For the next couple of weeks, Paul Grossman plans to start his workday around 6 p.m.

That’s because he’s working from his home in the French Alps, where there’s a nine-hour difference from his primary office in downtown Los Angeles.

But for Grossman, a partner at law firm Paul Hastings, the time difference is well worth enduring. Indeed, he and his wife, Margie, spend five weeks in the mountains every year.

“It’s so easy,” Grossman, 75, said. “I work out of my office in my home in France. It’s just like being at my desk in Los Angeles.”

Grossman, who backpacked across England earlier this summer, said he tries to go on at least one hiking adventure each year. In recent years, the lawyer has hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, through the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda and has gone on four African safaris.

Only a few places remain on his dwindling bucket list, but Grossman said he and his wife are planning a trip to Antarctica in January.

“As a kid growing up in Palo Alto, my family would take off for the Sierras when school got out and stay in the mountains all summer,” he said. “I have been camping and hiking my whole life. It’s just part of me.”

Taking Stage

For a lot of wealth managers, advising some of L.A.’s stars of stage and screen is the closest they’ll get to the thrill of performing live. Not so for Rasheed Muhammad.

Muhammad, 43, is a senior vice president at SunTrust Sports & Entertainment Group in Century City, having recently relocated from Atlanta. But before he began his career helping some of today’s headliners polish their investment portfolios, Muhammad was a singer himself – and one who got the opportunity to perform with his group at the legendary Harlem talent show “Showtime at the Apollo” in New York while he was a student at the University of South Carolina.

“We piled into a very small Nissan Sentra and drove from South Carolina all the way to New York City,” Muhammad said.

While he had performed in front of crowds since he was a boy, the Apollo crowd is notorious for holding nothing back if they don’t feel like a performer is worthy of the stage. Thankfully, Muhammad’s worst fears went unrealized.

“We didn’t win but we also did not get booed,” he said. “So that was good.”

Staff reporters Cale Ottens and Matt Pressberg contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].