There are certain candidates who have lived their lives like perfectly calibrated political arrows, arcing ever upward through all the right stops toward higher office.

Not Laura Friedman.

The Glendale Assembly member, who will probably soon take Rep. Adam B. Schiff’s prized congressional seat, spent her 20s with a $600 custom pool cue stick in the trunk of her car.  

Standing on the sun-dappled members-only portico just off the Assembly floor on a Monday morning weeks after the March primary, Friedman said that when she first decided to run for public office in 2009, Glendale City Council had seemed like it would be the be-all, end-all of her political career.

But Friedman — who served two terms on the council, as well as a yearlong stint as Glendale’s mayor — ran successfully for the Legislature in 2016 and held leadership roles chairing the Assembly’s transportation and natural resources committees.  

Friedman’s political roots actually predate her Hollywood career. Her mother, Carole Osman, founded the Broward County chapter of the National Organization for Women, and Friedman spent her childhood canvassing for abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment at her side.

“My mother saw her life’s work wiped away from one decision from an activist, corrupt Supreme Court,” Friedman told supporters at a pre-primary event. “And I will be damned if I stay here in California where it’s safe when my daughter, who’s 10 now, has less rights than I did at her age.”