One of the happiest days of Robert A. Hacker’s life came last Dec. 1 when he shaved off the moustache he’d been growing for the previous month.
“I got tired of the jokes about cowboys,” said Hacker, 54, vice president of business and legal affairs at Fox Sports in Los Angeles.
All that notwithstanding, he will begin growing another bush next week. His motivation: the third annual Movember, a worldwide event in which volunteers raise money for research into prostate cancer by growing moustaches during the month of November.
“It feels good to raise money for this cause,” said Hacker, who was motivated in part by a history of other types of cancer in his family.
Last year, the executive was able to raise about $4,300, mostly from sponsoring members of the Santa Monica Rugby Club, for which he coaches a team. This year, he hopes to boost it to $5,000.
But will he keep the bush after Nov. 30?
“If I were a betting man, I’d say not a chance,” Hacker contends. “I wouldn’t say I look good in a moustache.”
Both Ends Burning
Teen entrepreneur Evelyn Espinoza found a back door to movie stardom by starting her own business.
Espinoza, 18, has a leading role in “Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon,” a documentary that follows underprivileged students through a business plan contest and the launch of their companies. The competition and film are part of Global Entrepreneurship Week (Nov. 16-22), a project sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Mo.
By Hollywood standards, Espinoza’s movie-making experience was less than glamorous. The producers mailed her a camera and asked her to film herself. As owner of Hippie’s Candles, a custom candle business that she operates out of her home near downtown Los Angeles, Espinoza soon learned how to dip candles at the kitchen table while talking into the camera.
“It felt somewhat silly at first, but I knew it was for a good purpose,” she said.
Her emotions changed when she attended a screening of the film in New York several weeks ago.
“My heart kept beating fast – nervous one minute, excited the next,” she said. “It felt very inspirational to see yourself up on the screen and think, ‘Wow, that’s me.’”
In Los Angeles, “Ten9Eight” will show at USC and Chapman University on Nov. 13, and later at AMC theaters in Santa Monica and the Crenshaw District starting Nov. 16.
Spud Work
As chief executive of a downtown L.A. communications firm, Juliet Huck works on some high-profile and tense legal cases. To relax, she thinks of potatoes.
Not because she’s necessarily hungry, but because Huck grew up on a potato farm near Marietta, Ohio. She visits at least twice a year and even stays in her old bedroom on the farm that her parents still run.
“It’s really humbling and a nice change of pace from life in Los Angeles,” Huck, 47, said.
Huck worked as a graphic designer in Chicago before moving here 11 years ago. After recognizing that graphics were becoming a popular technique that lawyers were using in the courtroom, she started TheHuckGroup. She has designed informational graphics used in the court cases of Enron, Kobe Bryant and Scott Peterson, among others.
But while you can get the girl out of the farm, you can’t get the farm out of the girl, she jokes.
“I often tell clients that what we do as a firm with making visual sense of their information is like taking a big stack of hay and making it a hay bale,” Huck said. “Maybe that’s a giveaway on where I’m from?”
Staff reporters David Haldane, Joel Russell and Francisco Vara-Orta contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
