In the shower yesterday, I was scrubbing my arm and silently wondering, “How did I get so dirty?” Then it hit me — that wasn’t dirt.
I was getting tan.
I’ve been on the afternoon shift all week. While the mornings in Los Angeles have been cool and overcast, the afternoons have been sunny. Very sunny. Far too sunny for a pasty writer like me. Even with 50 spf sunblock, my ears were getting crispy around the edges of my USC ballcap, so on Wednesday I had to break out my wide-brimmed Maui hat, which strikes that awkward balance of Australian Outback individualism and post-vanity not-giving-a-fuck.
Fortunately, yesterday afternoon stayed overcast all day, so I could revert to the ballcap.
I spent the first half of my shift at Paramount’s Van Ness gate, where I spoke with three blog-readers who’d come out specifically to say whassup. David is a recent USC English grad who has a remarkably cool job shooting documentaries for MTV. My advice to him was to keep his job and not brag about it. I then spoke with an Australian couple. She’s an actress; he’s a writer; their future children will be gorgeous.
At 3:15, we were hustled down to the Van Ness gate of Raleigh Studios, where the cast of Ugly Betty would be joining the picket line. Whenever Actual Celebrities show up, news cameras are out in force, so you want to have a lot of picketers on hand.
The problem at the Raleigh gate was that there were too many picketers crammed in too little space, which made it impossible to move. And once a picket line stops moving, it’s just a bunch of people loitering, which is illegal. The obvious solution was to extend the picket line further down the sidewalk. I took responsibility for implementing the obvious, doubling the length of the line.
Today, the protest moves to Fox, with all the picketers headed there at 10 a.m. Which means I need to get moving. Once I know my schedule for next week, I’ll post it here.