Last week I didn’t do any picketing because we went up to Portland to visit my parents, baby in tow. I didn’t write this newsletter either which at first I felt bad about and then felt fine about because sometimes it’s hard to get stuff done.
Yesterday I picketed with my friend Lizzie at the Fox Lot, a studio that’s approximately one thousand miles from my house in a fabled land called…Century City.
Century City isn’t so much as a city as a few blocks of high-rises wedged between Beverly Hills and Westwood. I would call it the financial district of Los Angeles, in the fact that is palpably soulless and mostly populated by people carrying flavorless takeout back to their carpeted offices. It has all the depressing parts of the corporate world with the added ennui of not being near anything cool except a golf course and a very fancy mall, which I guess is some people’s dream so who am I to judge?
I parked at the golf course and after a few baby bodily fluids were dealt with, I went to meet my friend. She was at one of the farther studio gates, so I checked in at the welcome tent, grabbed a blueberry muffin, and started hiking down the Century City main drag, which is charmingly called “Avenue of the Stars.” This is not to be confused with the Walk of Fame (Hollywood) or the Milky Way (outer space).
We were united and we paced up and down the street, chatting and waving our signs. Eventually the baby started fussing so we retreated to one of the flora of this local habitat: a businessman’s hotel. You know what I’m talking about: soulless and impeccable! We stashed our signs in a shrub at the start of the circular driveway and headed inside.
We took respite in a high ceilinged lobby where Lizzie bought drinks (coffee and lemonade) because you must pay for your right to exist in public places. I fed the baby while doing my best to shield the businessmen from the sight of my breast. Every time I feed the baby in public it’s an internal fight as to what inconvenience I’m going to wage on the people around me: a flash of boob or a crying baby? I usually land on boob, since it’s silent.
We headed back out to finish our picketing, and saw an older man wearing a suit with no tie handing off our signs to a bellhop wearing an outfit that looked a lot like the one the guys (soldiers?) at Buckingham palace wear. It was bright and had some gold accents and seemed out of place among the concrete and steel edifices surrounding us, though they are a little bit like the castles of today. I ran up to the bellhop apologizing, telling him those were our signs we had stashed because we didn’t want to bring them into the lobby. He jovially handed them back to me and told me if his manager saw us to tell them we really fought him for them, and then he told us he really supported what the writers were doing. A nice moment of solidarity.
We trudged back up the hill and the baby had more bodily issues to attend to so I headed back to the car, shockingly passing on a pile of Domino’s pizzas at the check-in tent that (I later learned) were courtesy of Jennifer Garner. I had been gone half a day but it felt like a century in that city.
For those who don’t know, Century City gets its name from 20th Century Fox because it was built on the backlot of the studio. That’s why the street is named Avenue of the Stars. The headquarters of Fox Studios is still there on Pico, presumably the object of the picket line.