Nicole Panter ran away from her childhood home in Palm Springs at 14 to join the circus, but she took a detour to the big city where she and 24 other misfits spontaneously combusted into what would become known as the Los Angeles punk rock scene. She managed the notorious band The Germs, a moment in time that was immortalized in the documentary film, The Decline of Western Civilization. After her 1980 retirement from punk rock, she became an actor & writer (The Pee Wee Herman Show), script editor, the author of a couple of books of fiction, a culture & film critic, essayist, a photographer, a Mojave desert conservationist, an educator and a jeweler. She teaches screenwriting at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) and has taught at the American Film Institute and The College of Santa Fe.