APRIL 16 is BIKE NIGHT AT THE HAMMER!!!

Jen and I are meeting up at Heliotrope and Melrose at 5:00 and leaving at 5:30 sharp. Bring your bike and pedal with us to the Hammer for the epic and fun Bike Night! If you haven't seen Breaking Away since 1979 when it first came out, it's time to see it again. If you weren't born in 1979 and you've never heard of it, now's the time to get with the program. It's the film that spawned a hundred thousand bike-people. When I saw it in 1979, my dad was going on and on about the quarries in Bloomington, where he'd gone to college. He was totally into biking back then and used to take his bike apart every year and put it back together again for some reason. I'm not sure why, but I recall that ball bearings sometimes got lost in the yard while he was working on it. Not to digress too much, but if you've seen me on an oldish Dawes Realm Rider former ten speed, now fixed gear bike, that's the one that my dad used to take apart. I got a Raleigh 10 speed on my tenth birthday and we used to ride around to Long Grove or on the Green Bay trail and one year we went to some godforsaken trail in Illinois next to a train track. It was lined with hedges for 36 miles so all you could see was hedges and it wasn't very fun. Biking was great fun for a kid who wasn't good at sports. Seems like many of the people I know these days say they were the last ones picked for team sports during gym class in elementary school. I hung onto that distinction through high school. And I still suck at team sports.
Anyhow, I saw Breaking Away again in a hotel in Utah when I was doing a story for a ski magazine ten years ago or so and I was totally jazzed. I'm pretty sure that seeing that film again, sitting on a yucky hotel bed while outside a storm raged, led somehow to the hanging up of my skis and the embrace of my two wheels. Skiing's great, but you have to go somewhere special and have a lot of gear. Biking's something you can do everywhere and it can change your life and you don't usually end up with frostbite. At least in LA, you don't.
It's rare to find a movie that has an impact on your life. It's a cheesey, romantic, silly, sweet film, Breaking Away is, but it crept into my consciousness right at the right times. I'm hoping that the gang who shows up April 16 to see it projected in the Billy Wilder theater will get something out of it too.