New Website

I am no longer updating this website. Please go to my new page at:

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thanks!

kristie

My Footage is airing on Fuel TV’s The Daily Habit

In the past couple of months I went to Los Angeles and tagged along with skater/artist Lia H. on some cool night shoots. One of my profiles on her just ran in L.A. Weekly. I brought my video camera along and took footage of a couple of night outings sneaking into skate parks and just following her while she does her thing. She is going to be on Fuel TV’s The Daily Habit this week and my footage will be used in the montage they edit together on her. Her episode will air July 23rd….Check it out! xoxo

L.A. WEEKLY PEOPLE ISSUE

L.A. Weekly’s annual People Issue just hit the stands. Check out my profile on skater/artist Lia Halloran (click on the article to view larger)….

Rob Machado

This is a profile I did on Rob Machado awhile back for AOL’s Lat34.com (click on pictures to read):

Bikini Rockers

This is an article I wrote that is in the current issue of foam magazine….

Bikini-Rockers: A Look at Four Athletes Who Rock Their Bathing Suits and Their Sports
By: Kristie Griffith

Mother nature is about to drop-it-like-it’s-hot. Bathing suit season, that is. The passing of crisp fall nights and chilly winter days gives way to spring and the beginning of months of lazy, warm days at the beach. While spring means parties, school breaks and sunshine, it also means bathing suits and no big pea coats and comfy jeans to hide in. It’s time to get serious so you can rock a bikini like you know you can and kick butt in whatever it is that you kick butt in. In that spirit, we have found four of the hottest bikini-rockers we know: Model and former pro beach volleyball player Gabrielle Reece, wakeskater Stef Tor, Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard and ASP World Champion surfer Stephanie Gilmore. These women not only rock their swimsuits, they do it on a worldwide stage with grace and athleticism. We have the inside scoop on their secrets for looking and feeling fabulous. From the shores of Australia to Maui to California to Florida, these chicks are rockin’ it…..

Super Mama
Gabrielle Reece is known for many different things: Her former pro beach volleyball career, her height (6’3”), modeling, various media appearances and editorial contributions, even her marriage to famous tow-in surfer Laird Hamilton. At the moment, Gabby is focused on something far removed from the media circus: The newest addition to the Hamilton/Reece clan. She just gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Brody Jo. It is the second daughter born to the famous duo.

With a happy home life, a thriving career and a dedication to keeping fit, Gabby is one busy chick. To make sure she looks her best and feels good, she eats healthy organic food-really taking care to avoid processed foods-anything “out of cans or boxes.” She consistently works out, enjoying Pilates, spinning, swimming, weights and volleyball. She also advocates the “Bell Express 15” fit and slim fitness kit. The kit comes with a DVD with Gabby demonstrating strength and cardio moves. “In my mind I see myself a certain way so I expect to be fit,”Gabby said. “I don’t think ‘I’ll never lose the weight.’ Some people hold themselves there. Instead of having a picture of yourself as healthy and fit. Even now, just having had the baby. It’s fine but in my mind I’m already planning what I will go back to, and I think that. Manifest it in your mind and heart. I find the joy in eating well and working out. There are great benefits.”

For Gabby, those benefits have ranged from a successful pro beach volleyball career to modeling to helping others get healthy. She even has a website dedicated to health and well being. Being involved in sports from a young age shaped Gabby’s sense of self. Being 6’3” as a young woman, she had to make a choice to either feel weird and awkward about being so tall or to see beauty in uniqueness and she chose the latter. Raised on St.Thomas in the Virgin Islands, she moved with her mother to St. Petersburg, Florida in 11th grade and took to the volleyball court, embracing her height advantage. She won a scholarship to Florida State University and after two seasons began making treks to New York to model. Her commitment to volleyball came before modeling and she turned down five-figure jobs to make games. She won All-Tournament honors several times at FSU and in 1997 was selected for induction into the Florida State University Athletic Hall of Fame. Gabby set two school volleyball records in solo blocks (240) and total blocks (747). Both records still stand.

Gabby is a successful media figure, athlete and model but the core of her message is to embrace whatever it is about yourself that is your true essence. “Advice is tricky because we are all so different,” Gabby said. “It’s about learning what your gifts and your magic is. We all are different but we all have a gift. It’s difficult to fit into a picture of what you think you should be rather than fully embracing all of who you really are. That’s a great start in having better self-esteem. Nobody can be you better than you.”

Gabby has a sweet lifestyle of bouncing back and forth between Maui and Malibu with family in tow, depending on swell and schedules, enjoying perfect weather year round. Gabby and Laird have been married for 10 years and together for 12. Eight days after they met, they moved in together and are still going strong: “I’m not an impulsive person but I was with him. I have always been drawn to him. It was instinctive. It was not mathematical: Nice, smart, and good-looking. It was just a feeling. I was drawn. Even after all these years, I look at Laird I can feel the love alive in myself. It’s never been a stagnant love. It’s always growing. Of course we’ve had bad times but we are inspired to do the work. You start to realize that you are fortunate to have found somebody. It’s not always about finding somebody to love you-It’s about finding somebody that you love.”
**Go to Gabby’s website for tips on how to get fit: gotogabby.com.
**Check out Gabby’s ‘Fit & Healthy Prenatal workouts’ in stores now (full kits pre/post arrive in fall 08’)

Cover Girl
Amanda Beard
Southern California-based Olympic swimmer and model Amanda Beard is deep in training for the 2008 Olympic swim trials being held in Omaha, Nebraska this summer but today she has tattoos on her mind: “I’m going in to get tattooed tomorrow,” Amanda said. “I’m actually getting snowflakes tattooed on me. I haven’t completely decided where. I’m thinking I want them on my rib cage, like down my side. I kind of have this thing for snowflakes. I think they’re fun and my boyfriend has bought me a lot of books on snowflakes. I’ve been going through them seeing what kind of snowflakes I want to get on me. I’m actually doing it on L.A. Ink tomorrow. Hannah is doing it.”

Amanda is the youngest of three girls born to a jock dad and an artist mom and they are all ladies of ink. Both sisters and her mom have tattoos and one of her sisters has a large back piece (which her mom designed) and is prepping for a full sleeve. Her dad’s the only one tat-free. Tattoos add a little personal flair in a sport where solid one-piece swimsuits are the norm. Not that Amanda is bland in any way.

Last summer she sent tongues wagging with a pictorial and cover debut in Playboy magazine. Although she had creative control and didn’t show frontal nudity, it was a controversial move in a conservative sport. She has also appeared in the holy grail of chicks-in-swimsuits publications: The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. She trains hard and her body reaps the rewards. Gearing up for the trials, she is training five to six hours per day boxing, spinning, lifting weights and logging plenty of miles in the pool. If she makes the team and competes in Beijing, it will be her fourth Olympics.

Amanda began swimming when she was four and at 10 saw Summer Sanders at the Olympics and decided she wanted to be an Olympic swimmer too. After a couple of years she began to kick butt in the breaststroke and qualified for the Olympics at 14. She took home a gold in the 4X100m team medley and silver medals in the 100m and 200m breaststroke events. “I was a very immature 14-year-old,” Amanda said. “I was a really young 14-year-old. I wasn’t into boys yet or anything like that. I was still this dorky little girl. I was 100 pounds and 5’2”, just tiny and very, like, a little mommy and daddy’s girl.” She carried a teddy bear around with her at the Games, even on the podium. Flash forward a couple of Olympics and four medals later and she’s 5’8”, graces the pages of men’s magazines, gets tats and appears on late night talk shows (The Late Show with Dave Letterman and on the night of this interview-Last Call with Carson Daly.)

Amanda is based in Venice Beach where she lives with her boyfriend and trains. She will be doing a lot of spinning and dry land workouts in the coming weeks because her new snowflake tats will keep her out of the water for a bit. Then it’s back to the pool, in her bathing suit, swimming for Omaha and, perhaps, Beijing.

**Sponsors: Speedo, Oakley, Go Daddy, Orowheat & Redbull

Fantasy Isle
Stef Tor is living every playful, athletic, x-games-loving girl’s dream life. The 28-year-old wakeskating superstar lives on a lake in Orlando, Florida with three other girls, also wakeskaters. They have a mini skate ramp in the backyard (painted purple, yellow, green, blue and pink), a trampoline to practice moves on, jet skis, a boat in the driveway and countless boards, life vests and toys scattered around the yard and plenty of room to throw parties. It’s like Disneyland’s Fantasyland for the X-set. Stef is on the water by seven in the morning, already logging water time before many of her peers are out of bed.

Stef grew up in Niagara Falls, Canada. She had two older brothers and lived in the country, skateboarding and snowboarding. She convinced the owner of A-1 skate shop to hire her and was drawn to wakeboarding after seeing pictures of it in the magazines the shop carried. Every image seemed to be from Florida and everyone was smiling and tan and wearing bathing suits. Stef was in Canada where everyone was white and bundled up and cold.

10 years ago, while working at the shop, she went to a camp at a nearby lake to learn how to wakeboard and ended up staying the whole summer after landing a job at the camp. After graduating high school she moved to Toronto to study fashion and then moved to the wakeboard/wakeskate Mecca of Florida with five years of wakeboarding under her feet.

Wakeskating is a fairly new sport that is a cross between skateboarding and wakeboarding. Riders wear skate shoes and their feet are free-there are no bindings. The idea is to pull skate tricks on the water, like ollies and riding rails. It’s the “poor man’s version of wakeboarding” which was convenient since she didn’t own a boat or have a ton of money and the sport ties in with her skating roots. She soon hung up her wakeboard. A wakeskater can be pulled behind anything, even a Sea-doo. During hurricanes, Stef and her crew have even used a Ford Explorer to wakeskate ditches filled with rain water. On a trip to Cabo a few years back, they got creative and wakeskated over shallow water being pulled by an ATV on the beach.

Stef has been breaking new ground in the world of wakeskating for years. In 2004, she took home the World Champion title competing against all men (Amateur Wakeskate division/Vans Triple Crown of Wakeboarding) a coveted cover (UK’s Alliance Wakeboard magazine) and was recently featured in Volume Video Wakeskate magazine. None of this would have been possible if she was not able to live in Florida. She considers getting her green card and social security number to live in the U.S. as one of the biggest accomplishments of her life. A company she was repping and riding for at the time sponsored her and she did the foot work to make it happen.

Stef has blown minds by landing a kickflip-a really difficult move in wakeskating. Not many riders can pull it and a lot of guys told her it would take at least a year for her to land it. “I learned it in four months,” Stef said. “I seriously must have done thousands of them. I went out there and did them until I couldn’t do them anymore. I would get someone to video tape me and then I would come in and watch it frame-by-frame and then I would compare on a video frame-by-frame and I would dissect it until I knew it. I would go to bed visualizing it, I’d wake up and visualize it and then do it on the trampoline then I’d go to the water.” Her boyfriend was driving the boat for her when she landed her first kickflip, the second girl to ever do it.

When Stef isn’t at the gym or busting new moves on the water, she stays true to her fashion roots. She is a clothing designer for Underground Products, who she also rides for. She alters her clothing with dye or a sewing machine and recently took up knitting.

Another way she expresses herself is with her tattoos. She has a Tahitian-inspired tat on her arm, a star on her ankle and her last name “Tor” on her wrist. She’d like to finish her arm but has yet to find the right person for the job: “I haven’t found one person in Florida that can do it and I’ve asked around and done some research over the years,” Stef said. “The best people who do it are in Tahiti. I’ve always joked about taking a trip to Tahiti and getting the rest of my arm done…. I think that would be cool if I did go to Tahiti to get it and that would be another chapter in my life. But the biggest thing is they always say ‘stay out of the water’. How do you do that when you are a professional wakeskater?”
**Sponsors: Liquid Force/Maven, Underground Products, L.A. Fitness, JetPilot, Miami Ski Nautique, Sea-doo and Rockstar.

Happy Gilmore
Surfer Stephanie “Happy” Gilmore just got a whole lot happier: The 2007 ASP rookie just became the ASP Women’s World Champion of surfing. The ripping regular foot based in Tweed Heads, Australia is the first person in ASP history to become world champ their rookie year on tour and she did it at 19 years of age. Winning a world title is a climactic moment after a year of competition: “(It was) a big mix of emotions,” Steph writes. “At first it was very surreal but then it changed to more of a relief and now I just think about it and get so stoked out.” Steph just celebrated her 20th birthday, leaving her teen years and a trail of victories behind her.

Soon after winning the world title with the world watching, she disappeared into the “middle of nowhere in the Caroline Islands” (according to Rip Curl’s Dylan Slater). According to Wikipedia, “the Caroline Islands form a large archipelago of widely scattered islands in the western Pacific Ocean, northeast of New Guinea. The group consists of about 500 small coral islands, east of the Phillipines, in the Pacific Ocean.” So basically the Caroline Islands are a bunch of islands in the middle of the Pacific and Steph Gilmore is somewhere out there in the middle of them. As foam was rushing to print, Steph sent an e-mail with some thoughts on her new title, bathing suits and the importance of wearing sunscreen.

As a pro surfer, Steph pretty much lives in a bathing suit. She keeps fit by surfing a couple of hours a day, core training two to three times per week, stretching daily, keeping hydrated and eating foods that are easily digestible (fruits and veggies with some chocolate thrown in for fun). The overall lifestyle of a surfer contributes to looking good as well: “I don’t look that great, hahaha,” Steph writes. “But surfing involves a lot of paddling and just spending time in the ocean swimming or running around on the beach, drinking lots of water and good sleep-it all usually helps.” What does she look for in a bathing suit? “One that compliments my boobs but is comfortable for when I surf,” Steph writes. “So usually racer back tops are great for function and look good too.”

A little over one year ago, she told foam that her goal for 2007 was: “To be in the running for the world title toward the last couple of events and just to improve my surfing overall.” She surpassed that goal, and it was a lofty one, though not entirely unexpected. The surfing world has had its eye on Steph for years. In 2005 she became the youngest surfer to win an elite tour event when she won the Roxy Pro Gold Coast as a wild card. The victories this year that helped her clinch the world title are: The Mancora Peru Classic, the NAB Beachley Classic and the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach. Steph has a few words of wisdom to pass on to other girls who would like to follow in her watery wake: “Make sure you’re having fun,” Steph writes. “Don’t get discouraged by the boys and conditioner and sunscreen is your new best friend…. and patience and confidence will get you anywhere you want to go!”
**Sponsors: Rip Curl wetsuits and clothing, DHD surfboards and Creatures of Leisure Accessories.

It’s Whatever-Freddy P. Profle

This is a profile I did for AOL’s Lat34.com on pro surfer Freddy P. awhile back (click on pictures to read)…

foam magazine

The new foam magazine is out. I have a large article featuring four women who “rock their bikinis” (and their sports). I interviewed Gabby Reece, Amanda Beard, Stef Tor and Steph Gilmore. Check it out.

Travel Channel Academy Bootcamp-NYC

I just graduated the Travel Channel Academy’s intensive VJ bootcamp in New York City and had the time of my life. For my final project I hung out underneath the Brooklyn Bridge and filmed skaters. I met a guy named Cheeto-a very cool cat and grafitti artist. I’ll throw up my minute film piece on him later this week.I now have the skills to travel anywhere in the world with my laptop and HD camera and make stories that are broadcast quality for television and the web.These pieces are ready for broadcast as produced. That includes editing, voice-overs, music, etc. In effect, I am the producer-editor-camera chick-writer-director-talent, etc. This is the future of television and broadcasting.

FOAM Magazine Winter 2007

In foam’s winter issue you can check out my in-depth profile on down-to-earth, talented surfer/artist/ mama Shannon Payne McIntyre as she roams the South Pacific. Learn all about her Fuel TV show On Surfari (filmed with hubbie Shayne McIntyre), the latest addition to her family (hint: Baby on board!), her art and how you can be a world traveler just like her-on any budget!

Update: Here is the full article….

This interview almost never happened. At the end of August, Shannon Payne-McIntyre sent out a Myspace bulletin from Indonesia pointing her friends towards her blog. She wrote about being three months pregnant, teaching surfing to a group of Afulu village girls and learning to work with cement to build platforms around wells so local women could fetch water more easily. She closed musing on the beauty of the Hinako Islands, the great waves she was scoring and her “great times with good new friends and epic memories!” And then she disappeared.

After weeks of unreturned Myspace messages, posts, e-mails and phone calls-I got word from Shannon. She had been on outer Indonesian islands and on a boat trip and was back on Bali. Then she disappeared again. Days later, she resurfaced. Foam was rushing to press when Shannon called from San Diego. She was jet-lagged and exhausted yet ready to shed light on her Indonesian adventures.

Shannon Payne-McIntyre is a 33-year-old artist, surfer, vagabond and mama. She grew up in Santee, an inland town in San Diego County. An area, she describes, as having been full of “monster trucks and tumbleweeds.” At 16, she began to surf and landed a job at Sea World so she would have an excuse to make the 40-minute drive to the beach.

At 18, she moved to San Diego to attend Point Loma University where she majored in art and scored great waves. She also met Shayne McIntyre at a surfer’s bible study. “He was a La Jolla guy,” Shannon said. “One night they had a band, a disco band. People were slam dancing. He claims that I knocked him over but I don’t remember that. I remember seeing him there and thinking he was kind of intimidating. I thought that guy’s kind of cute but he looks kind of scary at the same time. He was with a football player guy that shoved one of my friends.” Their paths crossed again a few months later at a rave and they re-connected. “On our first date we surfed Wind n’ Sea and just became best friends after that,” Shannon said.

Shayne taught Shannon how to shape boards and as her senior art project she painted some of her creations and orders started pouring in. The gig was successful but hard work and didn’t allow for as much travel or surfing as she would have liked. Four or five years passed, she and Shayne were married and she was struggling to get ahead.

Shayne’s mom was a flight attendant and she hooked Shannon up with an interview at American Airlines and Shannon was hired as a flight attendant. It was the perfect job for a surfer and her and Shayne were able to fly around the world for free but everything changed when 9/11 happened. The airlines didn’t need as many flight attendants so Shannon took a two-year leave of absence but retained her travel benefits. She was able to focus on her art and take surf trips with Shayne.

American Airlines flies all over the world and so did Shayne and Shannon. From India to Russia to Oman, they were jet setters of the surf set. Shayne had a video camera and they began to film their travels and pretend they had their own surf/travel TV show. They would film each other surfing and then run up to the camera saying “Welcome on Surfari!” They came home and Shayne made a trailer and sold the series to Fuel TV. Fuel licenses the show to National Geographic International and as a result, the couple is recognized all over the world by fans of the show. “At about the time my leave of absence was up I became pregnant and then milked my maternity leave,” Shannon said. After that, she never went back.

The McIntyre’s have produced three years of On Surfari. “Shayne is more business and organized and I am more artistic and go with the flow,” Shannon said. “I kind of think of myself as creative director/co-producer, picking out music (created by Chad Farran) and making sure we get the cultural shots. Surfing is a thread throughout the show but we try to make it appeal to non-surfers as well. We include a lot of cultural things about each country we go to.” After each trip, Shayne gets home and hits the edit bay, taking two to three weeks in post-production before turning the episode in to air.

Not surprisingly, through their travels they found a new place to call home. After 15 years of living in a killer ocean-view studio in Point Loma, they decided to base themselves abroad. “Southern California is not the cheapest place to live,” Shannon said. “I was about to turn 30, I was pregnant, and I wanted to own a house somewhere. We had a job where we shot for National Geographic International. I hadn’t heard much about Puerto Rico. We went there and just fell in love with the place and the people. It’s a U.S. territory so you don’t have to have a passport. Homes are really affordable, by the beach and waves are really good. We like the tropics.”

The McIntyre’s may call Puerto Rico home, but they roam the world when adventure calls, ypically traveling four to six months each year. Their latest trip to Indonesia was a grand adventure. They were there filming On Surfari and helping out with several different organizations. For the first two weeks, they were in the Hinako Islands on the Indo Jiwa boat with Christian Surfers filming for a DVD that will accompany The Surfer’s Bible. The tour with the boat is called Holidays With Purpose. The group toured and surfed the outer islands of Nias and in the days between surfing, worked with local villages.

“My favorite day was teaching surfing to kids that were traumatized by the Tsunami,” Shannon said. “All the kids from those villages had experienced the Tsunami so a lot of the kids were afraid of the ocean. The boat captain said he hadn’t seen a lot of those kids smile in a long time so we went and did the whole surfing thing. He said it was the first time he saw those kids smiling and having fun in a long time so it was really rewarding in that way.”

Holidays With Purpose and LEAP (local empowerment assistance project) were created by Australians Ruby and Channa Senaratne. Profits from the Holidays With Purpose boat trips are funneled back into the local community and the boat trip is less expensive than most. “It was really one of the coolest trips I’ve been on,” Shannon said. “For anybody that wants to go on a boat trip in Indonesia, It’s so much more rewarding. Some days the surf isn’t totally epic and then what are you gonna do? Just sit on the boat and hang out? Instead of doing that you get to interact with the villages and hang out on land and help the people.”

After two weeks on the boat she met up with her parents in Bali before heading out to Sumba.“Sumba is an amazing place that puts you back in time,” Shannon said. “There is an organization there called the Sumba Foundation that is dedicated to stopping malaria and bettering the health and lives of the local people. We visited several clinics and villages and watched exciting traditional events and we enjoyed the surf everywhere we went.”

Shannon said that the Sumba Foundation runs three to four clinics that take blood samples from people, study the blood under a microscope and find out in one hour if the person has Malaria. She learned that for 20 cents (10 cents for children), a person can be administered a Chinese herb that makes them feel better within 24 hours. Yet people are dying of Malaria in Indonesia due to lack of money and access to such treatment. The Sumba foundation aims to eradicate Malaria, known as the “poor man’s disease, in the area.

Being three months pregnant with a three-year-old in tow and surfing reefs off of Indonesian islands is pretty hardcore but Shannon is an adventurous soul. Further, it was also not the first time she had been in the Hinako Islands. Before Shayne and Shannon were married, they were already surf nomads and it was on a trip to the Hinako Islands that their future as husband and wife was sealed.

“This past trip was the first time I’ve been back to the Hinako Islands since he proposed to me there,” Shannon said. “He carved me a little wooden coconut shell ring. We were in a little lagoon area. He said ‘I have something for you.’ There was a little blue piece of coral and I lifted it up and there was the little coconut shell that he had carved. It was cool ‘cause we were the only two on the island because everybody from the island went to another island for church or something. So it was a really big deal.” It was quite a trip. Days before the proposal, the couple was lost at sea for three days on a small fishing boat/surf charter. A sail and mast was constructed out of a rain tarp and a floorboard and the boat eventually found its way back to Nias.

Shannon and Shayne are open to whatever opens up to them. They take each adventure as it reveals itself. Just before Indo, they had a wedding to attend in Washington. They went all Kerouac-style and hit the road, stopping at surf shops up and down the coast, opening new accounts for Shannon’s art and meeting new people. They enjoyed discovering hidden beach towns through California up into Oregon and ending in Washington. She sells 11X14 prints of her colorful, playful, travel and surf-oriented original art pieces to shops at affordable prices and is carried in over 120 locations.

Shannon’s lifestyle may seem like a dream to some but she encourages other girls to get out there and see the world. “Before Shayne and I had sponsors or jobs traveling he was a bus boy and I worked at a flower shop and we would still do a lot of traveling,” Shannon said. “We would work consistently for three or four months and then save every penny towards traveling.” Her advice is to save your money, go where the dollar is strong and have no fear. “There are beautiful people everywhere you go,” Shannon said. She feels it is important to follow your dreams, wherever they come from and wherever they may lead….

Iron Butterfly: A Wild Night Backstage With Dashenka Prochazka a.k.a. “Bunny Girl”

pic: Volcom

By Kristie Griffith

A lot of people went to Volcom’s Bruce Movie release party, in Costa Mesa, CA, for a lot of reasons. Some went for the free Red Bull/Vodkas. Some went to see The Bruce Movie. Some went for the music. Guys went to meet girls. Girls went to meet Guys.

My mission was to find a girl, and this was all I knew: Dashenka Prochazka was Ozzie Wright’s muse and girlfriend. She painted blood on herself when she performed with her band, The Goons of Doom, and she is an artist.

This was a Saturday night in August, and the Volcom warehouse was a place full of noise and packed with people. I got lucky and bumped into Volcom’s Steve Stratton who pointed me toward this gypsy woman. I approached cautiously: Would she give me attitude? Wax esoterically about art? Paint me with blood?

Past Dashenka’s bright blond hair with dark roots, the single, thumb-sized, red-blood-lipstick-circle in the middle of her lower lip, and torn up clothes, is a strikingly pretty woman. We got into it, and this wild-looking woman set me at ease right away. Rather than rant on pretentiously about art and music, she dove straight into the interesting stuff-where she came from, what she has been through, where she is at now.

Dashenka Prochazka was born on Halloween, 29 years ago in the former Czechoslovakia to anti-Communist parents in a Communist country. Her mother was a teacher who encouraged students to be free in their minds, and her father was a talented handball player who was allowed to travel out of the country to compete.

When Dashenka was four and a half, her vagabond life began when she fled with her family from Czechoslovakia and beyond the Iron Curtain. Like true gypsies, they slept in tents and lived in refugee camps, making several attempts to cross borders before making it to Switzerland.

Dashenka was shy, not “nerdy shy,” but “stare out of the window and draw” shy. At night she enjoyed the hardcore music scene in Lausanne, all the while dreaming of attending art school.

Instead of art, she followed her mother’s advice and earned a degree in Economics. Later she worked for a real estate company and made great money. When she was 23, she broke up with her boyfriend of five years and left Switzerland to travel.

From San Francisco she journeyed to Costa Rica, which changed her life. “I wasn’t my mom’s daughter, my sister’s naughty nasty, little sister, my boyfriend’s girlfriend.” She learned to surf, and that led to Hawaii, which led to New Zealand. Traveling with a couple of fellow vagabonds, they were passing Manu Bay in Raglan when she had the urge to jump out of the car. She was alone, it was dark, and there was no campground, but Dashenka says, “That’s the best decision I’ve ever made.”

One day Dashenka said “Good luck” to a passing surfer. She didn’t know him, and still doesn’t know why she said it. He stopped, curious as to why she had said that: “I was shy… He came closer and had stickers on his board… I was like, ‘Ah, you probably don’t even need it.” He said, ‘Ah, thanks. I think everyone needs luck,’ and then just took off.”

And that’s how Oscar Wright met Dashenka.

At coffee shops around Raglan they were too shy to speak to each other, but she says the chemistry was “just there, like magic.” Then Barney Barron invited Dashenka to see a band in Hamilton, an hour’s drive outside of Raglan, with the boys who included such surfing greats as Bruce Irons and Dean Morrison. Ozzie and Dashenka hit it off and back in Raglan, they passed a pub and she heard her favorite song, Nina’s 99 Luftballoons. She wanted to dance but was turned away because of her dirty sneakers. Oscar grabbed her and they danced on the sidewalk and kissed for the first time. Oscar took Dashenka on his surf trip bus around New Zealand with all the guys. From then on, their lives have been intertwined: a mix of separating and coming back together.

Oscar returned to Australia and Dashenka followed soon after. They clicked and she feels they were destined to meet. “We like to do art. We like to go surfing. We like to hang out. Kind of the same life, in thinking, and soul, and mind, we’re so connected.”

For a few years, Dashenka returned to her real estate job in Switzerland periodically and that financed her lifestyle, which was work, travel, Ozzie, work, Ozzie, work, travel. They met in various places around the world for two and a half years. They had never discussed marriage and then, two weeks before Christmas 2002, Oscar said, “Let’s get married on Christmas day.”

Theirs is a relationship to sigh for. She calls him, “my boyfriend, my lover, my husband, my inspiration. We’re not married by law, only by love.” She is his “Bunny Girl.” One day, years ago, she was wearing a hoodie with little ears. He sketched them and continued sketching until they were proper bunny ears.

Volcom sponsors The Goons of Doom, Ozzie’s surfing, and Dashenka as an artist and designer. The Goons come across as a dark band, but are actually pretty lighthearted.

Ozzie draws Bunny Girl and Bunny Girl draws “comic, kind of folk-art. It’s kind of childish, innocent, wacky.” She does get a little cryptic when discussing her creations.

“I always felt like I was from a different planet. That’s what my art is as well, it’s Planet Pluto.” Traveling also influences her, “you always meet new people, you are around new stuff, new cultures, I think that’s the most important thing,” she smiles.

And with that, she had to leave to go onstage as The Bruce Movie was ending. As they were getting ready, Dashenka made sure the band was painted with fake blood; and that we all had a drink in hand. She even painted a little blood on me….