My first road bike, after the banana seat and streamers phase, was the most expensive bike in the shop. Italian-made, red steel, and with Campy parts. I spent an entire year of babysitting money to buy it. And I felt really cool on that thing.

Paul Nolan got me interested in riding even before Breaking Away came out. We’d head out early Saturday mornings and go on long rides on the country roads of Berkey, Ohio, where nary a car passed by, there was not a hill in sight, and the biggest danger were the barnyard dogs from the farms. And they were dangerous – baring their teeth, biting at the tires. Paul liked to smack ‘em with his portable tire pump. I doused ‘em with water. Sometimes we carried a spray bottle with amonia. That produced a lot of great dog noises and could probably be classified as cruel and unusual. But then so was the bared teeth and biting.

When I moved to Southern California, nothing prepared me for the hills. Whereas before I could whip off a century in four hours, now I was facing brutal climbs where I couldn’t crack 10 miles per hour. Or really even 5. I hung up my bike for film school. The only riding I did was for the first film I made at CalArts, a one-minute short featuring that red Italian Torpado.

Twenty-five years later I was still riding that thing… Until I hooked up with a couple of guys for early morning training and one of them, Steve, told me I could shave 10% off my time and limit the road vibration with a new bike. Done.

I bought a $4000 Team Raleigh for $1500 used. Airplane aluminum. Carbon fork and seat stays. Campy Record components. I rode the hell out of that bike. Even beat the guys up the hills a lot. Enough so they stopped riding with me. My century time in the mountains of SoCal was always above five hours. But that’s pretty good for the hills.

Just before my birthday this year a large check arrived unexpectedly. My parents gave their car to my sister and, in an effort to be fair, gave me a check to match the value of it. It basically burned a hole in my pocket. I’d already decided to upgrade some of the components on my bike. I wanted the hot new carbon crank ($500) and titanium sprockets that gave me more options for climbing ($250). If this means anything to you, I was riding an 11-21 sprocket which is great for professional sprinters, not so great for 40 year old women climbing hills.

So when that check arrived, so did this question? Am I going to put all these new parts on an old frame?

Certainly not!

The frame of my dreams was always a De Rosa. Italian-made, handcrafted, ultra-cool. They were always far too expensive. But now… Mine, mine, all mine.

However, a funny thing happened there in the bike shop. I didn’t like the newest De Rosa models. They weren’t cool. They didn’t ooze craftsmanship like they once did.

So, welcome to obsession-ville.

I researched bikes like a cancer patient researches drugs. And it came down to the Colnago and the Time. The high-end Colnago is the best-reviewed bike out there. Ernesto Colnago oversees the production of each handmade frame himself. And he turned to another famous Italian to help develop his carbon fiber – Ferrari. All this comes at a cost, of course.

Time doesn’t have the same press. None of the magazines that put out yearly reviews ever mention Time – not that I’ve seen. Do they not submit bikes for review? If you’re an obsessive research-junkie like me, you do your own review. Scratch the surface and you’ll discover that Ferrari or not, Time is doing carbon fiber like no-body! Whereas other manufacturers buy sheets of carbon they mold into a bike, Time makes their own carbon, they weave it with two other materials, Vectran and Kevlar, and then they layer it with resin into specific shapes. It makes it stronger, lighter and more vibration-dampening. If you look at most carbon bike frames, you’ll find that the tubes are cylinders that, like straws, don’t vary in shape. Time tubes are oval and diamond-shaped. They make asymmetrical chainstays because the drive train (all those back sprockets) is on the right side and so the force exerted on the chainstay is different on each side. Oh, and they also reinforce the seat tube and the steering tube in a really cool way that’s too hard to explain and sorta must be seen.

Have I bored you yet?

Um, yeah, I bought the Time. I was totally sold by all that, the lifetime warranty, and the fact that many other bike manufacturers use Time forks. Oh, right, and they gave me a loaner bike for a week to test it out and make sure I loved it.

Italian? No. It’s French. France is the new Italy – at least it is to me. My amazing little bike (and I was slightly disheartened to discover I was an Extra Small in the frame measuring department) was handmade by some little Frenchman I like to call Pierre. Now, I am so a Time girl and happy to have switched nationalities to the home of the Tour de France. I even just emailed the local Time rep, Gille Lalonde, and asked him if he’d send me some Time stickers for my bike helmet.

Enough already.

I’m doing my best to produce a movie which is zapping me of all possible creative energy. Wow, this movie making business – there’s an awful lotta moving parts.

But here’s the upside to being a producer…

I’ve gotten pretty good at reading contracts.
I know that the Michigan legislature is inches away from passing a 40% tax rebate for filming.
I have a free conference call number.
A couple of people at CAA take my phone calls.
Bluetooth actually works pretty well for talking while driving.
When people say they can get you money, they may not really mean it.
A friend of a friend of a friend is a contact in the making.

Oh, and did I mention that people invite you to speak about your vast knowledge?

Here’s what it looks like this week.

Until 2005, Sony Pictures Entertainment was called MGM Studios, home of the roaring lion. MGM was one of the original studios in Hollywood, dating back to 1924. The words above the lion in their emblem, “Ars Gratia Artis,” is Latin meaning “Art for art’s sake.”

Two years ago Sony bought the beautiful, historic, white pristine studio for $5 billion with their partner, a little Internet company called Comcast, which owns 20% of the company. Cleary this can only mean one thing: there ain’t no money and there ain’t no future in the Internet.

Sony Pictures is a subsidiary of Sony Corporation, which is Japanese meaning “Art for our sake.” The studio reported earnings of $7 billion last year, which must certainly be a disappointment for the corporation hauling in a revenue of $67 billion. It helps to understand why the studio needs to preserve their 22 year old residual structure with the creators of their product. Another million or two to its writers, director and actors, and that whole place becomes a house of cards.

I’m starting to really understand their side of things. After all, it was Sony who spent years and many millions of dollars developing the Blu-ray format. Instead of picketing, we should be on our hands and knees thanking them for their innovative technology that will help distribute our product to more and more people. We’ll be seen and heard, we just won’t be paid. That seems totally reasonable.

Okay, I’m not quite there yet. Silly me. I’m still walking erect, holding a sign in protest. Me and a few thousand others.

Now that this little strike is marching forward, it’s a grand time to be in Tinsel Town. On any given day, you can walk right up to any studio in Los Angeles, and without any sort of pass, badge, clearance or identification, you can take a meeting with all the major players. In fact, today you could have shown up outside Universal and mingled with the stars of nearly every show on television. Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Back To You, Cold Case, CSI, and 50 others. Two thousand people were picketing outside Universal today and that’s not including the throngs of news crews trying to get interviews.

Nope, there ain’t no better time for photo ops and autographs.

Contracts, not so much.

Nick Counter, the negotiator for the studios, says this thing could go on for nine months. Goodness me. I’m going to need another strike t-shirt for that kind of time.

I actually saw Nick outside Sony this morning. I was doing the 6 AM shift and he leaned out of his black Mustang muscle car as he drove by and yelled, “Go back to work, you bastards!” I can’t be certain it was actually Nick, but it sure sounded like him.

For the record, though, that’s the only unkind thing I’ve heard anyone say to us in 7 days.

Without having a movie in the can, I can’t say that the contract issues in dispute between the WGA and AMPTP (read studios and networks) directly affect me. They will, but they don’t now. Regardless, I’m more actively involved in this dispute than I’ve been since 2001 – the last time there was a realistic threat of a strike.

As of this writing, I’ve been on the picket lines for five days. Three thousand of us are fanning out across the city every day, and walking around in circles for four hours at a stretch at the entrances of 14 studios. We’re joined by members of the Screen Actors Guild who are walking off the job and walking with us in support. Huge numbers of actors are showing up, some of them with famous faces. Teamsters who deliver film equipment are, in many cases, refusing to cross picket lines as well.

Here are a few brief facts.

The average television writer in Hollywood makes $94,000 a year. The average film writer makes $70,000. Employment is sporadic for most of these people, with 48% of them unemployed at any given time.

There are about two dozen issues on the bargaining table but two of them are hot buttons: DVD/home video sales, and “new media.”

Regarding DVD and home video sales, the WGA currently makes 4 cents on a $19 DVD. Last year, writers made just under $60 million in residuals for videos and DVDs. We are asking for an additional 4 cents, which we can assume amounts to basically another $60 million next year. If that sounds like a lot, as a point of reference let me just say that Disney made $35 billion last year ($1.5 billion of it in digital downloads, see below). Sixty million dollars is the cost of the average studio movie. Last year Viacom paid their ousted CEO a severance of $60 million, and CBS paid their CEO $30 million in salary and compensation. Basically, to the studios and networks, $60 million a year is peanuts. But boy do they hate to give up their peanuts.

The WGA has been unsuccessfully negotiating for these residuals since 1985. At that time, the WGA made a big mistake. They agreed to take a massive pay cut of 80% on this new, emerging market of home video with the understanding that the studios would give back when the dollars accumulated. For 22 years those dollars have been accumulating at an astronomical rate and the studios refuse to give back. It is estimated that the writers have lost out on $2 billion since 1985. Even the strike of 1988 did little to correct the problem. That strike lasted 154 days (5 months), the longest in history, and is reported to have cost the entertainment industry $500 million. The dispute was over residuals and writers were less than enthused by the compromise. So now writers are just hoppin’ mad.

We’re asking for 4 lousy cents. The studio-networks are unwilling to give up even one cent more. Their share of the $19 is $9.

And then there’s “new media” – internet, cell phones, and new technology distribution. Since no one knows how much anyone is going to make in this emerging market (though Disney is telling their shareholders they made $1.5 billion last year), the WGA is proposing to earn 2.5% of the gross revenue. You see the theme here? Another new market for which they would like creative folks to take a pay cut, this time 100%. The studio-networks are holding to their position that all of the creators of this content, including writers, actors and directors, earn nothing in new media. They say that since there is no fee to download content, the creators of the content should not be compensated. However, studio-networks make advertising money off those downloads, just like they make advertising money during the broadcast of television shows that viewers watch for free. As you can imagine, writers, actors and directors find this unreasonable, and that’s why film and television production is shutting down in droves. “We’ve all got the same dogs in this fight,” is something I heard on the line yesterday.

It seems absurd, right? It does to me, and I’ll be out there walking around in a circle for as long as it takes to get my 4 damn cents.

To get there I drove through the city and then the valley, and as the spider-veined highways fell from my rearview, the noise of habitation gave way to remote silence. I found myself marveling at the High Sierras and understanding for the first time where “purple mountain majesty” comes from. And I noticed something. Billboard advertisements. They’d crop up as I neared a big town or a highway interchange, stacked on top of each other and clamoring for my attention. Promises and guarantees called to me. New cars, new houses, a whole new life of golfing luxury and botox. There was so much to read and see and do that the mountains in the background seemed dull by comparison. They weren’t asking anything of me. They weren’t making sales pitches. With glossy photos, words, logos, colorful swirls, and really good copy to compete with, how could purple mountain majesty be anything other than landscape filler?

That’s when the game started. Could I NOT look at anything man-made for the rest of the drive?

It’s harder than you think.

Full stop. Non sequitar.

Summers at Venice Beach are like rock concerts – a thousand sweaty bodies all crammed together at the edge of the stage. On some days, the stretch of umbrellas can be a mile-long mosaic of primary colors. Each with a slight scent of coconut oil sizzling underneath. And on those days, a steady stream of twin engine airplanes float along the horizon with long trails of banner ads behind them. Just when you thought you could get away from being sold, the sell comes to you.

And so my game continued. Can I NOT look at any of them?

I’ve become advertisement averse. I don’t want to look anymore. Studies show that as the outlets for advertising become increasingly more plentiful, the ads themselves become less effective. So they have to be Louder, Bigger, Faster, MORE!

Have you seen the digital billboards? I won’t look at those either. Must every urban area in America become like Times Square? I love Times Square. As long as it stays in Times Square. But when it starts happening on Sunset Boulevard, and then Santa Monica Boulevard, and then at the corner of Olympic and Bundy for God’s sake, it’s simply too much. And I refuse to look. That’s my protest. I would like to render them useless. This is me, sticking my fingers in my ears and squeezing my eyes shut.

So there!

As for Grays Meadow, it was hotter than hell in June, and then as soon as the sun disappeared, the raging wind started. It threatened the well-sewn seams of my new REI Hobitat (available at a local retail store or online for only $269, footprint not included). But no one tried to sell me anything out there. The ants didn’t walk by waving flags with recognizable logos. The bears didn’t come offering items for product placement. I was simply alone with the twinkling stars and the howling wind… trying to get some sleep.

When I arrived, my sister-in-law, Amy, was just finishing reading a new book written by Shirley MacLaine called, The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit. There was a striking photograph on the cover, a small Shirley from a distance, with backpack and walking stick. We all passed the book around and devoured it with glee. As I read, I would spend long hours on the road with Shirley, and then copy passages into my journal, ways in which I connected with the thoughts she was writing about and the transformation she was undergoing. It occurred to me then that walking an ancient path along a holy energy site was something I would do, too. But the thought of traveling 500 miles on foot was daunting, to say the least. I said to myself maybe I’d do it for my 40th birthday, still five years away. It was a romantic idea and blessedly far into the future.

Funny thing about time, it keeps unfolding and so five years passed. I kept wondering if I’d really do it. I was drawn to it as an idea, as a part of my personal story, something to tell people I’d done. The actual doing of it seemed frightening to me. But, since I’m attracted to pursuing things that frighten me, I held it out as a possibility, if not a reality. I tried it on a bit, floated it as an idea among friends and decided that if I committed to the idea by telling people, there’d be no turning back. I didn’t tell a lot of people though, just in case. And I had an out. I’d broken my ankle, undergone surgery, and if I decided not to walk the 500 miles, I could blame it on chronic ankle pain.

There was another idea I was trying on, too.

Years ago, my friend Sandy was going through a divorce, and as a way of releasing the old in order to re-emerge anew, she decided to shave her head. I listened with awe to her process of shedding her identity and her feelings of empowerment by this act of defiance and strength. I felt myself drawn to doing the same thing. It was an idea. I didn’t necessarily have a plan.

As I traveled a timeline toward 40, these two ideas came together – shaving my head and walking across Spain.

Somewhere around August of 2004 it occurred to me that I could begin growing my hair as long as possible only to cut it all off and donate it to someone with cancer who had no hair. Another romantic idea and the hatching of a plan.

.

I’ve never been bald before. I was born with a lot of hair and for the majority of my life, it’s been long and full and blond and lush. People have always commented on and coveted my hair. And so it seemed to be just the thing to give up, along with comfort and familiarity and language and responsibility and materialism. To expose my head as I exposed the deepest parts of myself in this month-long “journey of the spirit” seemed to root me into the reality and excitement of marking a transition, not just in terms of time and age but more powerfully symbolic of a new beginning within. And having told so many people was not just helping hold me to my commitment but also a way of understanding how vital it is that we share ourselves and our intentions so that others open a space and help us transform ideas into realities.

On Valentine’s Day of 2005, I pulled 18 inches of blond mane into two ponytails, braided them tightly, took a deep breath, and cut them off.

.

I thought it was going to be a disaster and that the next year of my life would be a painful process of regrowth. I wasn’t quite prepared to be not just enamored by the way I looked, but completely in love with my bald head. It might be the first time I truly ever saw my face.

But I think it is my best look ever.

.

Before leaving for Spain, I traveled to New York to visit friends. The Christo exhibit of orange flags in Central Park greeted me. And one night, I did an amazing thing. I took a bath. At night. I had never really taken baths at night because I didn’t want to deal with my wet hair before going to bed. But one night, late, all I wanted to do was soak in the tub and crawl into bed.

I lay in that water for a hour. It was so incredible. All the lights were off, only the flickering light of a candle lit the room.

There was a razor on the edge of the tub. I had used clippers the shave off my long locks, but it left stubbles and now there was new growth from a few days. So I sat in there in the warm water, and lathered up with shaving cream. I closed my eyes and just kept feeling the pattern of growth and all the different directions my hair grows out of my head. And I shaved my head to go against the grain, all the while keeping my eyes closed. It felt sacred. Beautiful. Some kind of rite of passage. It took me at least a half hour. And with each stroke, my head felt like glass.

The touch of my hand on my bare head. The transfer of heat. All the new sensations.

This head, mine. I lay back in the water and held my head, cradling it. I felt as though I was a baby coming out of the womb.