Jumpstarting The Electric Car

I am the last person in the world that expected to ever be called an activist - though that’s just one of many clubs I hadn’t expected to join. Average on my best day, I’m an odd combination in so many ways - I’m a Los Angeles area native, but having lived one of the smallest towns here for more than two decades, I identify more with the Mayberry atmosphere than the metropolitan surroundings.

My son attends the same elementary school that I did. My professional passion is in clean energy and alternative fuel cars, but my hometown is named after the oil refinery that forms its southern border. I’m incredibly shy by nature, but find myself speaking in front of large audiences on a regular basis. And I’m your typical, anonymous, ponytail and jeans-wearing, Cub Scout den meeting-attending mom next door – except that have found myself in a feature film, a television series, and three books in the last year. My biggest sacrifices have brought my best adventures, and the contradictions that used to punctuate my life have seemingly come to define it.

The funny thing is I’ve done nothing that I’d consider remarkable; I tend to live like nobody is watching - even though I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get people to pay attention to something. I’ve never had a plan. Indeed, my path, when seen from the beginning, would probably be too daunting to take. It started innocuously enough: At age 17, I bought my first car and wound up taking a job for Saturn to pay my own way through college in order to satisfy what my mother has come to describe as a nearly pathological mission of self-sufficiency.