Rachel Bauch spends her days handling clients at Ruder Finn, a West L.A. public relations firm. But in her spare time, Bauch, 37, is promoting a personal favorite activity – bicycling – as depicted in a movie recently released by her filmmaker husband.
The 40-minute film, “Riding Bikes With the Dutch,” was shot by Michael Bauch during the couple’s 2007 sojourn to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where they spent a month exploring that city’s two-wheel culture.
“People there use their bikes as an everyday form of transport,” said Rachel Bauch, adding that she and her husband cycle on weekends from their Long Beach home to attend church, visit friends and go shopping.
She said she was astounded to learn recently that Amsterdam officials have been showing the film to visiting dignitaries as well as featuring it prominently on the city’s web page.
So she put together a screening of her own at Long Beach’s historic Art Theater, where a sellout crowd of about 200 viewed the film. It has also been shown at health and biking conferences statewide. Next month, she said, her husband will be hosting the movie at a San Diego conference on childhood obesity.
“It’s not a moneymaking project,” she avers. “It’s really a joy ride.”
War Story
John Sharer is used to writing legal briefs as a litigator. But he learned how different it is be a creative writer when he wrote a novel set during World War II.
“In legal briefs, you always outline where you are going and where you are going to end up,” Sharer said. “And writing this book, I never knew what was going to happen on the next page.”
Sharer, 78, started working on his self-published book, “Honor Knows No Borders,” 20 years ago after deciding that he wanted to write a novel inspired by his experiences growing up in London during World War II and the blitz bombings by Nazi Germany, and the stories of his father, a British officer who oversaw a prisoner of war camp in North Africa.
He finished the book earlier this year, and it went on sale at Amazon.com in July.
The book focuses on two characters: a Jewish boy who befriends an injured German pilot whose plane got shot down, and the boy’s father, a British military officer who oversees a prisoner of war camp.
“The question is: Can you really judge people by the atrocities that are being committed by their countrymen, or must you treat each one individually?” Sharer said.
Sharer, who moved to the United States from London when he was 17, said writing the book brought back bad memories. But that’s not why it took him two decades to complete the book, he was just too busy litigating cases at downtown L.A. firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, where he serves as an advisory counsel.
“I’d always had in the back of mind that there was a story in there somewhere,” Sharer said. “So I’d start writing and then I’d get caught up in a trial.”
Staff reporters David Haldane and Alexa Hyland contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
