The San Francisco Chronicle is still trying to promote Cindy Sheehan, long after most of the country has seen through her naïve/cynical “anti-war” shtick: Cindy Sheehan’s year of living famously. (Hat tip: Ethel.)

The sun is rising over a house in the Berkeley Hills, and in its modest studio apartment, America’s most compelling anti-war activist is making her bed, apologizing for the clutter and running late.

Cindy Sheehan was up much of the previous night while emergency room doctors treated her daughter for a painful cyst, but sleeping in is out of the question. Soon a car will whisk her off to a Canadian TV interview, to be followed by a local TV interview, and finally, fixing spaghetti for her three adult children in Vacaville — her home before the death of her soldier son Casey and the political trajectory of her anguish propelled her to divorce, to estrangement from friends, and to a frenetic campaign to end U.S. military involvement in Iraq.

And where is “home” to her now?

She pauses and sighs, sinking into the window seat and pulling a quilt up to her chin. “Nowhere, really … .”

She’s averaging just two days per month here. The next morning she will fly off again, the surreal star of what is — depending largely on one’s political perspective — either an epic tragedy or a farce. After stops for protests in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., she will breakfast in Manhattan with actress Susan Sarandon, who is set to portray her in a biopic movie. A crew will film Sheehan for a weekly reality series on the Sundance Channel. Her letters to President Bush inspired “Peace Mom,” a one-woman monologue show in London. A memoir is due to her publisher April 1.

And she hopes to reschedule a trip to address the European Union, postponed, she says, because of injuries when she was arrested yet again and jailed earlier this month on charges of blocking entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

A year ago, when The Chronicle’s Insight section profiled the Sheehan family, Cindy was a rather anonymous Vacaville mom, shaken by the fact that her son has been killed by an ambush halfway across the globe. Six months later, when she pitched a tent outside President Bush’s Texas ranch and demanded he explain the “noble cause” for which Casey was sacrificed, her plaintive cry seized the moment in America. By injecting aching humanity into the political debate, she catalyzed public opinion against the war.