Out of money. Out of time. You can go to business school, but you won’t really learn until you launch your company. You can read What to Expect When You're Expecting, but you know nothing until that first contraction hits you. I remember bouncing on my big blue exercise ball trying to get Baby Rockwelle to come on already. I was two days past my due date and I was making an executive decision to get this moving. I felt a lot of pressure to do things right. To endure pain without medication, to deliver this child with grace, to be up on my feet rapidly.
After about 20 hours of labor I chucked all these ideas out and just focused on giving birth and hearing Rockwelle cry. This would signal to me that she was alive and healthy. Nothing else mattered and I made Dennis promise not to let me pass out so I could hear her cries myself. Great relief overcame me when I did hear her wails and Dennis told me she was ok, I was ok and it was all going to be ok. His calm demeanor gave me confidence. My fears were gone. Fear often amplifies when you are not in action. Once you get into the situation you’re too busy moving forward to focus on fear. I was now in the first moments of being a mother and I’ve been learning on the job ever since.
A few days after bringing Rockwelle home we knew we needed to get back to work. Roomieloverfriends was incomplete. We had to do a second round of asking for money. This time fewer people for a higher amount. We told them we were almost near completion and our closest allies agreed to help. At 5 weeks old Rocky was on set (on my boob) as we wrapped up the last two days of filming, It was in the can and Dennis was immediately getting into the edit. A few weeks later we screened it for cast and crew. We loved it. We knew it was special. We also knew it wasn’t perfect, but we still felt ready for our first network meeting. It was with Showtime. We needed a sitter.
I was nervous. What would I wear, how should I act - I felt a sense of powerlessness masked by excitement. The set up is they better approve of you, your work, and your potential. It’s very easy to forget that these executives are real people often seeking to be creative themselves. As confident as I knew I should be - I just wasn’t. I felt small in those big offices. Dennis had taken some meetings previously after his Sundance debut, so he was more collected. By the time they called us in ( a lot of times they make you wait a bit in the lobby) I felt a little relaxed. We sat down - the execs liked what we had done. Could we do more? Add more characters maybe? -get some name actors attached- what other ideas and projects did we have? It was a long meeting which is a good sign and we tried not to let it show that we needed to get back to our sitter soon.
We made it home feeling accomplished that we had established good relationships. We knew enough to know that that doesn’t happen easily so we celebrated that piece of it. What we didn’t know was that one of the executives we met with was leaving the company and the other executive was moving to a different department. Networks go through cyclical regime changes and they were in the midst of one. So Roomielover went back on a hard drive.
Next week I’ll tell you about how we dusted off those hard drives with two years of footage on them and launched Black&Sexy TV.
Photo by Sune Woods. Vintage Dress, Gloves by Miss Numa, Booties from American Rag Shot at the Snooty Fox Motel, Los Angeles CA 2011.