This is my 79-year-old retired-physician mother walking the picket line in Los Angeles during the recent writers’ strike. She picketed for my screenwriter sister, my comedy-writer brother-in-law, and everyone else toiling over keyboards and typewriters to feed the movies and television. For all of us who might like to write for the movies one day.

Mama–my siblings and I and most of our friends always call her that–has always inspired me to go after what I really want. Not that I’ve always done it, mind you, but the example was there.

When my mother entered medical school in 1950, there was only one other woman in her class. It wasn’t easy for a woman to become a doctor. Everyone down to the dean of the school tried to talk Mama out of studying medicine. “You’ll marry and have children and leave your practice, and you’ll take a spot in medical school that a man could have,” they said. On the first day, one of her male classmates said to her, “So, you think you want to be a doctor?” “I’ve thought so all my life. ” “You won’t last a week.”

Well, Mama graduated second in her class and practiced medicine for more than 40 years. A true healer, she is the most gifted diagnostician I have ever known. And that smart-mouth who told her she wouldn’t last a week? He fainted the first time the class observed surgery, and he graduated a semester behind my mother.

So, no matter what the odds against you are, never let anyone tell you no. That’s what I learned from my mother, my first hero.