I don't eat doughnuts," says another customer, Jeri Sobel, as she takes a bite of a hot glazed one -- just ... this ... once.

Nearby, two well-spoken couples sit, discussing Krispy Kreme's marketing brilliance as they eat doughnuts and drink coffee.

"I don't eat a lot of doughnuts, but you have to come here, because everyone else is," says one of the men, claiming to be eating his first doughnuts in 10 or 15 years. His friend, wearing a Colgate University T-shirt, seems to have more experience. He says the doughnuts "lived up to the expectations ... They're light, not greasy. They're crispy on the outside, and warm and tender inside."

Could you tell me your names? "No, no. Don't tell her," the wives loudly insist. The husbands are bewildered. In the ensuing argument, it becomes clear that the wives are not about to let the world know that they are spending a Sunday morning in a doughnut shop.

But that would hardly make them unusual. Angelenos are mad for doughnuts. There are doughnut shops on practically every corner, in every cruddy little strip mall. Besides the pedestrian doughnuts and coffee, there are shops that sell doughnuts and Chinese takeout, doughnuts and flowers, doughnuts and gasoline. You can buy doughnuts while you do your laundry. There's even a doughnut shop shaped like a doughnut. Early this year, when North Carolina-based Krispy Kreme began its incursion into Southern California, people waited in line two hours to buy dozens of hot glazed doughnuts.

Frankly, I don't get it. I just moved here, and I expected a populace that was colonically clean and Pilates-toned, one that ate tofu scramble instead of real eggs and that lived in homes made peaceful and productive by the magic of feng shui. That's all here, but what's up with the doughnuts?

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