Day 16: Hollywood Blvd Is Toast!!!

ETA: This page is getting clogged and slow to load, so I've put photos from the march on my Flickr page. Go to the shifty little box below and to the right. That's what she said.

I'm sitting in Berkeley at a tiny cafe which is blasting reggae music, surrounded by Cal students staring at complex mathematical equations in front of them or books about Eastern philosophy, while drinking chai and thoughtfully stroking their beards. This town does not change. There are just more condos and less hackysacks. Half of which at least is a good thing. This day after Thanksgiving gluttony was spent at a park with a bunch of friends who all have decided to procreate, thus we were surrounded by little tiny people. We made up a very dangerous multitasking sports game called Frisbee/Football/Soccer and I got drooled on, nearly took out a kid with a Whiffle Bat, and was threatened by one sulking kid that they would throw me in the garbage can. (Yeah, whatever. Empty threat: I'm totally like 160 pounds heavier than her.)

On Tuesday before Thanksgiving the writers descended on Hollywood Blvd. and marched, alongside Teamsters and other labor union members, down the street in a giant show of solidarity, despite the upcoming renewed talks. We are cautiously optimistic but certainly afraid of being bitched-slapped yet again when talks begin Monday. The march was packed and fun and ended when you could walk no further and had to just stop and listen to the tiny tops of the heads of people like Sandra Oh and Patrick Verrone address the crowd – while standing alongside nutjobs in dirty, ill-fitting, ill-conceived Superman, Pinhead, and Chucky costumes.

But before the march, we were treated to a two-song mini-concert by Alicia Keys, who told the crowd, "There are no songs without any words!" – which is in fact not true at all (maybe she's never heard of classical music? Or Jazz? Or "Frankenstein" by Edgar Winter")? But whatever. We knew what she meant.

Below is a short bit of random footage from the collision of one still camera's mediocre video feature, thousands of striking writers, actors, confused German tourists looking for David Hasselhoff's star on the Walk of Fame, hobos, bad-ass Teamsters and other union members, gawking Scientologists, the Hulk, a meth-y Jack Sparrow, Justine Bateman (as always), CAA agents baring trays of scones, Alicia Keys, and another chapter in the fight between writers looking to secure a tiny piece of the future and six corporations failing miserably in their miscalculated and super-douchey attempt to send the labor movement backwards 60 years.