PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF

By Kristin Scheimer

Well, hello there!  If you’re reading this, I assume (hope) you’ve read my other four blog posts, so you have a bit of an idea of who I am, or at least of the thoughts that often run through my brain.  And perhaps you’ve even read my little bio to the right of the blog, which tells of my achievements and background in the world of film and television.

But what I’d like to do today, is give you all a little bit of a peek at all the events in my life that led up to the creation of the “Kristin Rights” blog.  And what better place to start than at the beginning?   

I was born in the Summer of Love.  (sorry, you’re going to have to look that up to get the date.  A lady can’t give away her age that easily!)  

In Haight-Ashbury 100,000 hippies joined together for an enormous Love-In.   What better way to welcome me into the world?

I was born into an extremely liberal family.  My mother, father and all of my aunts and uncles went to UC Berkeley in the ‘60s.   One of our family’s claims to fame is that my uncle, Gordon Gordon, (yep... you read that right) was one of the original artists who moved to Haight-Ashbury, started a commune and began the Hippy Movement. 

The world was indeed a-changing at this time.  In Israel, there was the Six Day War.  The Vietnam War was just about to reach its peak.  The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing.  The Doors released their first album.  And to illustrate the changing ideas about race that were starting to emerge, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” opened in theaters.

I guess American History has always fascinated me, but I didn’t realize how much of American History I was living until much later. 

I was almost a year old when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were shot. (Ok.  I’m totally giving away my age now.  If you don’t know when these tragic assassinations happened, it’s time for a history review)

I have memories of our house often being visited by hippies and bikers, though to hear my mom talk, she was most definitely, absolutely, positively – despite her long hair, hippy clothes, and the fact that she sang folk songs while playing the guitar – NOT a hippy.   

A few years back, my mother was visiting me.  I woke up her and my stepfather.  Mom took one look at my tank top – an American flag with a peace sign where the stars usually are – and said “Oh, God.  I woke up in the 60s.” 

She’s always said I have a romanticized idea of the 60s, but I disagree.  For me, people actively participating in the action of causing positive social change… there’s nothing more beautiful.

Those are some of the most powerful memories from my childhood; those moments when change was happening.  Maybe I didn’t understand them completely, but they grabbed my attention.

My sister, ever the entrepreneur, came home one day quite eager to take a job – and more importantly earn some money – picking lettuce. 

My mother had to explain to her 10-year-old daughter that not only could she possibly get hurt if she tried to take this job, but that it was also wrong.  It was then that I first heard of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

You see, the farmers were hiring anyone who would pick their lettuce, which was dying in the fields, because their usual workers, led by the very persuasive Cesar Chavez, were striking – demanding better pay and better (less lethal) work environments.  Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta made amazing strides in gaining rights for these workers and a couple of years ago, I was incredibly honored to meet the diminutive, but still feisty, Dolores Huerta.

But this was not to be my only encounter with the farm workers of California.  I didn’t know what a grape tasted like until I was 4 or 5 years old because when the grape boycott started in 1965, my liberal family did their part.  I don’t remember how old I was, 3rd or 4th grade perhaps, when my class took a field trip to the City Dump.  Hey, this was El Centro, California.  There is literally NOTHING to do there.  On our way to the dump, I saw a long line of what looked like a bunch of large wooden boards leaning up against each other to make what I guess one could call buildings.

                 While this picture is from the 1930s, this is what the “buildings” looked like.

Curious little girl that I was, I asked my teacher what they were and was shocked, horrified and haunted for weeks, when I was told that those were the homes of the migrant farm workers.  How could men, women and CHILDREN, live in those things?  They could only generously be referred to as homes. 

Into this mix of tumultuous times, marched the results of the Supreme Court which began with the 1954 ruling on Brown v. the Board of Education and continued with the 1971 ruling on Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which essentially intended to level the playing field in terms of who got what quality of education.

The idea behind Brown v. The Board of Education was that segregated schools were not equal.  Children in poor neighborhoods (referencing at this time largely black neighborhoods) should have access to the same education as the rich white kids; rich being a relative term in El Centro, as no person of any real affluence would actually live there.   

Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education pushed busing as a means to force integrate the schools.

Just before entering 5th grade, we moved into a new house.  It was quite exciting as we moved a mere two blocks from my new school.  Alas, this was not to be so.  Sometime during that summer, we became a part of the busing /integration system.

There were three elementary schools in El Centro.   In order to ensure that all the children of El Centro were equally educated, the three schools were designated 1st and 2nd grade, 3rd and 4th grade, and 5th and 6th grade.  And as bad luck would have it, the school two blocks away was not to be my school.  We had the option to be bused, but I preferred riding a bike.  After all, El Centro is a tiny postage stamp of a town.  Nothing is really that far away.

So, here we were, all the 5th and 6th graders from every neighborhood in town going to the same school.  Let’s just say, it might have been a good idea if it had been handled better. 

Being a little blonde girl in El Centro meant I was a minority.  The majority of the population was Mexican as El Centro was completely surrounded by farms and so there was a great necessity for farm workers.  Plus, the Mexican border was right there.   There was also a fairly large black population.  And then there was a kind of mosaic of the other kids.  One only had to look at the playground during recess to see who came from which neighborhood.  We each flocked to the people we knew and there were definitely three distinct groups that never intermingled.  Despite putting us all together, there was no attempt to explain why this was happening or to encourage us to get to know our fellow classmates.

To make matters worse – much worse – they decide to test and track everyone.  Based on the test results we were grouped as A (the lowest) through E (the highest).  The A group was almost entirely the children of farm workers.  The test was in English and few of them spoke English.  ESL was to be something of the future. 

This testing and tracking further divided us into the same three distinct groups we were on the playground.   It also imposed a clear and rather insulting hierarchy, which just may have been more damaging than segregation had been.  The only lesson we really learned is that some of us were smarter, and therefore better, than others.

Junior high and high school would knock that idea right out of my head.  Lesson:  When in 7th grade and taking an Algebra class with the 8th graders, do not correct the teacher on your first day.  And definitely do not do it out loud in front of the whole class.

This wasn’t El Centro.  No, when I entered junior high I experienced a bit of a culture shock, or perhaps I should say class shock.  The summer before my junior high education began, we moved to El Cajon where I had my first encounter with the uber rich.  Suddenly rich was of more value than smart.  In fact smart earned you some rather cruel nicknames and pranks.  Some of these rich kids were nice.  Most of them made the girls in the movie “Mean Girls” look like cuddly kittens. 

The only place I felt at home in junior high and high school was in choir and drama.  I had no dance training at this time, so I started taking classes at the local junior college. 

And that was that.  I was going to be a triple threat, move to Los Angeles and become an actress.  Cue mom’s panic.  Now, it wasn’t that she was against me being an actress per se.  In fact, mom is a big supporter of artistic endeavors – and is one of the biggest fans of this blog!  Perhaps it was the idea of her naïve 18-year-old daughter moving to big bad Hollywood.

Well, I made it… eventually.  I attended a two-year acting conservatory in Orange County, where I would meet my first group of friends-for-life, and where the “diversity” of the group made me feel right at home.  After graduating, I moved to Los Angeles.  I did a number of shows, mostly musicals, and went on many, many auditions.

I came from a very educated family, so there was a bit of concern that I didn’t have a college degree.  Well, my waitressing career was going well, so I figured (with strong encouragement) that I might as well go back to school. 

Then something happened that completely changed the course of my life.  I was working at The Good Earth Restaurant when the verdict came in for the Rodney King trial.

Some of us were less than shocked by the outcome, but then one of my co-workers rushed in saying that there were riots.  They were covering it on the news and he said “It looks just like the Watts riots.”

                  Los Angeles Riots 1992                                                  Watts Riots 1965

Only one thought went through my head:  If history is repeating itself, then we haven’t learned anything.  And that day I decided I no longer wanted to be an actress who dabbled in writing.  I wanted to be a writer.  Rodney King’s words would later become famous:  “Can we all just get along?”  But that’s why I decided that day that I wanted to be a writer.  I felt that the biggest problems in the world came from people being afraid of or hating someone who is different than them, but only because they didn’t know them.  I wanted to write to give people the opportunity to get to know people who were different than them, and maybe the hate and the fear would go away.  (Clearly we still have quite a long ways to go, but that’s no reason to give up hope.)

I didn’t exactly know then how I wanted to go about this.  I had taken a Cultural Anthropology class and been fascinated by it.  I figured, what better way to introduce people to those who are different than them, than to expose them to people of different cultures from around the world?  So I decided to apply to UCLA as a Junior with a major in Cultural Anthropology. 

I was accepted and all set to pick my classes for my first quarter.  Small problem.  Thanks to Indiana Jones, when the budget was cut in the Anthropology department, all the money went to the archaeology classes, and virtually every Cultural Anthropology class was eliminated.  It was impossible to get a degree in Cultural Anthropology.

As a result, I had to quickly – and I mean in one afternoon – find a new major.  I flipped through the Class Schedule to find the subject that would interest me the most.  The one that was most in line with my goals was History.  That’s how I came to get a B.A. in History with an emphasis in American Social History. 

I studied the histories of American Women, Immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, a little bit of Chicano Studies, (I dropped that class after the first day.  The tenured professor said “those f***ing white people” just a few too many times for my taste.) so I did a little bit more studying on my own on the subject.

It's my fascination with history that drew me to Capoeira when I was searching for a Martial Art to study after seeing "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon".

A Martial Art created by the African slaves in Brazil?  And there’s music?!  Sold!  This is also where I found my second group of friends-for-life.  And a more eclectic group you could not find anywhere.  All ages, races, genders, sexual orientations and personalities, all in the same place.

CAPOEIRA BRASIL LOS ANGELES

In the meantime, I wrote.  I wrote script after script after script.  I mean, who creates genius their first time out?  As someone who gets paid to read many people’s first writing attempts, I can safely answer: No one.

In 2001, I made my first short film, a very, very dark little film called “Broken Child”.

"BROKEN CHILD"

I call this my blue period.  Eventually my writing turned lighter and finally comedic.   The immensely talented Joss Whedon, creator of "Firefly", "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer", "Angel" etc.  definitely influenced my writing and inspired one of my many TV Pilot scripts, "Alora".  

In 2010, I shot a TV sitcom pilot called “Five in a Car”, using my actor friends from Capoeira (which, if you’ve read my previous posts, you already know about).

"FIVE IN A CAR" PILOT

In 2013, I started working with a group of people I met at the home of one of the kindest men I know.  Tim occasionally likes to gather together people he likes - whom he thinks might like each other as well - for a casual evening of cocktails and conversation in his home.

It became a bit of a salon type of situation.  One night, one of the guests performed a monologue.  So I thought it would be fun, especially given how many of the guests were actors, to have a reading of my latest TV pilot “Complex”.  It went over like gangbusters.

Afterwards, I was speaking with some of the guests, whom I’d met many times.  We all decided we wanted to work together on our own creative endeavors.  And we formed a perfect little group.  Myself as the writer, Ed, our director, and our three actors:  Chum, Marti and Tommy. 

We had a great time, meeting once a week brainstorming, improvising and coming up with a little comedy show idea called “The Love Clinic”.  Wanting to produce something on a limited budget, we put together three scenes featuring the three main characters of the show.  Written by me, directed by Ed and starring Chum, Marti and Tommy as well as several incredibly talented guest actors, we spent a day shooting these scenes. 

I can’t explain how exciting it was to walk onto that set.  I mean, this was a full production, not the little pieced together productions I’d had with my first two projects – which were still awesome, fun and amazing experiences.

But here, thanks to my fellow creative group members, and especially Ed, we had a full production.  It was a great and very productive day.  I’ve seen rough edits of the scenes and they look amazing!  As soon as the editing is done, I’ll share them with all of you. 

And that brings us to today.  I have always been opinionated, and being a writer was told frequently that I should start a blog, but I had no clear sense of what I would focus on in a blog, so I kept putting it off.

Then one day, I watched an episode of “Scandal” called “The Lawn Chair”.  It was about a young black man who was shot and killed by a white cop.  I was talking on Instant Messenger to my “Scandal” buddy,  Nya “Dende” Assis, and she said, although she loved the episode, many people did not.  Well, I went on a rant.  Dende giggled a little about my rather passionate response and said “You should write a blog about this”. 

And “Kristin Rights” was born. 

As I continue to plug away at my own TV and Film projects, I will continue to express my opinions about social issues and how they relate to Film and TV as I believe these are rather powerful platforms and wonderful opportunities to do exactly what I set out to do as a writer:  Introduce my audience to as many different people as possible for the sole purpose of getting us all to understand each other a little better, so that someday we all really will “just get along”.