I'm Sean Horish and welcome to Pulse of the Port. In this episode we'll take a look at three projects here at the Port of Long Beach that have reached key milestones. From super trains to virtual security, you'll see how the port of the future is being built right now. But first let's meet John Slanger up, the man who's charged with leading this port in the years to come. July 1st, 2014, marked the beginning of a new era. He's a leader and a teacher, and I want to introduce you. Please welcome John Slayer. John W. Slangerup was introduced as the chief executive of the Port of Long Beach. It's been such a welcoming experience and such a natural transition here for me. It appealed to me immediately. This was about building something even greater. It turned out to be an excellent fit. And here I am. He's an extremely capable leader. He has an extremely impressive resume with more than 30 years of corporate leadership. Slanger Up has spent the last 20 years leading both public and private companies. A former CEO and architect of FedEx Canada, he has helped guide and build technology firms, focused fields ranging from industrial software to clean energy and ballast water treatment. Born and raised in San Francisco Bay Area, I spent most of my youth there early in my career I was involved with airplanes and mostly military aircraft. So I worked for the Navy for a total about six years and in that I was trained as an avionics mechanic or technician. Then I transferred into the commercial aviation world and that gave me some experience that was necessary for me to get into what was FedEx or Federal Express at the time. It was a tiny little business and there was less than a thousand employees when I joined and when I left I I think it was a couple hundred thousand and I think it's over three hundred thousand a day so it was just an unbelievable experience. Most recently I was rude and asked to join a private equity firm where we did this buying and selling of companies for a living. So that's where I was when I got the call for this. It was so compelling I had to listen. The Port of Long Beach has such an incredible reputation that how could you possibly ignore this opportunity? The history is based on great leadership that preceded you. And that's what the case is here. This is 100 years of great leadership, extraordinary vision and leadership. This is incredibly important work. I mean, it doesn't get more important than this. The impact that the Port of Long Beach has on the overall economy of the region and the national economy is not to be minimized. It means it's a massive, massive responsibility. We are an enormous organization, and we have billions of construction underway at the same time. More than $4.5 billion to be precise. Meering its mid-wave point, the Middle Harbor Modernization Project will create the world's greenest and most technologically advanced terminal, which will process more than 3 million T.E.U. annually. And the Gerald Desmond Bridge replacement project will create a new Long Beach icon that will allow the world's largest ships to pass below, adding fuel to this already impressive economic engine. What I see is outstanding work. What I've seen is meticulous planning, tremendous care and focus about the schedule. We need to accelerate where we can, we need to reprioritize where we can, we need to not overspend the capital that we're working with. I love people who are believers. I love people who love to innovate and come up with new ideas. All about defies this port. It might be. So this is really the mandate here is to bring economic development to the region and build an enormous next chapter of the Soul Story. Just a few days after John Slanger upstarted working at the port, the new mayor of Long Beach, Robert Garcia, came over to meet John and say hello to all the port employees who are a part of the City of Long Beach staff. Mayor Garcia's message was clear. I am here on my second day because you are all valued. This is the single most important economic engine that we have in the City of Long Beach. it's 30,000 direct Long Beach jobs. It's hundreds of thousands of jobs. You look at the region. And if the city of Long Beach is going to succeed, the port of Long Beach must succeed as well. Change is always exciting and offers new opportunities. When we come back, we'll check out a new development in rail transport that is completely changing changing the way our goods are moved. Welcome back to Falsal the Port. You know for centuries now, trains have moved goods from ports of entry like the Port of Long Beach to inland cities throughout our nation. And while you may not have noticed, these trains have gradually gotten longer and taller, stacking two containers instead of just one. And now here at the Port of Long Beach, the biggest trains ever assembled on the West Coast have hit the rails. And when I say big, I mean really big. A train two miles long carrying 452 containers recently left Pier T at the port of Long Beach, headed for Chicago. It's the latest in a wave of super trains assembled by total terminals international. A feat no other terminal in America has even attempted. This is the first time we've ever run a train of that size. We graduated from an 8,000 foot train to a 10,000 foot train and now a 12,000 foot train. So basically what we're doing is we're increasing productivity per train start, meaning on locomotives and crews across the United States. We can move more cargo from Pair T at a single time than any other terminal in the Long Beach, Los Angeles area. So it's a tremendous achievement. Putting together trains this large is not something that is normally done. On traditional trains, which are typically 8 to 10,000 feet in length, locomotive engines are placed only on the head and back end of the assembled train. But moving over 12,000 tons of cargo requires a bit more horsepower. But when you have this long train, they use distributive locomotive power. What that means is you have several locomotives in the front, you have a couple of locomotives in the middle, and you have locomotives in the back pushing it. So it's called distributive power, and that's what's needed to go over some of that steep grades in Southern California, such as Cahon Pass. Taking the containers directly from the ship, the switch crew assembles the train. When complete, all that's needed is for the engineers to get on board, do an air test to make sure all is in working order, turn the engines on and leave the terminal. They look easy now, but like all new breakthroughs, it took a bit of doing. There was a tremendous learning curve. I mean, we'd never done it before, and we weren't certain how to do it quite frankly. We know we can load as many cars as we needed, but to put it together and get it out in a timely fashion was really important. So, but after that initial learning curve, it's not difficult at all. Impressive as they may look, the benefits for both the customer and the environment are even bigger, as the use of trains eliminates truck trips from our roadways. For customers, it's cheaper. For the environment, it's less emissions and less congestion. It's actually cheaper. We can put an on-dock train together. It's cheaper for the shipping lines and the owners of the containers versus trucking it out the gate to another facility. It's already at the marine terminal, so why don't you load it on a marine terminal? When you're loading 400 containers on a train, what that allows the vessel to put down containers in the place where those containers just came from. So we're turning the yard over quick or faster, allowing for better vessel production and more production for the rail. A typical train can eliminate up to 700 truck trips from our local roadway networks, but a larger longer train like this one eliminated about 1200 trucks from our local roadway network from that one single train. Currently, the port of Long Beach moves about 23% of all the cargo using on-dock rail, but with nearly a billion dollars of projects in the works over the next decade, that number is expected to jump to 35%. When you see a container up front, it's big by itself. And you put, you know, 450 containers on one train, double stack. It's just massive. You see those locomotives pushing it. It's just amazing, you know, two miles of train. That doesn't have to go by truck. It's really a good accomplishment and we feel like we're doing our job here at the Port of Long Beach. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Watching these super trains, it is just unbelievable how quickly technology is changing and helping the entire supply chain move our goods faster and more efficiently. Giving all of us the consumers lots of choices. But with goods moving faster than ever through the port, it's also important that security be stronger and more nimble. When we come back, we'll take you to the hub of security at the port and see what's new. Welcome back. In this next story, you'll see how port security is dramatically improving and it's going virtual with a new integrated system that is completely web based. Responding quickly and effectively to an emergency requires not only great communication but also lots of information. Here at the Board of Long Beach, a new web-based tool. Virtual port is dramatically changing the way incidents are managed, as the new system integrates more than 50 data sources into real-time images that all agencies involved in responding to an incident can access simultaneously to coordinate and deploy response teams. There was no common operating picture. All these databases were in diverse locations. And I think very importantly, there was no single agency that had the technology, the people, or the budget to put this together. So the portal Long Beach took the lead to design and come up with an implementation plan for virtual port. From a practical aspect, the folks that are operating out in the field are the ones that are going to need that situational awareness the most. So the ability for them to have an effort in their fingertips in their vehicles or vessels, It's a neat capability for them. Developed over the past two years, this technology allows users to create a montage of what's happening with as much or as little detail as needed. The data can be easily pulled in and out, stacked and sorted to quickly make the most sense of any incident. In a crisis or response mode, seconds are important. One of the things virtual port can do is it will tell us here in the Joint Command and Control Center what public safety assets are on the water, on duty, and who's the closest. So just being aware of who can respond the quickest is a great advantage in another. So we see where other jurisdictions are doing operations so that we can stay away from that or we can lend assistance if needed and we know exactly what they're doing when they're doing it. So it just gives us greater situational awareness of the port that we currently do not have. Another key advantage of this new virtual port system is that it enables all partner agencies to constantly update their information. So the data provided is always accurate and in real time. Instead of only housing historical, possibly out of date information. There's camera, there's radar, there's vessel tracking, there's information about infrastructure, pipelines, grids, all those types of information that are stored in different locations can now be housed at one location and access easily. Being a web-based system means that this information can be accessed not just here at the Command & Control Center, but also out in the field using smartphones, tablets, or onboard computers. A big plus to the hundreds of individuals whose job it is to secure the port and deep cargo moving, no matter what the situation on the ground. As the most sophisticated and comprehensive security tool in the US develops a date, virtual port is an example of how interagency cooperation can make all the difference. I think it's the best anywhere. I don't think this is the model for the nation perhaps a world in terms of how port security should be managed. Creating one security system that serves the needs of so many agencies was really quite a challenge, but as this new virtual port system proves, collaboration during design really pays off. Next up, Ask the Break, check out the latest on the new bridge that will replace the existing Gerald Desmond Bridge. ["Disman Bridge"] Welcome back. The Gerald Desmond Bridge has been connecting Long Beach to Terminal Island since the 1960s. Two years ago, construction began on a new bridge to replace it. So what's been done so far and once next, engineer Al Moro brings us up to date. Just a few feet from the Gerald Desmond Bridge that connects Long Beach to Terminal Island, an entirely new bridge is being built. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ A bridge so tall that when completed, will be seen from miles away. For an engineer and for me personally, this is a project of once in a lifetime. An engineer dreams of having a project with these kinds of challenges and of this kind of magnitude. Building a bridge is always an engineering challenge, but here on this land, which is full of legacy oil wells and underground utilities that take back as far as the turn of the century, the team has encountered several unknowns that have required innovative solutions. Design build processes, a project delivery method where the owner, in this case the port, puts together preliminary engineering drawings, and then the design builder, which is a team of a contractor or builder, and a designer, they submit a proposal and actually finish the design. And so the incremental design and construction goes on throughout the whole life of the project. Work began on the bridge in 2012, and the initial construction phase has been completed. We basically cleared the area for the new bridge, which is right in this area that we're standing here. Miles of underground utilities, oil lines. Over 30 oil wells had to be a salmon, either re-abandoned or relocated out of the way for the beautiful brand new bridge that we're gonna build right here. Currently, the more than 330 piles that will support the bridge are starting to be built. The challenge here is that all this work must take place as the port continues to move cargo. It's a very exciting time in the project right now and unfortunately it's all underground. The contractor has four massive rigs out here and they are drilling shafts 150 feet or more down into the ground. Occasionally you'll see the reinforcing steel vertically hung up in the air. You'll see massive numbers of concrete trucks that are here pouring concrete into those holes and then on top of that pile, late this year you'll see what's called a pile cap. It's basically a very thick concrete slab that's put on top of this array of piles. And then from that the foundation of the towers and the columns are built. It probably represents one of the most critical components because it supports the structure for the life of the bridge, which is 100 years. It's almost like building a bridge underground to support a bridge above ground. By the end of this year, the pilework will be close to complete and the main towers and columns will start to rise from the ground. When complete the new bridge will be the first cable state bridge for vehicle traffic in California. With its elegant design it will become a stunning landmark for the entire region. This bridge is going to be an icon for the city of Long Beach. Picture the bridge with a deck 200 feet up in the air and towers that go up 515 feet. I think people from all over the area are actually going to travel down here to the harbor just to see it. I'm really excited about it and I can't wait till we get to see that actual bridge up in the air. For regular updates on this once in a lifetime project, follow the story on new GDbridge.com or download the LB Bridge mobile app. That's going to do it for this edition. I hope you've enjoyed this trip through the Port of Long Beach as much as I have. If you'd like to catch any episode of the show, go to polb.com slash pulse. And don't forget to like the Port of Long Beach on Facebook follow us on Twitter or Instagram. I'm Sean Horish thanks for watching Pulse to the Port. I'm gonna host, Sean Horish. And as you can see behind me, there is construction going on, which is of course the new normal here at the Port of Long Beach. And here to talk about that and give us a tour is Port Construction Management Director Jerry Cardamon. Gary, thanks for joining us. My pleasure, Sean. Well, tell me about this site right now. This is the site of the new maintenance building, but I understand it's also connected to the construction of the new Gerald Desmond Bridge. That's correct, Sean. The new Gerald Desmond Bridge is going to be located just north of the existing bridge. And one of the things that we need to do is to move our existing maintenance facility out of the way, and we need to do it quickly so that it does an impact the start of that new Gerald Desmond Bridge. And that new bridge will be nearly a billion dollar project. I imagine there's a few other things tied to that. There's a lot of things that need to be... so that it does an impact the start of that new Gerald Desmond Bridge. And that new bridge will be nearly a billion dollar project. I imagine there's a few other things tied to that. There's a lot of things that need to be relocated. We have existing oil wells, we have pipelines, we have the existing Southern Cal Edison power line, we have a 42 inch storm drain, we've got gas lines, we've got a lot of things that need to be moved out of the way to make room for the new new bridge will be taller one and that is deffin continues to get bigger and bigger. Take a look at some of the recent shipping activity that put 14 cranes to work all at one time. If you need proof that the port of Long Beach leads the big ship movement, look no further than total terminals international at Pier T. During the second week of October, TTI had all 14 of its super post-pandemic scantry cranes working in concert for three straight days. We had the Cotto vessel for PIL. We had two MSC vessels and we had a Hangein vessel. It was an extraordinary weekend for us, and we moved a lot of high. TTI even made history. The two MSC ships were mega ships. At 11,600 TIEUs, the Ivana was signed by side with the 13,000 TIEU Altair. Marking the first time in the history of North America that two ships that size called the same terminal simultaneously. And then of course they dwarfed the two other vessels which were about 1700 T.E.U.s and 4500 T.E.U.s. With a main channel deeper than any in North America and tenants like TTI, the Port of Long Beach is perfectly positioned to handle the biggest ships on the ocean and committed to supporting more than 300,000 jobs in the Southern California region. For all of our folks out on the front, it's keeping them a lot busier too with 14 vessel gangs and sometimes four rail gangs and a full gate in yard operating simultaneously. It's becoming the new norm here at TTI. Welcome back. Like all construction at the port these days, this new maintenance building is being constructed as a green building. Now Gary, a lot of folks, I've heard that many times before, but they don't know what it means. What does that mean for this facility? Sean, as you may know, in 2005, the Board of Harbor Commissioners passed a green port policy. And one of the guiding principles of that policy is that we use sustainable development in fourth projects. All the major buildings that are constructed here in the port are going to be lead certified. Lead stands for leadership in energy and environmental design. And it requires a building to be sustainable. And this building here will use things that will make it sustainable and will make environmental friendly. In the covered maintenance storage area, we'll have solar power to create 320 kilowatts of energy. This will be one of the largest energy producers within the city of Long Beach. We'll use a lot of recycled materials. 90% of the waste from this project will be recycled, so it'll keep it out of landfills. Certainly sounds like the wave of the future to me. Now Gary, stick around. After seen. And before we go, I'd just like to say thank you very much to Gary Cartamon for showing us around today. We really appreciate the information. My pleasure, Sean. Now before we go, I want to know what exactly is going to be going on here and how long is it going to take to finish this maintenance yard? Well, this is a complex of three buildings Sean. We're building a new maintenance building, a covered storage area, as well as a vehicle repair facility, landscaping. It'll be a complete facility here for our maintenance folks. We hope to have it done by the third quarter of next year. In fact, we better have it done because we're going to be in the way of the Gerald Desmond Bridge project as I mentioned earlier. And that is definitely a deadline you going to be in the way of the Gerald Desmond Bridge project, as I mentioned earlier. And that is definitely a deadline you want to be out in front of. Gary, thanks again. We appreciate it. My pleasure, Sean. All right. Now, time for our final story. We'll see what free trade agreements are all about, and how they help the port grow. The United States imports more than $2.2 trillion worth of goods and services from all over the world every year. But did you know we also export another $1.5 trillion and that that number continues to grow? The goods that we export are anything from raw materials. We're semi-finished goods like lumber, recyclable materials. We also export of course a lot of agriculture products. Feeds, grains, corn, but we also export services. How to grow the number of exports from U.S.-based companies is a hot topic right now and one discussed at length during this year's America's business forum hosted by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. The port of Long Beach's own Sean Strawbridge was one of the speakers. Forty-one percent of U.S. export goods will go to partner FTA partner countries in 2012. FTA stands for free trade agreements, and the U.S. currently has them in place with 20 different countries. But what are they and what do they do? Free trade agreement is an agreement typically between two or more countries, where goods and services can be exchanged between those countries, with very low or no tariffs or quotas. NAFTA or the North American Free Trade Agreement is one example. The 1994 agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico links 450 million people producing $17 trillion worth of goods and services. Trade between those three countries has tripled. From our standpoint, we see that more U.S. goods and services are exported to Canada and to Mexico. And the benefits that they have is of course they have easier access to one of the largest consumer markets in the world that be the United States. And that pattern of growth also holds true with all the other countries where the US has negotiated and implemented free trade agreements. Once in place trade seems to boom. big winner, of course, is our economy. Free trade agreements create jobs. Free trade agreements create a vibrant economy. The United States is only 5% of the global consumer economy. By exporting, you have 95% of the world's markets available to you. Which is why the Port of Long Beach participates in and sponsors educational outreach seminars that bring companies together with federal agencies and other exporters to spread the word. It's all about education and if we can facilitate that education, then it's beneficial for our customers and ultimately for the Port of Long Beach. The Port of Long Beach is definitely on the move. So if you want to keep up and get all the latest news and information, make sure to check out po-l-b.com. I'm Sean Horish. Thanks for watching. Pulse of the Port. Have you ever heard of Lupus? Chances are you know someone whose life's been affected. A new diagnosis every half hour, one and a half million patients, that's enough to fill 30 baseball stadiums. Too many people for you not to know anything. Let's get educated. The Lupus Foundation of America can help. Hey, Sarah. Oh, gosh, this is so cute. How do you love him? Oh, God, I've been doing like I taught you. Love the new tattoo, Sarah. Let's go! Dude, that's Sarah. You sure on the pink shirt? That's the girl I was telling you about. Oh, that's Sarah? Theater two on your left. Hey, Sarah. We'll color underwear today. Hey, Sarah. So when you're gonna post something new. Anything you post online, anyone can see. Family, friends. See you later, Sarah. Even not so friendly people. Think before you post. You always made sure I brushed my teeth. You told me this smart was cool. You always told me to dream big. To all of those parents who took the time to make raising their children their most important job, we'd like to say. Thank you. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Thanks, Mama Dad. Thank you. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It tended to look much like any other building. The usual geometric jumble of rods, forms, and scaffolds. by its location alone, here on the familiar axis of American history, it was destined to become a prominent stone in the nation's crown. The The first problem, architect am faced was the shape of the site, an asymmetrical setback trapezoid on which his building would have to respect the classic symmetry of its older sister and serve also a combined function as an exhibition space and a study center. And there were other challenges. The field height will relate perfectly with buildings on Constitution Avenue, and a hundred feet will relate very well with buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue. And if we pick these two heights, we can begin to develop some interesting modules. The desire for outward textural compatibility led them back to this marble quarry in Tennessee. Here, forty years ago, the materials for the original gallery had been carved from the same geologic formation. The close correlation of texture, shape, and color were critical. So into the hands of the family that had overseen the quarrying of the original gallery marble went the responsibility. The architects' model revealed how he shape and color. The Architects model revealed how he divided the trapezoid shape into triangles to serve two related but separate functions, a quiet center for the study of the visual arts and the public art gallery, with a grand public space in between. And that's upon you. What happened, having there putting up? Where were that escalator attached to the old building? The workers whose hands would convert the design into reality were asked to share as equal partners in the final undertaking. They had raised many buildings in their time, but this was a different challenge. I was there trying to help everybody remember that we got to do it just right. And if you hit a place three times with a vibrator, that won't hurt it. If you miss it one time,'s what it is. That's gonna hurt. That's right. You're not just out there pouring concrete. You're a capitalist placing architectural concrete that people are gonna see forever. And you don't get a second shot at it. What you do is there, man. There's no way to hide it. You either gonna brag about it or you're gonna be off the shame one of the two. So you to hide it. You either going to brag about it or you're going to be off with shame. One of the two. So you've got to do it right. You'll just never do anything like this again, your life. And so you've got to live it up this time once around. This way I look at it. Ha-ha. On every detail, there was to be no compromise and precision. No margin for error. Working with concrete, iron and steel, wood and plaster, they were working in tonnages and crafting in inches. The sharp corners and angles dictated by the design had to be joined in perfect alignment. skilled cabinet makers fashioned copper forms of clear-grained fur, finished and rubbed like fine furniture to avoid blemishes and imperfections on the final pour. After weeks of weaving steel I'm out to get you. They had performed a delicate triumph in architectural casting. the fall of 1975, the bearing walls and concrete work were in place. Now they were ready to receive the marble. It would take three and a half years to prepare properly in place the 7,081 tons of Tennessee marble that would adorn the outer skin and inside walls and floor. Unlike its predecessor, it would have no cornices or trim to cover mistakes in joining. Each meeting of stone would be exposed, leaving no room for error. The marble would expand and contract with the cycle of the seasons. They had to invent and design a neoprene gasket permitting the building to breathe without distorting the knife-like detailing of the facade. No stone was placed indiscriminately. Each was positioned for shape, texture, and color. The parts giving unity to the whole. Major artists of international reputation, men like sculptor Henry Moore and the creator of the mobile Alexander Calder, came to share ideas with Gallery Director Jay Carter Brown about their works, commissioned by the Gallery to enhance and celebrate the new building. And then a couple more pieces come out. That's right. Here it is. That's the front room. The artists had been chosen because of their preeminence and their genius for creating monumental works for monumental spaces. Right. Lovely to gospel. You do give it the opportunity to relate in scale, to trees and other things and not just the building. All my argument was not to have pieces that are attached to the building. You know, it's like it's become like reliefs. It's a decoration to the architect. I think you should have a sculpture that's separate from the architecture to give scale to the architecture and to the sculptor. Yes. And you have a... It would prove to be Calder's last work of epic proportions. I didn't make a home. And he would approve its fabrication one week before his death. The ultimate space for Calder's work was the third major element in the building's design. The space frame and main skylight would be constructed 80 feet above the level of the concourse floor, creating a feet, more than a third of an acre, culminating in a public space unique in architecture. And it would receive light in a selective fashion to illuminate but protect the artwork within, filtering out direct sunlight, and the ultraviolet rays that could damage the art inside. The the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the That's good. They came from England, France, Spain, and from across America. Calder and more. Art. Cairo. Miro. Motherwell. Rosati. There works to be placed in the grand spaces. I'm going to have to go. This building is a gift given to the nation by Paul Mullin, Elsa Mullin Bruce and the Andrew W. Mullin Foundation. But it is more than that. It is a statement as one critic wrote of perseverance and excellence against which all buildings and builders must now be measured. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a your life like that, yeah. Scientists tell us that all forms of life originated in the sea, and the oceans of the world are teaming with diverse creatures both plant and animal alike. The ocean in fact has also been the center of important human culture, and its eternal cycle has inspired human life for countless millennia. Among the more significant cultures to arise from dependence on the ocean because of great Western demand for its product are those dedicated to the harvesting of the pearl oyster. Pearl cultures have sprung up in those areas of the world where the cultivation of this ocean gem is most common. Parts of the Persian Gulf, Japan and the coast of Salon or Sri Lanka, off the southern coast of India. Pearl culture has been a part of life in Sri Lanka for over 2,000 years and that island has traded in this precious commodity for centuries. Fascination with the pearl has been with us ever since, as well as curiosity about the people who cultivate and harvest what is often called the perfect gem. Now 19th century audiences in France were no less curious than anyone else, demanding as they were of the new and the exotic to entertain and delight them in their theaters. Works about such exotic cultures abound from this time period. But it was the young George Bise, who focused in on a libretto concerning the Hindu pearl culture of Salon. He created for his audience a glimpse into a rarefied world that they could only partially imagine. The opera, while not a complete success, was Bize's first professional introduction to the lyric stage and it is the subject of our program today. The opera, Bize's Le Péchard de Père, the pearl fishers. I'm Nick Ravellas and this is This is Opertok. Bize was born on October 25th, 1838, to a musical family, and he showed unusually precocious talent for music at a very early age. He was a brilliant pianist and organist, and was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 10. His earliest operatic works were in the comic vein, like Dr. Miracle, a one-act operetta. It was written for a competition established by the master of Second Empireempire comic opera style Jacques Offenbach. The jury for the competition was a who's who of French lyrical theater, Danielle Obert, Fremontal Alevier, Eugène Scriebe, and Charles Gounault. The work was successful enough to grant him Andre into the world of Paris Theatre and he he spent much of his short life as a rehearsal pianist for opera houses throughout the city. Early in his career, Bisey threw himself into a number of projects many of which were still born. He was recognized as a brilliant pianist by no less a personage than Franz Liszt, and he spent some time playing solo concerts and making appearances in the ubiquitous Salon. But it was by employment as a rehearsal pianist that he came to know the great operatic literature. In 1861, he met León Carvallo, the director of the Teatro Lirique. Carvallo was impressed with the young man's wit and talent, and it was the director's habit of the Lirique to offer the young, untested, but promising composers of the day commissions to write work for the theater. The work that he commissioned from Bise was to be the pearl fishers, and it was this composer's operatic calling card. Ramannurriini, Krashuai, La Notre. Now let me tell you a little bit about the opera theaters in Paris. The most venerable institution was of course the Paris Opera, which in the 1850s and 60s was experiencing a period of decline, run more like a social club for the aristocratic classes. It was thought of as something of a dinosaur by younger progressive artists, writers, and composers. There was also the Opelac Comique, which produced lighter fare with spoken dialogue. And then there was the Teatro Etayang, which had been granted exclusive rights to the performance of Italian opera in 1801 and was the first sight in France of the first Italian performances of the Mozart da Ponte operas as well as many of the Belcanto classics. But the Teatre L'Irique, the most serious rival to the opera and the Comique during its 20 years of existence, was chartered to perform French and non-French works, and was the site of the first French performances of works by Beethoven, Weber, Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner. Carvio, the director of the Lerique, was a brilliant stage director who spent so lavishly on his productions that the company was often in danger of going under. But he was committed to producing works by new composers. Bise was certainly ready for the challenge. His compatriot, the composer Camille Sassons, upset by their lack of success as young composers once said to Bise, since they don't want us in the theater, let's take refuge in the concert hall. Bezai replied, well that's all right for you, but I'm not made for the symphony. I need the theater. Without it, I don't exist. Bezai's relationship with the older and wiser Gu-no was a great stimulus to him in the writing of his early works for the stage. After announcing to the composer that he had received the commission from the Lerique, Gu-no wrote him a long letter urging him, first of all, to take his time with the work, to try to envision many of the numbers in his head before actually writing anything down, and to keep the tone light. This was very wise advice, especially the caution about working too quickly, but in fact, Bisei worked himself into a frenzy to finish the piece, and almost exhausted himself in the process. Given the commission in April 1863, the work went into rehearsal in August to scant four months later. Originally, the LeBretis had set the story in Mexico, but during composition it was transferred to Ceylon and given various Indian and Hindu references. The plot, essentially a love triangle, set in an exotic locale, was basically taken from earlier successful works like Spontini's La Vistale and Bélini's Norma. Although Carvallo the director was much more encouraging and congenial to young composers than other directors of the time, he often made things difficult for his production teams by making last-minute changes. He always wanted to make his own mark on another creator's works. Shifting the period or background of an opera at will was something he loved to do, or changing a dancing role into a singing role in order to give it to his soprano wife. Because of his wild spending, however, the productions of the fall of 1863 were extremely important to the theatre. He needed a success in this theatre as it was engraved at. In the repertoire of the Teatrole Rique for that season were Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and a triple bill of minor French works lavishly produced. The pearl fishers was due to premiere on September 14th, but because the soprano was ill, it was postponed to the 20th. Even then, the soprano was still slightly indisposed and was not able to give the best performance of the temple priestess, Leïla. But the reception of the opening night audience was enthusiastic, as Parisian audiences at this time were used to embracing operas that had a touch of the exotic. The composer appeared on stage with the singers at the end of the opera, and a contemporary described the moment. Bise looked a little dazed. His head was lowered and revealed only a forest of thick, curly, fair hair above a round, still rather childish face. And live, and, however, by the quick bright eyes that took in the whole audience with the delighted but embarrassed look. All of the composers and attendants looked to be Zay as the young leader of a new school of French theatrical composition, remarkable considering that he was only 25 years old. The critics, however, weren't amused. In the journal Figaro, the critics said there were neither fishermen in the libretto nor pearls in the music. The opera received 18 performances. It was not played again until about a decade after biseis on timely death at the age of 36, and since then, even though it's been produced more in Europe than elsewhere, it's never really left the standard repertoire for very long. The pearl fishers, while not the financial success that Lail and Carvallo had hoped for, was enough of an artistic triumph for him to immediately commission Bise to write one more opera. But it was a later commission from the Opera Comique that was to make his name in music history and successfully produce one of the most popular and enduring operas of all time. Carmen. Who knows what would have happened if the composer had not literally worked himself to death barely three months after its premiere in 1875. Before the ruins of a Hindu temple, Zurgah, the leader of a tribe of pearl fishers, is chosen by his people to be their king. Nadir, his former friend, enters and left alone by the chorus, they reminisce about their early days together. In their duet, one of the finest ensembles for two men in the operatic repertoire, they remember the beautiful woman that they both spied in the Temple of Kandhi. In order to remain friends and avoid being rivals for her love, they renounce her and swore fidelity to each other. Laïla, the woman in question, appears with the high priest of Brahma Nourabad. She has been chosen a priestess of Brahma to pray on behalf of the fishermen for good weather. Zurgah doesn't recognize her, but Nadir does, and he sees the spark of recognition in her eyes as well. As she enters the temple to pray and Zurgah and the people leave as well, Nadir is left alone. He confesses in an aria that he has followed her here and has dreamt of her often since his youth. Nadir falls asleep as Layla sings a hymn to Shiva. When he awakes, it becomes a song of love. In act two, Layla tells Nurabad that she once saved a stranger's life by hiding him from his enemies. In return, he gave her a necklace that she still wears. The high priest leaves and she sings of her love of Nadir, who arrives in secret and sings a love duet with her. After he sneaks away, a gunshot is heard. Nadir is captured by the tribe and he and and Layla are about to be put to death when Zurgah, the new king, arrives on the scene. He pardons them and whispers to them to leave quickly, but during the ensuing chaos she is unveiled. Zurgah immediately recognizes her as the woman that he and Nadir had sworn off so many years before. Angrily, he condemns them both to death. Act III finds Zurgah alone, singing of his inner turmoil over the possible loss of his best friend Nadir. Leila arrives to plead with him for Nadir's life, but when Zurgah realizes that she loves Nadir, his fury is doubled. He calls on the fisherman to escort her to her doom, and she offers her necklace to one of the young guards. Zurgah snatches it away in fury, but as the couple are about to be burnt on a funeral pyre at the feet of a statue of Brahma, Zurgah recognizes the necklace as the very one he gave to Leila so many years before. The people see that their village has suddenly been set afire and they rush out to save it. Zurgah shows Leila the necklace, then embraces the couple, sending them on their way. As he prompts their escape, he sees Nurabad and the fishermen escaping the burning village in the distance. Selfless love and friendship have triumphed. So great! Since we're exploring Bise's The Pearl Fishers, I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to bring in a designer who's going to be working on an actual production of this opera, and I'm delighted to welcome to opera talk, Zandra Rhodes. Zandra, welcome. Lovely to be here. Now, you're in the midst of designing a production of this opera, and I'd like to ask you basically, how did you start? What was it about the story elements or the music of Bizeh that first inspired your designs and where did you go from there? Well first of all typical I had never heard of it so I got the tape from Ian Campbell and played the music which is divine and romantic music And he also gave me a leeway and he said, now I have to tell you that these, they probably never even went to Sri Lanka, which is salon. I think that's probably a good guess, yeah. But I loosely could connect it with India. And I was invited to India to judge Miss India. And so I said, well, in that case, I'm going to go down and we're going to go to Sri Lanka. So I went to Sri Lanka and looked to all different things in it and these wonderful caves that were medieval caves with wonderful naked ladies hanging from the ceiling and then started to think that it would have a slightly exotic Indian feel. But on the other hand, the whole opera never refers to a single pearl. So I decided that I'd do a prasinium arch where the arch is a cover to made of pearls. So it's going to be completely covered in pearls. And then just made to look very exotic and oriental. Now how about the color schemes? I mean, are the colors inspired by the colors that you saw in Sri Lanka? Well, they are. Although I didn't see pink and turquoise palm trees. So I felt that it should look very patty, very exotic, and just then highlight these singers who will be just singing these beautiful duets. And as it's a French opera of that period, they'll also be wonderful dancing. So I've got some sort of semi naked dancing girls coming along. And then we're doing the whole crowd scene in like turquoise saries and blues and creams like sand and the ocean. So it's going to be very exotic. What about the textures of the materials that you use? Are you suggesting certain textures again to connect with the story or with what you experienced in Sri Lanka? Do they use lots of silks for instance? Well they have silks and cotton so we've got lovely silks and madras cotton because madras is only a little way away and then they're going to be covered in hand-painted Santa road's details with seashells and pearls and things like that. So I think it's going to be rather wonderful. It looks great. I'm about the main characters Leila is a high priestess so how do you designate her as opposed to a priest? She comes in veiled and she's probably going to be in wonderful scarlet colors. We're still debating that. The priests are going to be in glowing, almost Buddhist yellows. And then, as I said, the crowd are going to be in blues and sands. So, and then probably the heroes were being a colour that's in the middle sort of emeralds and browns so that they look rich and they stand out in front. And Nurabad, the high priest, if you thought about. He's a guy, and I think he's going to be golden brown and sort of metallically. Now I've noticed that the almost all of the show is hanging. It'll be coming from the fly space. Why is that? I've been taking lots of advice and I've been working with wonderful Andrew Sinclair. So luckily he's working with the Royal Opera in London. So we go back with some forwards and he said he wanted it with the things flying in. He's the stage director. Yes, you're work with him now. Work with him in the network. Yes, and then I work closely with John Paul Peters to go over, John David Peters to work on the how it will actually work and where we have to cover up the lights and all those other things, which I didn't know about before. It's interesting, I suppose, being coming from the fashion world. And this is your second or third opera? Second, I was lucky enough to be asked to do the magic flute. Exactly, which was wonderful. So it's a whole new world for you, I'm sure. It's a totally new world, and I felt it should be very... There's no point if it doesn't look very zander roads. It's got to look... And I felt, because I trained as a textile designer, it should have a very patterned surreal quality about it. We don't think we want reality on the stuff. No, well then, particularly with this opera because it's a kind of a dream of an opera, it's kind of a fairy tale opera rather like the magic. It's not terribly different from flute. So I think that these ideas will probably support it very well. Well, it's just lovely working on Indian temples and the front curtain is going to be these fishermen on stilts, so it's really exciting. That's terrific. Sandra, thanks so much for coming. Thank you for inviting me. the poor de caririta. Bise wrote the pearl fishers that are rather early age, and even though there were a couple of short comic operas that preceded this piece in his output, it was the first important opera that he wrote on commission from an actual opera company. It is therefore the work of a very talented but young composer with little experience actually writing opera. Let's put it this way. It's not Carmen, which is arguably one of the finest works ever written for the operatic stage. But while not quite at that level of genius, the purlfishers has much to offer, and is a delight to experience in performance. The music of the mural fissures reflects the period in which it was written. Its beauties are to be found on the surface in well-written, memorable melodies that waft by us like the scent of a good French perfume. One of the most popular melodies in the work is found in the duet between Zorgah and Nadir in the first act, or Fond du Tampelissant. This is a melody that is instantly memorable because of its shape, and interestingly enough, because of its orchestral accompaniment which features the ubiquitous French instrument, the harp. music One of the other ways than which the work reflects its time is its use of typically French forms. Here, for instance, is Nadir's Romance, or Arya, Jacques-Onton-Dron-Corne, written in the style of a barcarole, a typical French form, with its gently rocking rhythm imitating a boat on placid water. But remember what audiences demand for the But remember what audiences demanded at the time were stories with exotic locales, and for 1863, Célon was about as exotic as you could get. Does Bise use any cello-need tunes or authentic Indian raga techniques to get an exotic sound in the fabric of the music? Well, no, not really. But he does attempt a kind of imitation of what people would have imagined such music to sound like. It came in the use of what we call ornaments in the music. Short, lyrical embellishments to the vocal line that would remind the listener of a vaguely eastern or oriental atmosphere. These passages would be just different enough from surrounding melodic patterns to get the listener's attention. Here, for example, is Lay-Law's Prayer to Brahma in act 1. I'm going to play a song. Those little ornaments that are collected over a single syllable, usually an A or an U sound, and they should be considered as little decorations of the melodic line. good example example from the Pearl Fissures, it will be heard in the entrance of the hero Nadir in Act 2. So Bize wasn't quite the researcher like Puccini trying to find authentic Japanese or Chinese music to include in Butterfly or Turundought. Much like other French opera composers of the mid 19th century, he satisfied his audiences with a few exotic compositional tricks of the trade that will work rather nicely, don't they? When you're out looking for resources to bone up on the pearl fishers, you may be a little disappointed. There haven't been any really terrific books on Bise's work and life in the last 40 or 50 years. And many of the recordings, the classic recordings of the pearl fishers haven't yet been re-released on CD. But there are two which are quite excellent, and I'm sure they'll suffice. The first one, a more modern recording, is with Barbara Hendrix as Leila, John Aller as Nadir, and Gino Cuilico as Zürga, all of these wonderful singers under the direction of Michel Plasson. This is a terrific recording with all the modern recording techniques. It's really quite stunning. The other recording is a re-release of one of the classic recordings of the pearl fishers. This with the Leila of Janine Micheaux, the Nadir of the wonderful Nicolai Guedda, and the Zürga of Ernest Blanc, all under the direction of Pierre Der Vaux. This is one of the great recordings of the pearl fishers and both of these are readily available. Now as I told you before, there aren't very many monographs or books written about the life and works of Bise, but that gives me the opportunity to introduce you for the first time to one of the basic tools and operatic research. That is the new Grove dictionary of opera. This is a terrific resource. It's four volumes long, and it has articles on everything that you can imagine dealing with opera. The articles on Bise, his life and works, the article on the Pearl Fischer's, in fact, the article on Carmen, Bise's other wonderful opera, are all stunning. This particular four volume work is also available in paperbacks so that you don't have to spend quite so much money on it as I did. I know you'll enjoy this resource. of the earth. The Pearl Fischer's is one of those works that has a surprising amount of truly gorgeous music that's entered the public's consciousness over the years. And because it's so rarely done in this country, it's always a refreshing addition to the repertoire of any opera any Opera House. It's tuneful, colorful, has a touch of the exotic and is substantial enough for a creative designer to dress it in a truly spectacular production. If you don't know this beautiful work, go get a recording and definitely see it when you can. It's well worth the effort. I'm Nick Revellis, and I'll see you at the opera. And the Lord, He is the Lord of the world, He is the Lord of the world, He is the Lord of the world, He is a god. and the that will never change. you you Thank you. Welcome to LA Parks. I'm Monica Recreation Coordinator. Today I'm with Channel 35 and I'll be teaching chair circuit. What you'll need is a sturdy chair, resistance bands and or dumbbells, water and a towel. Let's get started with the seated march. Shoulders relax and roll back. Bracing to that core as you're getting your fitness equipment together, don't forget to like and share today's workout on Facebook. Begin to increase your range of motion, abs are a little bit tighter every time you bring that knee up towards the chest. Today's workout will be all about 30 seconds with our time frame. So we'll be doing 30 seconds of cardio, 30 seconds of straight training, switching it up from the comfort of our chair to standing up pressing those arms up Deep inhale, exhale as you raise those arms Give me four more Quick five minute warm up and then we'll go right into it. Good job arms across the body extend that leg. Adding that rotation by squeezing your abs in nice and tight, focusing a bit more on those love handles. Give me about 10 seconds here. You got it. We're going to go to a full extension, opposite hand, opposite legs. You're going to reach and lengthen here. 30 seconds. Really lengthening here, elongating through your spine. Less than 10 seconds. Get's job We're going to go back to that march. Right here. Bigger movements. Really pumping those arms. Getting that heart rate up. Slowly. Yeah, gradually here. We're going to stand and sit. You can go into a standard squat or come all the way back and down into the comfort of your chair. Get ready, ready. Less than 10 seconds to go. Try those knees up a little bit higher. Last few seconds. When you're ready, walk your legs, speed out, stand all the way up. Sit all the way down. So since we're moving today and switching it up every 30 seconds, let's sit here body. If you need to take that break, yes. Do the movement a little bit longer or you need to shorten up your time. That's perfectly fine. Those, are slightly bent at the top. You are still pushing off both toes and heels. Last you. You're going to go into a full extension. Low kick. Your goal right now is to extend and reach those toes. If you're not touching those toes just yet, don't worry about it. You're going to come as far forward as you can. Continue that rotation warming up those abdominals here. And 10 seconds we're going to go into a full sit up. We're going to round that back, engage those abs and we're going to open up that heart and chest right here. Walk your legs feet out, arms cross. Your range, your pace, for 30 seconds. Breathe with me here. Nice and tall, belly button to spine. You got it. We're gonna go into lunges, side to side. Toes needs forward, out of our chair, yes. Get ready, ready. Give me one more. Carefully come up. Toes needs forward. Hands from the hips. Keep that chest lifted, yes. So you're sitting onto one side as you lengthen the opposite leg here. Take your time. Use your abdominals and glutes, especially the glutes to come up. X-selling and pilling on your way down. Last one here. Other side, yes. Good job. Back to that march. This time we are out of our chair. We're gonna go wide and narrow. 30 seconds out and in. At your own pace, setting up nice and strong. You got it. We're gonna to grab those weights in less than 10 seconds. Shoulder presses with our march. At any time, you need to adjust each exercise by doing just the shoulders, just the upper body, listen to your body, and do a split workout versus a compound move. So go right into that march, seated, palms face you and press up. So we're here for 30 seconds and we'll switch it up again. Lean back a little bit, that neutral spine, that rounding or slouching, abs are definitely engaged here. You've got it as you bring those weights up. Think about stretching out those arms and X to only get them out. Last two here, good job. We're gonna hand you the hips, come forward, just a bit, draw the elbows straight up. Think about squeezing the upper back, squeezing those shoulder blades. To make it a bit more challenging, we're going to straighten out those arms. Easier? Bend at about a 90 degree angle, yes? Last two. Back to that march and press. One more set and we'll move on. We'll range, lean back a little bit, race it to that core, not rounding that back. You got it. All the way up, all the way down, really working those shoulders, taking your time, less than 15 seconds. If this gets a little bit too much for you, you can always adjust one dumbbell or no weight at all. Hands from the hips, right into it, set up, straight arm or bending at those elbows. At about a 90, you got it, come on. Come on. Good. If you're feeling this music you can always tap it out here yes come on breathe that chest is lifted neutral spine release squeeze the upper back those shoulder blades here last few head and then I neck aligned with the spine. We're gonna grab that resistance band and switch it up. Good job. Lower those weights off to the side out of your way. We have biceps and a leg extension focusing a bit more on the glutes. So you're here, using those handles here, stepping on to that band. That hand is on the shirt for support. So you're here, you're going to go into one by a curl. You're going to stop roughly about 90 and then go into that extension, squeezing the butt. You're balancing like you want to spread those toes, you want to bend that knee. When you're ready begin. We're here for 30 seconds and we'll change sides. Release squeeze. Focus on engaging those glutes. Engage in that core versus swinging. Now if you do not have fans today, that's fine. You could still use those dumbbells, canned goods, water bottles, and then just focus on that extension. Really squeezing the butt. Don't think about kicking back. Last one here. Excellent job. Other side. Same fun move. Set up for success. Right of that vice-prol stop halfway. Lift to squeeze, 30 second push. You got it, come on. Try not to slouch on that curl all the way up, looking straight ahead. We have triceps coming up, but we'll break up this strength exercise with a little bit of cardio. All 30 seconds you're here give me two more. Take your time. Really squeeze that core, squeeze that bum. Good job. Take that fan off the side out of your way. Going into a seated jack arm straight out to the side. So options you can alternate or bring both legs out and in at the same time. 30 seconds. You got it. Come on. Breathe with me here. Arms are kind of low, stopping at shoulder level. Kick it up. Come on. Need to slow it down. You're here. All arms instead. Come on. Breathe. All legs. Last 10 seconds. Half fun with this one. Finish off with me here. Come on. Try steps. We're going to use those dumbbells. You can always use that band if you need to. Before we go ahead and do that, grab a quick drink of water. All right, so we're going to use one dumbbell, ship that body, pull it on that chair, the elbow is in. One at a time, you're going to fully extend, really flex to make that muscle and then slowly return. So that head comes forward a little bit so that you do not hit the back of your head. Yes, good posture. You're not rounding that back. Your abs are engaged. They're about halfway here. Slow control movement, switching sides in less than 10 seconds. Get ready ready, really flex. Think about flexing, making that muscle versus squeezing that dumbbell. You have one more repetition right here. Beautiful. Shake it out. Other sides, same fun movement. All All triceps here in 30 seconds. Let's go. Slow control movement. Breathe. We're gonna repeat those jacks. You're gonna have the option of standing up. If you are comfortable seated with that cardio move with the jacks you are welcome to remain seated. You more here. Four, three, last two, one more, one more. Excellent. So go right into those jacks. Flex your options. Switching up the arms or your up with me here. 30 seconds, you got it, come on. Toe tap, lift that heart, lift that chest. Pull the extend that leg, point those toes. Now pick it up, you're down to your last 15 seconds. Come on. We're going to go back to those shoulder presses. We're going to slow that pace down from that knee up, focusing a bit more on our abs by bringing those knees up a little bit higher. So we're going to take the cardio out and focus on range. Press up, knee up. 30 seconds moving at your own pace. Lean back just a little bit. Exhale as you raise those weights. Exhale as you remat knee up, yes. Beautiful. Finishing off. Give me about 10 more seconds here. Breathe. We're going to go into those kicks similar to what we did earlier in our warm up, last one each side. Instead of a single kick, it's going to be a double kick. So you're here. One in two and switch. Add that rotation, working those abs. Yes. You got it. 30 seconds. Rock your best. Making sure you're exhaling on those kicks. Come on. Breathe. We're gonna go back to these kicks a little bit later and we're going to run it straight 30 seconds on each side. Good job. Let's go into squats. Options here. It's going to be with or without the weights. If you need assistance, you'll be using your chair to carefully come up and down. Otherwise, you're gonna walk your legs forward a bit. Your knee angles are aligned. The weights are in front of you. Stand up straight. Sit all the way down. You got it. Pushing off toes and heels. Exhale as you stand. Inhale as you lower. 30 seconds push, let's go. Shoulders are relaxed and roll back. No tension on those shoulders. Think about standing straight up, carefully sitting back down. You're already halfway. Come on. Beautiful. Keep it up. We're going to go back to that cardio. Quick beat. Small yet quick movement. Awesome. Wades off to the side out of your way. Right on time with the beat. Right on time with the music. So you're here. Relax the arms, moving as fast as you can. Right here, come on. Light on the feet, balls of the feet. Can you do this one standing? Of course you can. Otherwise, you're here with me seated, shaking out those legs, lift that chest up, brace that core, deep inhale, deep exhale. Last few seconds, here's four. Breathe to get job. All right, let's go right back to our weights. Switching it up, we're gonna go into our bicep curls. It's gonna be a combination. We're gonna come all the way up center here. Come all the way, and then palms facing me. Yes, so we're just switching up the angle of your bicep curls, doing two versions of them versus one. Take your time. We're gonna go into our kicks, 30 seconds on each side, and then we'll go right back to our triceps. We'll body workout today. How are we doing? How are you feeling? Last few seconds. Come on. Really flex. Make that muscle. If you want to switch it up and go into a hammer curl instead of a regular bicep curl, more power to you. The switching up the angles here, really flexing, making that muscle. Last one here, in a strong. Good job, lowering those weights. All right, same leg. 30 seconds, adding that rotation each time. Let's go. A little bit more power behind your kick. Do your best on that extension, on that reach. If you're here today touching your shins, your quads, your knees, that's perfectly fine. Do your best. Come on. Feel that leg. Your heart work. Right into it. Let's switch. 30 seconds. Rotate, rotate. Finish off. Last few seconds here. Triceps coming up. We're gonna stand for this one. You'd like to have a seat. Listen to your body. Remain seated. Last two here. Good job. Shake it out. Let's grab a quick drink of water. So we're switching from resistance bands to dumbbells. Just in case if you have one over the other, maybe you have a preference today. Fans are easier to travel with. Less weight. All right, same concepts. Working the back of those arms. So you're going to adjust that band to make it challenging for you. Pinch on the hip, seize that chair for support, elbow in. I'm going to lift all the way up and stop halfway. So there's relax, go back, neutral, flat back. 30 seconds each side right here. Gazing slightly ahead of you, you're not going to look up. Nor are you going to drop down down. You're gonna focus on extending and stopping halfway. Yes, don't go into a bicep crow. We did that a moment ago. Your main focus is to work up the back of those arms. Yes, keep it up. Few more reps. Challenge. Pause a bit at the top. One more here. Excellent job. Take it out. Other side. Same fun move. Working those triceps. So once again, you're gonna adjust that band so that it is challenging for you. At any time you need to readjust to make it a little easier, more power to you. Same thing, 30 seconds. The elbow is nice and high. Holy it's skin, stop halfway. I'm going to get a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit tighter. Your shoulders are relaxed, roll back away from those ears. Give me four more reps on this side. Last three here. Two more. Last one, last one. Beautiful. Lower that band down. Off to the side out of your way. Right back to a cardio. We're going to go back to the quick feet. Switching up the hand movements. You're going to push forward and back, open up that chest. All out, 30 seconds, let's go. Really opening up, squeeze the upper back shoulder blades, relief flex, and work that chest, work those pecs. Abs are still engaged. Slow movement, strong movement with the upper body. All quickness with the feet. Finish off here, less than 10 seconds. Going back to those dumbbells. We're going to focus on our quadriceps, strengthening those knees. Good job. Good job. quickening. Water towel off if you need to. So the weight that you add on your quads is completely optional, yes. The good thing is we're doing it for 30 seconds versus a minute. You could do that for 30. What the weight? A little goes a long waist. You're here, toes straight up, all the way up, almost all the way down, right? That leg stays straight the entire time. You're holding onto that weight, almost quads. Think about bringing those knees up towards your hips. Building the abdominals work as well. Beautiful, ex-healing, lifting at the same time. Come on. Checking in, viewers relax. Try not to tense up. Hit me two more. Shake it out. Other side. Getting ready in about five seconds. Set up more success. Everybody relaxed. 30 seconds here. Let's go. If you like to add this in on a regular basis, you can always adjust that resistance. So, in the future, add two dumbbells. Drop one weight and then go to no weight at all. Yes, or reverse it. Start with no weight and then increase by using one or two sets of dumbbells. One more, one more. Good job. Placing that way off the side, going back to that march. Big movements, 30 seconds. We're gonna switch it up to a cross. We're gonna bring those arms across the body, a cross chest. Working once again, our torso, our movements, and a little bit more shoulder work. Options to push forward or to punch. Last few seconds. All out right here. Sten and punch. 30 seconds. Really rotating here. Kick that leg out the side. Come on. What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? What's up? And then we'll call it today. Once again, both of you to use your dumbbells instead. To make the work a little easier, you're going to walk your feet in. To make the work a little bit more challenging, you're going to walk your feet out. See you here. Stopping at shoulder level. Take your time. Exhale. Inhale on your way down. So I deal. You wanna lift both arms at the same time. It's still too difficult. Narrow stance. Still too difficult. What can you do? You can alternate. Yes. Take your time. All about the quality of the movement. Never quantity. That's why I typically work off. Time not reps. Over time you will build strength, cardiovascular, as well as your endurance. And then you see a difference. A change over time. Give me two more. Your own pace. Finish off. Come on. Strong shoulders. Right here. Good work. Let's take that band off to the side. We're going to go to that extension. So hamstrings, we're going to swoop up. Yes. Feel the stretch that lower back. As we onwind into our stretches here. Come on. We get those fingers toes. Swoop up. Deep inhale. Deep exhale. Look at those fingers toes. We're gonna carefully come up. Walk your legs speed out. Not hip dances. Hip dances apart. If not a little bit wider, you're gonna rotate. Rotate. Big movement. Full range. You got it. Other direction. Breathing in the nose, exhaling nice and slow. Let's open up those hip flexors, going to a nice deep lunge. You're here. Use that chair for support if you need to. Torso is upright. This time if you'd like, take those arms behind you. Walk those hands back and down as you gaze up. Keep it up, deepen hell up. Center, exhale, reach for those toes. From here, shake your head, yes, no. Bend those knees, nice and tall, other side. Let's open up those hips. Once again, nice, comfortable deep lunge. Cook that pelvis under, switching it up. Pump, face, you round that back. Drop the chin down towards your chest. Good job today. Great job today. Hope you enjoyed today's 30 second and the lap push. Excellent, once again, let's touch those toes. Touch the floor if you can. Take a moment to breathe. Release here, bend those knees. Chest is left to deep and pull up, taking out the legs. Let's have a seat. Now we're going to go a little bit deeper to our hamstring stretch. Obviously, head opposite leg. Rotate and hold. Fluencing breath, inhale up. Exhale, other side, take stretch, hold. gonna go into that apple pose. If you have a side that's a little bit tighter, needs a little bit more love. Come on, I'm going to go to that side first. Lensy, breath, strike a pose. Exhale, really opening up those hips. Ideal. You can work me say this before unless you're brand new. If you sit too much, you move too much. You definitely want to create this stretch. And I prefer a scenario after you are warmed up. Yes. Switching sides. Even the left. Exhale. Strike. Pose and then open up. Good work, good work. So any questions, come suggestions, let me know in the comment section down below. My job is to cater to you. You wanna see something more or less of, maybe it's a piece of fitness equipment. I'm like Monica, I wanna start pressing this chair. I don't know, release, deep it up. Walk the legs, feet out. This time you're gonna reach for those ankles and then give yourself a gentle massage around the calves, your shins, your quads. Yes. Nice and tall, deep inhale up. Exhale, push out, release. One more, nice and tall, lengthen. And exhale, relax. I appreciate you all joining me. I look forward to seeing you soon. As usual, you rock. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. What is that thing? Looks like somebody's double chin. What's the last snack on fruits and veggies? What's the last snack on fruits and veggies? What's the last snack on fruits and veggies? Welcome to Common Sense. I'm your host Laura Fong. And today we're exploring Torrance Bakery, a business that's been baking up goodies for 30 years now. But first we're going to take a look back to when they first opened their doors on El Prado Avenue and find out how they're staying competitive with trends and utilizing social media. And you're going to find out why Torrance Bakery is one of the best places to work and you'll get to meet some of the employees that have and serving up treats for years now. Well, come on, I downtown Torrance. the bakery is one and a wedding showroom and a cafe as the others. But back in 1984, the bakery was a little bit smaller when they first opened their doors on October 18th. I would help with the decorated the cakes and filling them frosting at the cakes. So I had this little spot right here, this little corner right here. Kurt Rossberg is a fifth generation baker. He worked at local bakeries throughout the South Bay for about 12 years before he saw a great opportunity to buy his own place on El Prado Avenue. At the mere age of 26, he bought a 1200 square foot donut shop and eventually opened up Torrance Bakery with only nine employees. I would be more scared now to open up a place than I was back then. With a little dedication and a lot of hard work, it's proven to be a great investment. The business now spans 15,000 square feet between this location and its second bakery by the same name and gardener. And has gone from 8 to 86 employees, including bakers, decorators, cashiers, managers and more. Even though we've been around here 30 years I always feel it's always what have you done for us lately type of things so it doesn't matter what we did you know two cakes ago or three cakes ago. It's like, how was your last cake? Because that'll dictate whether you get another cake from us. And with decorated cakes accounting for 40% of sales, Torrance Bakery has been known for their innovation in the cake department. They were one of the first bakeries in the nation to pioneer computer-generated pictures on cakes. And now it's like, what are we gonna do today to stay in business tomorrow? So it's always, you know, once you start resting on your laurels, I think you're in a lot of trouble. There's caregiving for information on how to provide even better care for the person who wants to care of you. Don't let me call I mosh with your food. An estimated 3,000 Americans die from a foodborne illness each year. You can't see these microbes, but they might be there. So always separate raw meat from vegetables. Keep your family safe at foodsafety.gov. Welcome back. We're indulging in Torrance Bakery's secrets to success. The business has been nestled in the heart of Torrance for three decades and is dedicated to serving the freshest, most delicious goodies in town, but it's not just cakes and cookies on the menu. It wasn't that long ago that croissants were the big thing. There's fat-free muffins, there's the opran craze, tronuts, or the croissant donut craze was big. Cupcakes have had a good long run. So over the years it's kind of like the stock market. You see various things. You just have to roll with those changes. You can't be so rigid that you're unplexable to change with the times. Rossberg learned early on in his career that it's not about what he likes. Instead, it's about what his customers want. And with an average of a four star review out of a possible five from more than 440 customers on Yelp, it appears the bakery is doing a good job listening. It's a good learning tool and it's a great way to reach out if a customer does have an issue or if a customer has a compliment either way, we'd like to reach out to that customer and say, hey, thanks for the kind words or, hey, I'm sorry you had this bad experience, you know, how can we make this up to you? Social media has changed the way customers and businesses interact, which is why Torrent's Bakery stays connected through Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram. Plus, Rossberg says social media is a useful management tool for the bakery to learn about their market. We're able to find out what works and what doesn't as well. But I think it's huge. I think people passing on information is the cheapest form of advertising you could possibly get. So we use it as much as we can. To stay trending, Torrent's bakery is on top of not only the latest buzz in social media and baked goods, but they stay on top of headlines too. During the Super Bowl, there was the whole deflated football thing that went on. And so, you know, we jumped on that right away and had deflated football cookies. So sometimes it's a way from the food trends to current events on what's happening. You know, what movies are hot right now and what are people paying attention to? And so we try to focus some of that into how we present our products as well. And why not have fun when selling baked goodies? Rosberg points out most people come to the bakery in a good mood looking for a treat for themselves or as a present. How hard is it to keep them in a good mood when they come in here? So by us acting positive and creating happiness and we always have to think quality. So we always want, you know, if we wouldn't want this on our dessert plate, we certainly don't want that to be on our customers' dessert plate as well. So, you know, there's no, well that's okay, it's everything has to be, you know, top notch. Dedication to customer satisfaction and innovative marketing strategies are just a few ways Torrent Bakery has continued to grow and keep their loyal customers. Now stay tuned to find out why it's the best place to work. Oh, I see you don't have to be perfect to be the perfect parent. Thousands of siblings and foster care will take you just as you are. Hey, this job looks perfect. It says you need people skills? Check. It says you need people's skills, driver's license, and high school diploma. You've got one of those, right? It says you need people's skills, drivers license, and high school diploma. You've got one of those, right? Skip the drama. Get your diploma. I got that. You are good to go. Take that first step towards a better future. Find free adult education classes at finisher diploma dot org. Common sense is back and today we're behind the scenes at Torrent's Bakery. We've learned some of the ways the bakery is winning over their customers and now we'll hear why the taurence area chamber of commerce crowned at the best place to work. Beto here has been here for 30 years. He was one of our original nine employees that we have. It's been nine wonderful years. Been here for 11 years now. Eric Esquivel is one of many employees who clocked in a number of years at the bakery. He started at taurence bakery packing cookies to make some extra cash for prom and moved up under the mentorship of Rossburg. I was cursed, I guess, sort of a apprentice when I first started, so he even mentored me. He showed me the basic stuff, quick, easier stuff. And then it progressed to a little bit more challenging stuff, which he also showed me. He gave me the basic tools to succeed. Eskival took the Rossburg taught him plus his creativity and worked his way up to head decorator. It's a really good place to start off and learn. I mean if you're really dedicated to doing cakes and if you really want to get into this, of course it's first good step to come in here or more than willing to teach you if you're willing to take in the information. Dec decorating careers have grown in popularity after shows like cake boss and ace of cakes glamorize the industry. And like other trends, Torrent's bakery has embraced this one too. We have a lot of people, they'll see the cake shows and they want to be a decorator's, but maybe they don't have the skills to be a debt career yet, but they can start off as a salesperson or a counterperson and then just through osmosis they will learn the trade. This gives workers the opportunity to be both an employee and a student. What I tell them is you know what, you're going to get paid but this is really a school you're coming and we're going to teach you all the basics and you're going to see so many things go out at the door that to me this is better than actually going to a culinary school or paying for them to teach you when you can see it all here with your own eyes. Diana Gide is the general manager who oversees all the employees and interviews new candidates. She says many people looking for a job at the bakery already know about the positive environment there. So when I get people in and start interviewing people and they come in and they always say, you know, we hear such good things about employees working here. They're so happy and amazed for the experience that we that there is and it really is an amazing place It's it's kind of more unique to any other type of job just because you see so many different cakes so many different people that walk into that door And we say so busy that is just it's great. The Torrance Bakery creates an environment for employees to express their creativity, continue to learn and be promoted, making for happy employees who are committed to the customer. It's good management, good employees. I mean, employees that are willing to take risk, to make customers happy, give rise to what they want, what they're picturing, and what we're willing to do anything that we can. I think that's what people like about it. It's really nice to have some dependable long-term employees that you know are going to be there and everything's going to be okay. The community has also taken quite a shine to the award-winning bakery. It's been named Best Bakery and the Daily Breeze's South Bay's Best since 1993. The cool part about being in downtown Torrance is, I've always said, it's kind of like a little maybe very atmosphere down here. So here you have a very small town vibe in downtown Torrance, but it's surrounded by all this great business that thrives around us. So we feel we have the best of both worlds and we're grateful to be in downtown Torrance. In the heart of the South Bay, the Torrance Bakery has found success with a variety of customers ranging from local families and residents to working with big businesses. It's really the small community that we focus on. It's always kind of fun to go to, you know, maybe we could go to other bakers and say, how, oh, we did this and this. We did Chevy Chase's birthday cake or something like that, but it's really what we do in the community in torrents and the surrounding area. That's the most important to us. The bakery shows they care about the community in part by giving back. It is kind of heartwarming to get back and it's just important to get back to, you know, it can't always be take, take, take. So we feel it's very important to get back to the community. The Torrance Bakery has been delivering quality treats and excellent service and been a great employer for 30 years, and they hope to see another 30. Hopefully we've had a positive influence in downtown Torrance. We're just trying to do the best we can every day. Thank you so much for watching Common Sense where we offer you a rare behind-the-scenes look at local Torrance businesses and explore the secrets to their success and now I'm going to explore some of these baked goods and hopefully we'll see you at Torrance Bakery very soon. From Iraq and Afghanistan, our brave warriors are coming home. Wounded. Some with wounds you can see. Some with wounds you can't see. Wounded Warrior Project was created to support our men and women coming off the battlefield. Please help carry these warriors the rest of the way home. Get involved at Wounded WarriorProject. Hi, I'm Renee Inge, your host for Common Sense. We've got an exciting episode for you today. We're going to learn how to start a business from an organization that focuses on just that. They're called the South Bay Entrepreneurial Center, and they're dedicated to incubating new businesses. Let's go check it out. I'm going to go. Just to keep it very simple, we make games. We make online casino games. On this night at the South Bay Entrepreneurial Center, Ted Lane's got a chance to others about his online gaming company, MX Digital. For me, Pitch Night is a chance to take the crowd through my company and what our opportunity is and get feedback on what they did understand, what they didn't understand, what they did like, what they didn't like. The South Bay Entrepreneurial Center, or the SBEC, helps entrepreneurs like Ted foster and grow new companies by holding events like Pitch Night, free to the public. Some of the other presenters are presenting an idea for the first time, and they're going to get feedback at a much earlier stage, which is priceless, really, because people who have done it before have success will say, you might want to think about this, you might want to think about that. And that's not all. The SBEC provides crucial connections in the business world. The biggest upside for me was having access to some different mentors and connections. That's turned out to be far beyond my expectations already. The SBEC was co-founded in 2011 by attorney Lee Petalon and Mike Grimshaw, who saw Indeed in the business community. There isn't one or any kind of source like that in the South Bay, but there's a lot of people that have early stage companies and have ideas, innovative ideas to help them bring them to market. Mike himself is no stranger to the business world. I have several different businesses when I was in college, but probably the most significant for me in the entrepreneurial world was when I graduated from college and I went into the gas station business. He learned some important lessons. We had the first self service here in the South Bay and from that I learned after doing a couple of years that one I didn't want to be in the gas station business anymore. And two, how to work with people. Afterwards, he worked for IBM for 10 years and eventually moved up to Silicon Valley. Since that period, I've had the opportunity to start and manage and co-found 12, 13 different companies, mostly in the technology world. After moving back to the South Bay in 2000, semi-retired, Mike realized he had a passion for helping businesses get their start. As an angel investor, working with early stage companies to help them be successful, I just found that that was a passion that I had. He saw business incubation as a way to direct that passion. Taking a creative energy and helping nurture that energy and making it successful, bringing it out into success. Mike also teaches business and entrepreneurship at Marymount College in Rancho's Palace Ferdays. So he decided to challenge his classes to build two incubators, one on campus and one in the community, which was the foundation for SBEC. It became a corporation actually about two years ago on the South Bay Entrepreneurial Center. We self-funded it. There wasn't much expense or anything at that time, so we self-funded a little bit of the cost. They started off in a thousand square foot space and torrents for the first six months and ran training programs and meetings. Meanwhile, we formed a board. We formed an advisory board and everybody volunteers. There's no salaries, no pain,'s just everybody loves entrepreneurship. In 2012 they moved to a larger 24 hundred square foot space on Satori Avenue with the help of a hundred thousand dollar grant from the city's economic development fund. We are part of the community and we're giving back to those companies by providing new technologies here, some growth capability, and for them, they like to give that to the community and have it grow as well. Their goal is to be a self-sustaining non-profit. When we come back from the break, we'll find out more about the SBEC and what services are offered. I believe in an idea. I believe in community. I believe in entrepreneurship. Small businesses. I believe. Help weave people and communities together. I believe in American training. What's even better than dreams is making a dream come true. Scores and nonprofit organizations where we provide free business consulting services to people who want to start a business or Korean business. I believe one person can't make a difference. I am that person. I am that person. I am a score, mental. I am a score, volunteer. What do you believe? You have a gift to share. Small business owners need you. To show them to give them ideas, to encourage them. I do what I do because watching other people succeed gives me great joy. Our client's success is our success. It's like watching your children or grandchildren succeed. Share your success. Volunteer your expertise. You've got it. Share it. Volunteer now at score.org. Volunteer your expertise at score.org. or dot org. I'm going to be a little bit more beautiful. Welcome back to Common Sense, we're at the South Bay Entrepreneurial Center today, the first of its kind in the community. This incubator is really a consortium of talent in people. Founded in 2011, this center offers advice to early stage companies. From how to set up the corporation to issues they might have in product launches, marketing questions, personal questions, maybe proof of business, concept, kinds of things. SPEC is a nonprofit and runs on donations, a city grant and monthly membership fees. It's about $300 a month, which gives you basically unlimited access to the center. And I could come here and work all day if I wanted to and there's Wi-Fi and all the typical features of that. There is an application process. They apply, we screen now and we look at their backgrounds and we look at what they're bringing to the table and what their business is And then decide if we're gonna accept them into the center once accepted members can go into the three-story center 24-7 and take advantage of the flex space by coming You know bright and early in the morning and then I leave like late afternoon So I'm here full days and there are advantages to working around other. Another factor of why I wanted to join an incubator like this was having other founders to discuss things with because sometimes there's a collaborative bit where you can take something away that you wouldn't have been able to do on your own. Other membership benefits include access to mentors. This incubator is a bit unique in that we have a very large pool of mentors to the program. We have over 25 different mentors, each with different disciplines ranging from marketing through to business planning strategy and then into the technical aspects of even setting up a corporation. Which helped Perpell Scott Herring's business ZenCX. Once I started taking advantage of the mentors here, some great insights on who we should be talking to, some great introductions. So we're starting to meet more and more people in our industry. Members also go through training sessions to help their business become stronger. The client has the ability not only to hear educational training and seminars about it, but then also has the ability to practice what they've learned in those seminars. And what members learn here is different from a traditional business school education. Actually, living and breathing, working on a startup, which is a whole other education unto itself. SPEC has as many as 13 members at any given time, but its 200 non-paying members can still take advantage of workshops presented by SBEC. I open to the public, you go up on Meetup.com, under the South Bay Entrepreneurial Center, join the group, and you can sign up. Workshops include topics like marketing, social media, and pitch night. Founders can get in front of investors who are looking for certain things. Number one, talk about how you're changing the world. What is it you're doing that's radically different, particularly radically different these of these competitors? As for the future of SBEC, we'll find out what their plans are after the short break. Minds can achieve anything. We make sure they get to college. Soon Aid provides more than $150 billion in grants, loans and work study funds to make college possible for anyone with the mind to get there. Because of given the chance, minds will do great things. Federal Student Aid proud sponsor of the American Mind learn more about Money for College at StudentAid.gov. As a first time Olympian, it was a true honor for me to represent Team USA in London. I'm also proud to represent another great team, the multiple sclerosis association of America. Who sponsors Swim for MS, a national fundraiser where you can create your own swim challenge. Anything from swimming laps for pledges to jumping cannonballs for cash. If you love swimming like I do, register today at swimforms.org. Sergeant Michelle Garcia served meritoriously in Iraq and has the medals to prove it. Korman Richard Stokeley took the skills he learned in Vietnam and put them to good use as a paramedic. But soon after leaving the military, these veterans faced homelessness. Even after Michelle lost all her savings, and even after Richard battled alcoholism for years, they both reached out for help when they needed it most. A simple fault call put them in touch with a trained professional from the VA. If you know of or are a veteran in need, make the call. We're back at Common Sense here at the South Bay Entrepreneurial Center. The center had its grand opening in 2012. I open to the public, you go up on Meetup.com and to the South Bay Entrepreneurial Center join the group and you can sign up. SPEC is run entirely with volunteers. It really is a communal effort not only from the mentor side but also from the folks that help here and volunteer their time on the admin and the operations aspects of it. It's really a community effort and we're really trying to build the business base here in Orange. The center is currently serving as a prototype for future centers. We're planning on building three additional centers in the South Bay. So we're using this as a prototype to see how we can build it to be sustainable and to be vibrant through the community and physically accessible. In the meantime, SPEC is affiliated with local incubators. We work closely with the Port of Los Angeles. They have a center called Port Tech LA, which is a business incubator designing and developing technologies for the ports. And we're on their board, they're on our board, so we're closely with them. And National Association. We're heavily involved with the National Business Incubator Association, which is a association designed to provide support to all the business incubators around the United States. Even incubators in other countries. It's a really a global environment and business should be global. And locally, the SBEC encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to share their ideas with others. People say, well, I don't want to tell anybody about my idea because they may steal it and take it away from me. That's not true. They believe that most ideas need to be opened up to the world. If you have a creative idea or you're developing a company, get out of your kitchen, get out of your garage, come on over. Now how is that for some motivation to start your own business? I'm Renee Aing and thank you so much for watching Common Sense, where we offer a rare behind-the-scenes look at local taverns' businesses and explore the secrets to their success. If you know of another local business you would like to see featured on our show, please send an email to commonsense at torrentsca.gov. We look forward to seeing you next time. 3 City Cable Welcome Home Welcome to Art Studio. I'm Lisa Lowell, your host, and today we're going to show you how to create instant color for your patio porch or backyard by planting beautiful flowers and containers. And I'm so pleased to welcome Certified Master Gardener, Judy Gerber back to the studio to show us beautiful ideas with annuals and perennials. Welcome back. Thanks Lisa. Thanks for having me. Great to have you. You always come with such colorful things, Judy. It's such a pleasure. And it's so fun to work with flowers. They're so colorful. So tell us a little bit about what we're going to do today. Well basically we're going to make what most people usually call color bowls, which is this example here that I bought at a local garden center just the other night and it comes pre-packaged. They're beautiful. They're great for instant color. We've all seen these. Yes. And a lot of times you might have thought, oh I like this but I don't like this flower or I like this flower. I wonder how hard that would be can I do it myself and they're a little bit you know instead of spending you know say from 20 to 40 dollars on something for a much more economical cost you can build them yourself and have them during the season and you know there are times when it's great if you want to bring someone a gift you can make it and actually they won't know the difference whether you got it at the garden center or made it yourself. So basically we're going to make one of these and show everybody how it's done. Great. And tell us a little bit about flowers. I know there are annuals and perennials and while the name you would think would suggest what they mean, I know it gets confusing for a lot of people who do myself. So annual is something that I tend to think of that gross only once a year. Annually perennial. Excuse me, I got that one. And there's actually biannials which are more than once a year and the perennial that last all year. But basically when you buy a color bowl like this, you're buying flowers that are annuals that are only meant to last, not for a whole year, but for a particular season. So maybe a couple of months. For a couple of months, you know, these have typical spring, early late spring flowers and some summer flowers. This has the petunias, merigolds, which merigolds will last well into the summer, but not necessarily in a color bowl. These lovely, wonderful smelling stock, which are very fragrant, which last in spring. And as much as I love buying these at the gardening center, what I have found, sometimes they've either been there too long already. By the time I get them, this one's gone, this one's dead. Maybe it's me, maybe it's the thumbs I have. But I like the idea of planting your own or learning what to plant so you can either replace as you go or start fresh. Something a little bit fresher. Right and these are really like I said they pack them really tightly because they're meant to be instant color and I would you know we'll kind of go through that when we plant them but you have to remember they are going to spread a little am annuals I mean no matter what you plant, they all need a little bit of care and they need a little bit of room. The other thing... That this could be potentially a little bit too tight if you wanted to flourish. Flourish. But this will last as long as you go through and maintain and what's called deadheading and take off some of the spent flowers and we'll talk about that as we're planning. Okay, great. We talked about container gardening before when I was on the program and this is different than veggies only. It's just a different way of doing it colorfully instead of the way you plant. So is there kind of a structure to this sort of like flower ranging if you will how would you go about starting? See now I'm this is something I would love to have someone come in and arrange one I do it as gardener. But how you basically start is you start with a container. Now, because before we talked about growing food that you're going to eat, we thought it was important, sort of what they looked like, not as much as what it looks like in a container. So when we talk about containers in general, I think it's a good place to start. You can use any kind of container that you like, But because we're planting color bowls or a window box, I brought a sample of a little window box. You're more concerned with what the container is going to look like because it's going to look like. So something like this, any container will do whether it's plastic or wood or clay or even glaze ceramic. I mean, there's some beautiful, especially for a flower arrangement. A lot of people, although one of my friends says she doesn't like to use any ceramic that's colorfully painted because it distracts from the flowers. Interesting. And it's also personal preference, depending on the theme of the flower bowl, you might want something that has certain colors in the pot. But the nice thing about a color bowl is you can use baskets and light. You could even use a smaller container like we have over here to line a basket, a window box thing. These little containers that I got at a local nursery, they have, you can make it a hanging container where you just snap it in. That's easy. And it works pretty simply if I can do it on camera and you pop it in. And it's pretty strong. So basically whatever container you use, it's up to you. It doesn't have to be really deep. It doesn't have to be, especially when we're talking about flowers that don't produce fruit or that aren't dependent on being grown for produce, it's something that has a shallower root system. Okay. Annual flowers especially, because it's something that's not going to last a long time. If you're planning perennials, you'd probably want to replace them and take care of them a little bit better. You might even want to feed them and give them some fertilizer. But if I'm going to do something like this that's not going to last that much longer, I might do a little organic fertilizer when I first plant the but typically I don't and I just use a good potting mix. And before I do that, I just use a good potting mix. And before I do that, I just want to talk about containers, whether you're planting veggies or flowers, you want to make sure you have a nice, clean, sterile container, whether it's been used or not. We sort of talked about this in another or other program, but talked about the fact that I have killed a few plants in my time. I wasn't using old dirt. I wasn't going to say that on camera, but that was your choice. Yeah, basically whenever you plant anything. the fact that I have killed a few plants in my time. Why wasn't it an old dirt? I wasn't going to say that on camera, but that was your choice. Had a bag. Yeah, basically whenever you plant anything, you want to use in a container. You want to use a fresh, clean potting soil. And you don't want to use garden soil because that can be contaminated with pests and bugs. And also because there's no nutrients. Even though I say annuals don't need a lot of fertilizer, they do need some basic food. We all need food even plants need so fresh, fresh, fresh basil. So you want to make sure that you clean out the pot and whether or not you want to sterilize it it's up to you. And then you just start adding flowers. Now before you add flowers or go shopping, I like to think about what the purpose of this is going to be hanging on a porch. going to be hanging be hanging on a patio, is it gonna be on the ground, is it gonna be around a window box? We've sort of talked about before we started filming about shade versus sun. There are some flowers. Again, a great resource to find out what kind of flowers will do good in the sun or in the shade is the sunset, a book like Sunset Western Garden Book. even your local nursery, they're there to help you. And they'll answer questions. So if you figure out what the purpose is, whether it's going to be in the sun or not. And you also have, you are a master gardener, a sort of a master gardener. And you have some, there are some resources you were going to mention to the audience as well online. The University of California, Los Angeles County, has an extension office. Our parent campus is UC Davis. And we have resources, everything from, it's 20 page booklet on how to start a school garden, to how to plant vegetables and containers, to what flowers to use different times in the year. Because when we talk about annuals and perennials, we also need to talk about flowers come in different seasons. And that's the thing about a color basket or box that you have these for spring and summer, but when we take these flowers and plant them, we're gonna have to eventually replace them. We know that going in and you can use the same container and the same methods to say it's Halloween time. They actually now make these cute panties. I got some for last Halloween. They were a little orange and yellow with like a little Halloween around the holidays around Christmas and Hanukkah. You can plant things that have evergreen leaves. They may have less flowers in the wintertime. So that's the beauty and you can move the container around. So as far as what they've done here and what I would do is how you talked about what design or what flowers Basically you want something in the middle that's good and like I said, I'm not a flower ranger So I'm helping some of your viewers will give us some tips But how does for photos from the viewers? So they can send us in all their great design ideas But the thing that you want to do is In addition to it being aesthetically more pleasing to have the taller flowers in the middle, if I were to put these tall flowers around the edge, what's going to happen is they're going to have the taller flowers in the middle, if I were to put these tall flowers around the edge, what's going to happen is they're going to block the sun and the light and the water for the smaller flowers. So from a garden aspect it's better to plant the shorter things around the outside. So they have a little bit of a barrier too, they don't fall over. And so for me personally, I like to plant things along the edges, sort of what they did, but a little more so, these like marigolds are known as kind of they clump. They may not spread like you would like something, a lot of times a lot of people in me, in particular, along a basket edge, I like something that's going to spill over, it kind of has a spillover effect. So these, I picked instead of picking the petunios or the marigolds, I like these verbina to go around the edge because as they grow in, they'll spread over and spill over and give your tainer a little bit too. So that's another issue of why you may not want to use such a beautiful, artfully decorated container because you may not see it eventually. So I brought um so can I begin taking these out? So I brought for your choice I brought some tall ones, some stock which stock are so fragrant and I also bought some um grubbera daisies. Okay. Not only a partial to the name because my last name is the same but because they grow in the center and these are a little bit I only would probably use maybe one I didn't find them in a smaller container but to start with would maybe be by these if I were starting this container, maybe in a 4 inch pot or a 6 pack like this. Just because you kind of want to start as much as possible with all the same size flowers so that they all grow at the same time. Even though you know they're going to be taller, you don't want them to overshadow at the same level. Same level of the exactly. So we can kind of start putting, we started with soil. And like I said, any container will work. The only criteria is that it has drainage holes, which we have on the bottom of this, because we want to make sure that in addition to light, flowers and plants on the water, and the water needs to be in there so that the thing is kept evenly, fairly evenly moist but not soggy. So any container, and if your container you find doesn't have drainage holes, you can always have somebody poke some in for you. So I'm going to try and get this out of our way here this year. And I know, as a beginner, even a sort of experience gardener, it's always a little scary to take them out of containers. How do you do that? So now it's okay to touch every part of the plant. Some people are reluctant to touch the roots or the... So we start we are starting with a little we probably want to put a little more soil in to start with just because the other thing about vegetables versus flowers is when we're doing veggies we can have our soil a little lower because again it's not as aesthetically important to have our flowers. Sure. As it is we have our flowers wanting to pop out. And how tightly packed you have to put the seal? While I'm working and planting, I leave it loose. Again because we're in a kind of a studio environment, I would probably have it a little moisture because that packs it in a little more. But before our purposes you can moisten it up later. You do want to pack it up. You do want to pack it up when you're done, definitely. But for me, the other thing is because you can touch all the plants of the flower, or parts of the flower, you can leave it loose because you might say you put in a color and you put another one you don't like it. So while you're working with it, you want to have the flexibility to move it around. So for now, we'll just kind of... And I've had that experience, we were talking about packing it in. I've had the experience of not packing it down. You water in a couple days later suddenly. Right. Everything is sinking down. It's gone. Well, just kind of and I've had that experience. You were talking about packing it in. I've had the experience of not packing it down You water in a couple days later suddenly, right? Everything is sinking down Right and the thing is everything shifts like we were saying about the container And that that's the one thing about gardening as it teaches us life lessons no matter how long we've been doing it But what you what we were saying is To pack it in when this when we holes, everything goes through the bottom eventually of that container. And like you're saying the soil and all that will sort of shift. So we probably, just to show people we're doing, leave a little space. But we'll start with- I'll let you take the first one. Okay, so basically instead of, a lot of people have a tendency to just take it and grab it and pull it out. Or jump it. Or jump it. So it's okay to touch it, but you just want to be gentle. You have to remember it's a plant and it needs a little care. So you just kind of squeeze and depending on kind of work it out and then you can sort of pop it out. I try not to pull too hard on them, but sometimes if they're packed, that's the other thing that, depending on where you get your plants, they'll have to be root bound and they'll be... it out. I try not to pull too hard on them, but sometimes if they're packed, that's the other thing that, depending on where you get your plants, they'll have to be root bound and they'll be hard to get out. So this one, I'm kind of breaking my own rule, but if we pop it, it's better to probably dump it. It's better to use gravity to dump it out than to just yank on it. Right, so then a lot of times, would you, if you were going to plant this now, would you just, what would you do for yourself? I would think in my head that I need to break this up a little bit, that I would be afraid to. Right. And it's okay to hear the crackling and the breaking of the root. Right. And it feels like dangerous. Right. Suddenly dangerous. The problem of keeping the roots like this and actually one of your technicians that we're talking, he has a trick when you break up, the roots use is a fork to sort of spread the part which I didn't. But the problem of keeping the roots like this, and actually one of your technicians I were talking, he has a trick when you break up, the roots use is a fork to sort of spread the part, which I didn't bring. But it was kidding. So when you're doing it, you want to get, the problem is if you just leave it like this, it's going to grow in a square and it's, the roots are not, they're going to just keep wrapping around themselves. Well frankly, I popped out the dead plant. And it does not expand. It does not expand. And another thing that I don't think I mentioned besides water and sun is plants need air. That's why when we're talking about we are, I probably seem a little reluctant to say, yeah, pack it in because you do need a little bit of air, you need the air to move around. We probably could still sense we're working with it, but we could probably put in more soil because the goal is to have it come up over the top. But basically, this soil on top of the plant, this is their potting soil. You don't necessarily need that. OK, so we might just take some of that out. We might take some of that out. And a lot of people I know I have friends that keep the soils and use it some people don't they want to use all fresh. And then, you know, they've planted things very close together. If you'd like that, a lot of it is personal preference and a lot of it is, you do need a little spot. For me, I might leave a little more spot in between plants, maybe a half an inch or an inch at the most. See, the soil level is a little low, we probably could add some more. And you must have quite a community of gardeners. I understand you have a blog. I do have a blog. Tell us what your blog name is. It's lafarmgirl.blogspot.com. Okay. And that came about because about 10 years ago I started volunteering at the local tour and certified farmers market and I got to meet our farmers and I realized what they had to go through to make a living to sell their produce to us and I started writing about them and telling their stories and that's what led me actually to start guarding myself. Really? And I just came back from the San Francisco Garden Show where because of my blog I started I joined Twitter and I met many garden friends on Twitter and Facebook and they're all garden writers and we all kind of get together and that was our first time to meet in person. Fantastic. So basically I'm trying to prop up our soil just a little. So the other thing is you and I are so busy talking, we're not looking at our colors. So right. Like when we were talking about is it okay to move it? So again, not being a flower ranger, and I would do something, maybe I don't want two of these magenta ones together, maybe I don't want two of these magenta ones together. Maybe I want some red or white ones. Here's another white. Okay. So you kind of move it around as we're going. And just sort of until we are pretty sure that our plants are situated where we want them, we want pack into, and again, like I just did as we were chatting, I kept adding soil growing, that's too high, that's too low, and so then, you know, we'll work. Do you want it more or less to within about two inches? You probably would within an inch and a half or two inches from the top, just because you wanted to spill over, and you want to leave a little room, I mean I noticed even in there, they left, they probably left a good inch because when you water or when you move the containers around the soil will pop out or spill out. So you want to make sure that it stays pretty self-contained. When you water it kind of ends up floating on the top a little bit if you want to work them through and we'll just keep. And then you know you might want to, and there's also no rules against putting in. So let's put some tolerance in. Now the nursery did not have the little six pack sizes of these, so I bought a kind of again and breaking my own rule. These are a little bit harder and they're a little messier to work with, but actually sometimes the gallon size becomes out a little bit easier and I'll just sort of support it. So if you want to pull on that, and this is probably a little bigger, and you can always trim your flowers. There we go. So this might give, again, using something this big, you'll have more soil than you need. And now, could you split this? You could, that definitely, this is more than one flower. So this is a little flower. And how would you do that? Can you literally just cut into it? literally can cut into it with your, just cut straight through like you're cutting a cake. Cut it not in the routine. Although a lot of time you could cut or have my clipper somewhere, but because if you're gentle enough, you can sort of work the roots apart. You can find the roots. See, we've managed to find one plant. Great. So if we want to keep this in here until we decide if you wanted to plant this one, whatever works. Let, it's pretty much, people are very intimidated thinking that if you're working with the plants, you're going to be hurting them. The other reason when I'm working that I don't pack it in is you saw. This is a nice garden potting soil. It sometimes I end up with too much. In the land here when we are filled up with this. As long as we see, okay, I can see in here, I have a good system of roots. I've worked with it and managed to pull it apart, but not broken it. So, you know, again, since this is your show, I didn't know if you wanted, how many flowers you want in the center. I also brought, like I said, the Gerber daisies. You know, I might stick with for this one, I would do my Gerber's maybe in a larger container just because I know they spare a little bit more spreading. What do you do about pests? I know the last time I like planting botanians in the summer. These here. Yes. And I have had a few caterpillars that were eating through, they were eating holes in all the flowers, not just the leaves. The flowers had holes. And I found the caterpillars and I would pull them off as I would find them. What do you suggest for practice? Well, because I practice or myself, I practice organic gardening. I don't use artificial chemicals. They are some good sprays and some organic garden pest sprays that work. And they do work. Some of them do work. They have, I mean, there's different things that work different oils. Some people swear by even natural remedies like mint sprays. There are some people that do all kinds of things that they make at home. The thing about containers, I mean, like you're saying, even though theoretically, you're thinking that caterpillars or slugs can't get up there because we've got a container, they can still slide up. Sure. Especially something of your planning in the winter or cool season when the slugs are out. I mean, for snails and slugs, people use beer baits. They actually sell them at the nursery, which is a natural, I mean, you're still eliminating the pests because basically the snails drink themselves to death or they have copper traps. They have copper traps. Another nice plant to go around the middle. So we talk to go around them. First we have the center we're making tall. So say we decided we just want the one flower. Then sort of the middle, I do kind of like they've done. They use the mary gold to kind of do a ring around the tall plant as mounting type plant. So we are kind of going in rows. We are kind of going in rows. It does make it easier. I mean, maybe, you know, you may be harder to plan on the outside, but it looks better on the camera to plan on the outside. Yes. Shows up more colorful. This is another plant that mounds really well and grows very easily. There are certain flowers that no matter what you do, you could even kill it. Hexen. Like, let's talk later. This is a listen which a lot of people consider to them, they consider it if I talk to some people like to them, they consider it, if I talk to some people like my father, he considers this a weed, because it grows places and recedes itself meaning it comes back every year, even though it's an annual, it actually is acts like a perennial and comes back all the time, but there are perennial varieties. But I think this, what I really love about containers too, is that you do get a quick pop of color. It's not too intimidating. It's a good way to start learning. It's not a big financial commitment. I think what I really love about Containers 2 is that you do get a quick pop of color. It's not too intimidating. It's a good way to start learning. It's not a big financial commitment. It's not a big space commitment because it is daunting and it does take care to keep flowers looking beautiful. And if you take a big space and start too much too soon, it's tough to make it look good. So I think this is really... Definitely. And it's a great way to get familiar with gardening and to get comfortable with it. And again, the nursery, the people at your local nursery are... it look good. So I think that's really. And it's a great way to get familiar with gardening and to get comfortable with it. And again, the nursery, the people at your local nursery are more than happy to answer your questions. They'll tell you certain things that work. I live in the part of West Torrance, where I'm closer to the ocean. And I'll drive two blocks to Hawthorne Boulevard, and it'll be bright sun at my house. So there are different microclimates and there are different things that work. So something like this you could plan in the, you could plan. and I'll drive two blocks to Hawthorne Boulevard and it'll be bright sun at my house. So there are different microclimates and there are different things that work. So something like this, you could plant closer. See the stock, the stock is tall and won't grow out. So you could plant this a little bit closer than you would plant. And we would keep filling in here. And I wanna talk a little bit about, You were mentioning that you lived in Torrance your whole life. I was born in Torrance. And you're also a very accomplished author. You've written a book about farming in Torrance your whole life. I was born in Torrance. And you're also a very accomplished author. You've written a book about farming in Torrance in the South Bay. Wonderful book on a lot of the history of all the history of farming in the area. It's fascinating. How did that come about? How did you get involved in the history? It kind of came in the same way. I'm also involved with it. Now I'm involved with the Torrance Historical Society. I used a lot of their resources to research. But again, when I started volunteering at the farmers market and hearing about, did you know when our farmers market and Torrance first started, we had farmers that were based in Torrance. And now we only have one traditional farmer left. And I just kept thinking, as a writer, I wanted to start telling people the stories of our farmers so that they're not forgotten. So where they go and, you know, I just keep gathering information and it's something that, you know, like I, when I'm not giving classes and telling people to garden, that say after they watch our show and they see how easy this is, they still decide, this is too much work for me and they want to buy fresh fruits and vegetables or fresh flowers. I encourage them to support our local farmers by shopping at the Torrents Certified Farmers Market is wonderful. I mean, I still volunteer there. It's twice a week and... Everything is so fresh. It doesn't have spent a lot of time on the truck. Anytime on the truck really traveling. And then the considerations about buying locally grown produce, growing your own and local grown for hours is that it is better for the environment to buy from a local grower. It doesn't have to be transported, it doesn't use as much fossil fuel. So I mean there's a lot of arguments. Carbon footprint, right? It's producing it. Yes. So as you see, I mean we could keep working. You know, and we might be talking. And we have a lot of open spaces. So like I said, I might leave maybe even two inches as too much. And I would go, I might alternate how I brought some marigolds to have some orange colors. But that's the beauty about doing the color bowl as you can add as you need. Now the question that came up was earlier was annuals and perennials and how do I know how long this is going to last? I mean typically a perennial, see and I haven't haven't even, we're so busy talking, I haven't even gotten to our petunias, which are another lovely kind of clumping flower, but they can grow a little bit taller than say the lism. So you might want to put these either on the edge or actually closer to the middle. But see, when you're talking about something like this, you're going to ask me before we were on camera. How do I know if, you know, I mean, my flowers are just, they're not dead, but they're just not producing, right? They sort of look like plants, but they're not flowering. They don't, they're definitely not all brown. They're still living, but they're essentially dead. So when you spend and you just you feel a little guilty it's sort of like your babies that you've tended to during the summer or whatever month you're guarding in. And then how do you know it's time? Right, well you see this, a lot of people confuse this looks dead. This is actually a new flower coming up. It's closed up versus this one versus that one. Okay, so this one you would just snap it off. Depending on the time you're at the stem, You really just take the blood of the man. Now you could, because it's an annual, I wouldn't go to all the trouble, but you can for a perennial, you can actually, snow. just snap it off. Depending on the time it's not at the stem, you really just take the blood out of the mat. Now you could, because it's in the annual, I wouldn't go to all the trouble, but you can for a perennial, you can actually snip it back. I know what, I know what. The trim is over here. I think they're here. You can snip it back and cut it back and it'll keep producing for the season. Now typically people say, well I did have my flowers and it still dies anyway. That's what annuals do they die. So they will die. So they will die. But once as you can see, I did have my flowers and it still dies anyway. That's what annuals do. They die. So they will die. So they will die. But as you can see, if you have new growth coming up, once you start getting more foliage coming up versus flowers, then it's about, and if you start seeing that the flower production is decreasing. And it's tiny. Right. advantage. I mean it may not look as it may take a while to fill in but by planting a little further apart say one of these for summary. and a cycle is. Right. And the other advantage, I mean, it may not look as, it may take a while to fill in, but by planting a little further apart, say one of these for some reason didn't like the side of the container. Who knows? And it dies. Sure. You can pop one in and pop one out. Now would you leave this amount of space? Could you, I should ask, because you mentioned you would leave a couple of inches maybe, but Could you be done here at this point? If you'd like the way it looks. You could, but I mean like I said probably if we weren't talking so much I would do a couple of things. Be step a little bit more. Yes. you would leave a couple of inches maybe. Could you be done here at this point? If you'd like the way it looks in here. You could, but I mean like I said probably if we weren't talking so much I would do a couple of things. Be step a little bit more. I mean we could do, I mean they will spread. They will spread. That's the thing about flowers and especially the way that they've planted those I would probably bet that they didn't separate the roots and they left them very compact for that reason because it gives you a lot of instant color. And then graded that. Right. But you could leave it spread out and just add when you might find you know these are too clumpy they're not high enough. But the thing about a container is you can always get another container and plant that instead of worrying about you know when you have the bed, you're so concerned with ripping it out and starting over. Or the neighbors. Or the neighbors. Or the neighbors. You're neighboring plants. And I also love, I think you mentioned that these make just fantastic gifts. Right. Right. You love to get that. Whether it's a housewarming gift, like, I mean, I've had a friend who used to make friends, He would take a smaller container like those over there and put a beautiful wicker basket around it and deliver that for like a housewarming gift but like a hostess gift. Instead of bringing a bottle of wine or a bouquet of flowers that's going to die anyway you bring them something that's going to last. Absolutely. You know so you could still do that and like I was saying when we've talked about planting vegetables such as thing as succession planting you could do containers there like right right now the time of year it is it's very early spring and some of these flowers are not going to last so in another month there's going to be different there'll be marigolds sure there'll be zinnias there'll be cosmos so you can do that and take away as you go as you go and do another container to go right next to it if you're not going to replace it sure gradually so Iually. So I mean, that's the beauty of containers that makes it a lot easier. Well, and surprisingly, I'm sure you can tell that we are absolutely out of time. We always work up to the wire because there's so much to talk about with gardening. And I've learned so much. You've inspired me to start with my gardening for the season. Thank you, Judy. Great. And for you at home, we hope we've inspired you to get your hands a little bit dirty, put some instant color in your home. If you have any questions or want more information about today's project. at home we hope we've inspired you to get your hands a little bit dirty, put some instant color in your home. If you have any questions or want more information about today's projects or for any of the resources we spoke of please call us or email us. Thanks so much for watching our studio, we'll see you next time. 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The usual geometric jumble of rods, forms, and scaffolds. by its location alone, here on the familiar axis of American history, it was destined to become a prominent stone in the nation's crown. The first problem architect I am pay faced was the shape of the site, an asymmetrical setback trapezoid on which his building would have to respect the classic symmetry of its older sister and serve also a combined function as an exhibition space and a study center. And there were other challenges. The field height will relate perfectly with buildings on Constitution Avenue. And 100 feet will relate very well with buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue. And if we pick these two heights, we can begin to develop some interesting values. The desire for outward textural compatibility led them back to this marble quarry in Tennessee. Here, forty years ago, the materials for the original gallery had been carved from the same geologic formation. The close correlation of texture, shape, and color were critical. So into the hands of the family that had overseen the quarrying of the original gallery marble went the responsibility. The 15 shades of color, compared with the original gallery where it was 20-21 shades of color. The Architects model revealed how he divided the trapezoid shape into triangles to serve two related but separate functions, a quiet center for the study of the visual arts, and a public art gallery, with a grand public space in between. And crash upon you, what happened, having their footing up. Where were that escalator attached to the old building? The workers whose hands would convert the design into reality were asked to share as equal partners in the final undertaking. They had raised many buildings in their time, but this was a different challenge. I was there trying to help everybody to remember that we got to do it just right. And if you hit a place three times in the vibrator, that won't hurt it. If you miss it one time, there's no bad. That's what it hurts. That right. You're not just at that porn concrete, you're a capitalist placing architectural concrete that people are gonna see forever. And you don't get a second shot at it. What you do is there, man. There's no way to hide it. You either gonna brag about it or or you're gonna be off with shame, one of the two, so you gotta do it right. You'll just never do anything like this again, your life, and so you better live it up this time, once around, this way I look at it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. On every detail, there was to be no compromise and precision. No margin for error. Working with... On every detail, there was to be no compromise and precision. No margin for error. Working with concrete, iron and steel, wood and plaster, they were working in tonnages and crafting in inches. The sharp corners and angles dictated by the design had to be joined in perfect alignment. Skilled cabinet makers fashioned coffer forms of clear-grained fur, finished and rubbed like fine furniture to avoid blemishes and imperfections on the final pore. After weeks of weaving steel, the moment of truth. Music I'm going to get the, but it's just right. I'm going to go slow, but it's just right. I'm going to go slow, but it's just right. What am I not going to do? I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to get you. They had performed a delicate triumph in architectural casting. In the fall of 1975, the bearing walls and concrete work were in place. Now they were ready to receive the marble. It would take three and a half years to prepare properly in place the 7,081 tons of Tennessee marble that would adorn the outer skin and inside walls and floor. Unlike its predecessor, it would have no cornices or trim to cover mistakes in joining. Each meeting of stone would be exposed, leaving no room for error. The marble would expand and contract with the cycle of the seasons. They had to invent and design a neoprene gasket permitting the building to breathe without distorting the knife-like detailing of the facade. No stone was placed indiscriminately. Each was positioned for shape, texture, and color. The parts giving unity to the whole. Major artists of international reputation, men like sculptor Henry Moore and the creator of the mobile Alexander Calder, came to share ideas with gallery director Jay Carter Brown about their works commissioned by the Gallery to enhance and celebrate the new building. The artists had been chosen because of their preeminence and their genius for creating monumental works for monumental spaces. I'd love for guffal. You do give it the opportunity to relate in scale, to trees and other things and not just the building. All my argument was not to have pieces that are attached to the building. You know, it's like you've become like reliefs. It's a decoration to the architect. Yes. I think you should have a sculpture that's separate from the architecture to give scale to the architecture and to the sculpture. Yes. And you have a... It would prove to be Calder's last work of epic proportions. I didn't make a hole. And he would approve its fabrication one week before his death. The ultimate space for Calder's work was the third major element in the building's design. The space frame and main skylight would be constructed 80 feet above the level of the concourse floor, creating a lofty canopy with a 500 ton steel frame. Using aluminum and double-pain insulating glass, it would span 16,000 square feet, more than a third of an acre, culminating in a public space unique in architecture. And it would receive light in a selective fashion to illuminate but protect the artwork within, filtering out direct sunlight, and the ultraviolet rays that could damage the art inside. They came from England, France, Spain, and from across America. By November of 1977, they were ready to receive the first of the commissioned works. They came from England, France, Spain, and from across America. Calder and more. Art. Cairo. Miro. Motherwell. Rosati. There works to be placed in the grand spaces. music I The This building is a gift given to the nation by Paul Mullin, Ailsa Mullin Bruce, and the Andrew W. Mullin Foundation. But it is more than that. It is a statement as one critic wrote of perseverance and excellence against which all buildings and builders must now be measured. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. You don't in job, kid? We gotta score, yo. You want me to do- I got the bus here, man. I got connections. We holding up traffic. Let's go. I'm not letting you waste your life like that, yeah. music I'm your host Jesse Pierre and in this segment of Faces of Torrance we are getting up close and personal with Torrance Fire Chief Martin Sourna. He's been with the department in 1993 starting out out as a student in the Fire Academy. Since then, he's taken on the role as a firefighter, engineer, captain, battalion chief, and so much more. And he's also the first Black Fire Chief to serve the city of Torrance. Family, friends, work, and community are some of the words Torrance Fire Chief Martin S Serna has written on the wall in his office. They are the first words he sees in the morning at the start of his ship, and they are the words he lives by. Really, it's just trying to find balance. I'm a huge proponent of balance. I leave those as a reminder up there on the need to have balances in your life. My parents no longer with us, but they really set the value for us for us as kids on earning people's respect, working hard, and being appreciative of all the things that we have in our lives and always look for opportunities to give back to those that are less fortunate. My faith is where I draw a lot of my direction, you know, especially from the Catholic perspective, it's, you know, giving back and looking for opportunities to help others. CERNA, who is was Mexican and Puerto Rican thanks his parents for building a strong foundation for him and his siblings. He quickly learned them points of hard work and discovered his passions at a very young age. I grew up in City of Norwalk. You know as a child there was a fire down the street. I think I was around eight or nine years old and I remember walking up the street and fire truck shows up, fire engine shows up, and they pull out my friend's grandmother at the time. And from that point forward, I said that's what I want to do with my life. At the time, one of the popular shows was the Merton C51, Squawk 51. It's a kind of a show that highlighted the value of the paramedic program in LA County. So every kid watched it at the time and looking at all the calls it would go on and the excitement of the opportunity of saving people's lives and helping people. You know, that was one of my favorite shows and that maybe kind of planted that seed. From that time forward that's kind of where I just continue down that process. As I transitioned to adulthood, one of the, even as a kid, I really enjoyed helping people and I recognize as I did my research that this profession really does help people. Can you do you remember like your first day at the fire academy? Oh yeah, like yesterday. Yeah.. The first day of the fire. You know I can share back a little bit. You know this is very competitive job and if you're pursuing a dream as you are as anyone else here, we're always pursuing a dream but I remember I got that first call the opportunity to work for the City of Torrance was Chief Thompson at the time. He was a Italian chief now retired left the voicemail and say,, am, are you interested in taking a position? You know, this is Chief Thompson. Are you interested in taking a position with the City of Torrance on the Fart Department? You know, and I remember listening to that voicemail and jumping in, like I just hit the lottery because I believe I did. You know, it worked so hard to achieve a goal and actually it's there now in front of me. So the excitement of that first day of the academy and I share with the group that we have, we have Nyamokruth right now at the station two and I shared with the Alchemyl Fire Academy back in December. You know, a little envious because they're on the front side of the career and the things they'll see and experience through that career or this career is going to be so rewarding. How was the training? I enjoyed it. It's a challenge. I enjoyed it. I'm you know I think anybody's attracted to this type of profession or this line of work you're attracted to that kind of excitement. I thrive on it and miss it. You know my current position doesn't allow me to go out there as much as I would like. No, I drive in that type of environment. I can remember my first I won't call significant call. It was still at El Toro at the time and it was for a gunshot wound and a very tragic situation where a gentleman had snuck onto them to the marine base there and shot his wife. The mother of his kids at the time, we responded on her Sergeant House. You know, I still remember the smell of the gunpowder in the air trying to save her life. Unfortunately, it wasn't we weren't successful, but it was definitely an impactful call. So you recognize it's an automated voice, so that's an auto dispatch center. So what we do is we have the address, so it says, Inji 91, Rescue 91, Difficulty Breathing, gives the address to the location. And then we have, we're keeping track of our, good timing. Is there any position that you miss the most? Paramedic. Yeah. Yeah. Why? Because it gave me the opportunity to interact with my patients. And I really enjoyed and I share with all our folks that's probably the most rewarding time of my career. Not saying the other positions were not rewarding, but it really was the opportunity when I sat in the back of the ambulance and provided patient care. I'm not saying the, you know, like I'd call I mentioned earlier, or the cardiac arrest. It was really just the opportunity just to have a conversation like you and I are having with my patients. You got to meet some extraordinary people and really understand the culture and the DNA of the citizens of Torrance. You know, I've talked to veterans from World War One, World War Two, talked to a gentleman over here at New Horizons who flew bombing missions as 19-year-old, over Tokyo. You know, and so that's what I really do miss. I'll present to you your badge, signifying your appointment as fire chief. Congratulations. Was it a hard decision to go into the office? Yeah. You get into this profession not wanting to sit behind a desk. That's what I joke. I said, I got into this to go on big red and go on to emergencies and give back to the community on that side of the business. I recognized that to provide impact and change and bring forth what I believe is what the organization needs. I believe I had a skill set that was necessary and you know it's not about me. It's not about Martin Stern. It's really about providing what's best for the organization and the team and the community. I thought my skill sets at this level was where I needed to be. Fire Chief is not the only title, Stern holds. He is also a devoted husband and a father to four children. I got married in 1996. My wife sat next to me in high school and biology class. We didn't date at the time, but we came back together shortly Shortly after I got hired with the L-Torough Farty Department and she went to UCLA, she's actually a nurse. We just connected and been together ever since. You always wanted to get married and have kids? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm a family of guys, so that's kind of important to me. Families, the essence of life. That's really what's the most important thing in my perspective, relationships and family to me is the primary number one. I see the coach. Yes, I'm coaching my son's basketball team right now. I really enjoy coaching that age. My daughter just finished her last basketball season at her high school. So life really is at home coaching, getting involved in our church, and just really just trying to find the opportunity to spend time with the busy and chaotic family that we have. Did you ever think of working in any other city or so far for what kept here? It's a great community. I mean you want to talk about a well-balanced city and I mean that's kind of our local right, a balanced city. But you look at the support that the community provides. It's public servants just just phenomenal. You know looking to other agencies. I don't think going to another agency. You not going to have a, again, right now there's only five departments that can place themselves in our category, which is a Class 1 Fire Department and now a credited agency five out of three thousand. Whereas the desire to go look for the opportunities when you are already worked for an elite department. When you are looking at a recruit, what makes the criteria for a person who would be a good candidate? That's a good question, but. But we are really looking for what I'm looking for somebody. It's really who has a servant's heart, who has the passion to serve others. There's characteristics that we're looking for. What What I share with a lot of our folks, and you know, we have a profession where some people trust their most treasured possession to complete stranger. I'm gonna take a leap of faith that you're probably your parents most treasured possession, right? So if you get an accident right here at Carson and Crenshaw, you don't get to decide who shows up. So we want to make sure we have the people with right ethics, character, integrity, the ability to perform. So it's up to me to make sure that we have the right people. Because you get to decide whether you're going to work for city cable or city of torrents, you get to decide whether you're going to go to this doctor, that doctor. But when it comes to an emergency situation, you don't get to decide you dial three numbers and the complete stranger is going to show up. And in the expectation from the community and yourself, your parents, that the person's there is well trained with the caring heart, servants heart, that it's going to make the pain go away. So we're recruiting, and I'm interviewing, I'm making sure that those candidates have those characteristics. So, Nikki was our first woman firefighter, female firefighter that we hired. Oh wow. Paul So-Y was our first Japanese, and that was the first person of color. I'm actually not a second, had Charlie Watson. So anyway, man came in and wanted some models and for a puzzle and it went nationwide. So how many women do you have now? Two. You know we want more women in the fire service. It's definitely way out and represented. I believe believe it's one of the professions. I want to say that we're probably at 5% if not less women in the fire service. It's a challenge for the fire service to attract women as well as minorities. So we've done as we're trying to have a more focused recruitment. You want to call it that and utilize what you established earlier a couple years ago our Grow Our Own program and maybe exposing and providing opportunity for individuals that may not have been interested in this profession. You know, women who historically haven't been interested in the fire service. This gives us that opportunity for us to expose them to a phenomenal opportunity. Having a connection to the African American community is extremely important especially when there's not too many fire chiefs that have my complexion. So recognizing the being a role model. So I'm kind of all over type of background, kind of America, right? So how do you feel about being, well the first African-American, well black, Torrance Chief here for Torrance? I knew you would ask that question but it's not been the only time that's been asked. You know the sad part is, just to have to ask that question, you know, because what some point it would be nice just to be asked the question, how do you feel about just being a chief? Right? But in today's world, still having first is, you know, I think it might reflect back on my childhood and thinking that we would be well-passed some of the stereotypes or the first person in certain positions. We would be past that in at least in my lifetime. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to occur. I think we'll still have some of that, you know, a wide wide range of reasons. So, all right, feel about it. You know, a little sad that I'm the first, but I'm proud of being able to achieve that. I know a lot of, I know my kids and my family recognize that. I know the community does, you know, to be that person, especially in the fire service and in these positions, to be a positive role model. And so I feel fortunate, you know. But I look forward to the day where that question is no longer answered in this country. And Sir, and as always looking for ways to improve. Adding the Chaplain was an important part for us. As I mentioned, it's about providing support for our members, especially since it's a high stress profession. We do have professional help with doctors, psychologists, but we thought of providing a chaplain and from a spiritual perspective was incredibly important to provide that level of support for our members. We've been looking'm 14,000 calls, 15,000 calls I mentioned earlier, but we never really looked to see, we need to have downward trends. And where can we provide opportunities to have less calls? You don't call us, that's a good thing, right? So when you're calling 911 so an example of that last year, we had a fall prevention program. So when we looked at our data, we recognized that one of our number one call, and it was 10% of our calls, not number one, was Falls in our elderly community. So we said, hey, how could we provide some education to our elderly community so they can prevent some falls? I had the opportunity to go to a seminar out in Denver, Colorado back in 1995 and one of the classes that I sat in on spoke about falls in the elderly community 65 and older and they said if they had a deb of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little out of the shower. Maybe you can wear slippers. So we were really aggressive with it. We partnered up with our city librarian, who was a great resource for us, and a nonprofit organization. And we provided that education in our community, and we started seeing reduction in falls, which is a good thing. So now we're starting to look for other opportunities to say, okay, let's look at other areas. We're working to provide some better outcomes. I feel very proud. We got a great group of people that I worked with. You know, we just recently completed something that has only been achieved by five departments in the city California at a 3,000 and that's to be an ISO Class I rated fire department and an accredited department through Center for Public Safety Excellence. This agency from the top to the bottom. I mean if you look at the table They're committed. They get it And I am honored To present this agency with a recommendation for accreditation But it wasn't because of me it really is because of the of team that we have in the organization. We have some phenomenal people. I'm so blessed to have the team that we have and so proud of them. You know, I can speak days on them because they've done and achieved such great achievement for us to get to that level. And I think the community will appreciate it. and it it's going to challenge us to continue down that path of excellence and look for opportunities for improvement. That's something that the fire service isn't really looked at as we are looking at it from a more progressive standpoint and not just output. We went on 12,000 calls last year or 14,000 calls, but really looking to measure outcomes. How can we provide opportunities for improvement and improve the quality of life for our citizens? And the party part of the employees, across the board, just a phenomenal group. So our journey know, our journey's not over. The focus is to stay and make sure that our organization is providing the highest level of service for our community. I'm preparing the next generation who's gonna sit in this role, it's temporary. And I'm sure every career has an expiration date and we just don't know when that's gonna happen. But I wanna make sure that when I do leave, that the folks coming behind me are better prepared than I was coming in here and they're gonna take the organization to that next level. So that's really what I'm focused on and I'm confident we're on that right path. I think we have some great people that are going to come in behind me. You know, I don't know whether I move on from my current role as a fire chief and retire with that time I looks like. I don't know, but it's really, you know, my wife gives good analogy of life about seasons. And we see some seasons last longer than others. So when that next season happens, you just embrace it and move on. The door behind you will close when God says it's time and you just embrace it and you move forward. So I'm not gonna, I don't think anybody should have the perspective, because I know that's what my dad shared with me, if you plan to retire, always have something that you're gonna be passionate about. And recognize, you know, post career. And that's why I really say it's about service of others. And it's me more involved in our church, more nonprofit organizations, the journey never ends. For Faces of Torns, I'm your host, Jesse Pierre, speaking to ordinary people doing extraordinary things. music Welcome to the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health's monthly magazine Meeting of the Minds. I'm Karen Zarsityos. In this month's mental health minute, a team of researchers from UCLA, Boston University and Johns Hopkins found that students who are frequently skipping out on school may have problems with their mental health. The study was published in the journal Child Development. Seventeen thousand kids in elementary and high school were included in the study. Researchers found students who were chronically absent 20 days or more tended to have more depression, anxiety, and antisocial problems than their peers. The researchers hope this data will help school administrators and policy makers address mental health issues and develop programs to reduce absenteeism. In other news, suicide prevention groups and the social networking site Facebook have partnered to help stop suicides. The new service allows Facebook users to report a life-threatening comment when they see a friend post one on Facebook. By clicking on the report Suicide Content Link, Facebook emails the person who posted the comment, encouraging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or to click on a link for a private chat session with a crisis worker. The toll free 24-7 Suicide Prevention Lifeline is linked to local crisis centers and is supported by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, otherwise known as SAMHSA. Hope, wellness and recovery is our department's motto, with more about what DMH is up to. Here's a message from our director, Dr. Marvin Suther. Thank you, Karen. Adolescence is a challenging time for everyone, because during that age, our brains change rapidly as they grow and react to the presence of more hormones. During this vulnerable time, as our brains are creating all kinds of new connections, our social environment assumes a heightened importance. This might seem paradoxical because adolescents are not as dependent for survival on adults as when they were younger. younger assume an immense importance during this age because adolescents have begun to work on three interlocking tasks. They need to begin to figure out who they are. They need to accept and value the person that they find themselves to be. And they need to imagine how that person they are becoming and accepting can contribute to the world. This is a very big job, and here's the thing. No one can find out who they are and value what they find in isolation. We find out these things from the feedback we get from other people. So for young people, finding and keeping good friends who can support them in healthy, positive ways is a keystone of mental health. Conversely, friends who bully us or encourage us to bully other people and who make fun of the ways in which we are different do us and our mental health a disservice. So if you or someone you know is feeling alone and isolated, reach out, find someone you can trust and talk to. No matter how it looks, everyone faces the same challenges and we can overcome these challenges best when we work together. Thank you Dr. Sutherd. We like to share stories and tips on wellness and recovery on this show with more about this and our Walk the Talk segment. Here's Kathleen Feshe. Thanks Karen and welcome to Walk the Talk. My guest today is Dr. Sam Kio. Dr. Kio is a clinical psychologist working for the LA County Department of Mental Health and a survivor of the Cambodian Holocaust that claimed over two million lives between 1975 and 1979. Sam's unique experiences from trauma to success led him to write a memoir entitled Out of the Dark Into the Garden of Hope. Sam has developed an expanded belief of post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD resulting from repeated threats of death over time and in behaviors that present in the next generation of Cambodian survivors. Sam's here today to share his story. Welcome to Walk the Top. Can you describe what it was like when the symptoms of PTSD got really bad for you? What your lowest point was? When it started I started to kind of have something night me and flashback and it was really, that's my lowest point was that I keep seeing my my late mother and my my brothers in front of me. That was the lowest point and then I couldn't take it anymore. So I went, I drove off and was going to off the cliff. You know, just try to, and the suffering. So, but that was the lowest point, and I was lucky that the little voice in my head said, that don't do it. You need to give yourself a chance for treatment. That's in that split second. I Stopped the car and I come home and seek for treatment and you sought help and how did you initially get help for that? First of all, it's like I was afraid because of stigma because I was I am a month of health professional I treat other people Right your license cycle. Yes, and it was like to go and tell people that I have mental health problem, what do my client think of me? That's a stigma that I'm having. That's a self stigma. Right. Something we combat also in addition to the stigma of having a mental illness for anyone. Yeah, and it's kind of like, I shouldn't know, I should kind of debate myself. And finally I said, I gotta do something out of whatever. I would, I would have killed myself. So I went to speak to one of my friend who is there. But, and she was very understanding and she reformed me to, to the treatment. So what is recovery like for you now? And how do you handle things when they come up? Maybe when things get very stressful for you? I always have somebody that I could trust and speak to. Did your family help you when things get tough? Like when things get stressful for you? Yeah, I'm thankful to God. All my family went through the similar deal. So they know how hard it is to go through the flashback, the nightmare, and they really understanding their coverage supportive. Yeah, I mean yours is sort of a different kind of PTSD. We normally think of it as one incident that is traumatizing to someone, but in your case and your families and all the refugees case, it was being threatened with death on a daily basis over four year period. And also now we're seeing different generation of Cambodian refugees, like their children are coming up with secondary PTSD. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, our trauma is every day for, we will live like facing death every day for the last four years during the commarsals. And that's why in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in How do you help them? How can you help them? There's people that have so much. Yeah, too. Well, I have to put myself in their shoe, which I can do very well, because I was there and talking to them and restoring hope, talking about, you are here now, you're safe and work with them to assure their safety and that they're not here anymore. killers not here anymore. The problem with that so many can be murdered at half PTSD, it passed on to their kid because like you said earlier, kid lived with the parents who have emotional problem for all their lives and the kid was born. So they're not handling it? So the problems are passed on to their children. Yeah, the problem will pass on to the children. We use that the research shows and some of us will find we call an intergenerational transmission of trauma when it passes on to children. So if people, it's really important to resolve these issues so that you don't pass it on to another generation and for those people, of course, as well. Thank you so much for coming here. It's today's fam. It's been great talking to you. And I know that there's a very large concentration of Cambodian refugees and Long Beach right here in LA. And you have just opened up a practice, private practice, to treat those people. So that's so great. Thank you for having me here today. Okay, back to Karen. Thank you, Kathleen. And that's the show for this month's edition of Meeting of the Minds. To learn more about the Department of Mental Health and for more information about DMH's programs and resources you can always visit the website anytime at dmh.lacounty.gov. You can also follow us on our Facebook page and watch our profiles of Hope videos and PSAs on YouTube. Just search for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health or LAC DMH. And if you or someone you know is in need of help, you can call our 24-7 Access Line at 1-800-854-771. That's 1-800-854-7771. Thank you for watching. We'll see you again soon. Thank you. . The arts has just been a passion in all my life. A love that's carried excellence in arts winner Janine Ferguson through her 15 years as a cultural services supervisor for the city of Torrance. She applied while she was working at the Palace Verde's Art Center. A lot of programs that I couldn't do up there that I thought maybe I could try here in Torrance. It also gave her a chance to apply her background in the arts. She earned a master's degree in public art studies from USC. Ultimately became a painter and a printmaker in school and then immediately afterwards I worked in interior design and in a lot of space planning and that kind of thing. She got the job in November of 2000 Ferguson grew the visual arts programs for five studios at the Cultural Arts Center and expanded offerings for children. We brought in a new contractor that started a visual arts program for the three to five seven-year-old group. We added quite a few children's instructors. Ferguson says she wanted a balanced program and added more teachers. I do think that the children's program grew tremendously. Especially in the summer we had about three new instructors that we brought on. Summer is the busiest quarter with up to 500 children enrolled in classes. Ferguson also dropped in on courses to make sure both students and teachers needs were met. Teachers very special because then they have that gift of being able to communicate to another person how to do that. So there's, you know, several different things involved with that. She also hopes children learn the basics of shape, form, and balance in art classes, something the youngest students may not understand right away. But, you know, just learning the color wheel is a huge accomplishment. And, you know, they don't realize how that's going to benefit on life. Ferguson moved on her role in November of 2015. She the work she accomplished for in one area we had accomplished with the Torrance Art Museum and I was very thrilled about that. Um, and it just seemed that this was an appropriate time. Her dedication to the arts was recognized recently. Ferguson won the Excellence in Arts Award for Arts Education. It has been a great privilege to work with serious arts professional colleagues. Amazing and talented instructor teachers and the opportunity to get to know many of the students and patrons who take the city's classes. She hopes many students benefited from classes at the center. This was just kind of another opportunity to share art and and expose people to a good quality lesson of learning the basics and you know primary areas of what is good art. And even though she wasn't teaching, she feels the award validates her vital role in coordinating programs and hiring educators. You know, all of those things were very important to me. You know, I did want to do a good job in all of those areas. She hopes classes like those at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center will inspire pursuing their craft. The huge value of being able you know, creative ideas, they can, you know, shape Even bring some peace to artists, whether they're drawing a picture or making jewelry. Ferguson believes it helps a person to focus on improving a skill in that moment. And all of those other worries and cares kind of leave you for a moment. And I think when we can bring joy and happiness to people, that's a very good thing. For Excellence in Arts, I'm Renee to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to get some water. You do anything to take care of that spot on your lawn. So why not take care of that spot on your skin? If you're a man over 50, you're in the group most likely to develop skin cancer, including melanoma, the cancer that kills one person every hour. Check your skin for suspicious or changing spots and ask someone you trust to check areas you can't see. Early detection can put you in a better spot. Go to spotskincancer.org to find out what to look for, a message bit on the sort of mythological and fantasy and a little bit of supernatural. Excellent. And Arts winner, Bondo Waspolsky says that passion for writing started when he was a kid. I think it must have been as a child seeing films like Mighty Joe Young and the 7th Forage of Sinbad. That's when he fell in love with the arts. Maybe I didn't know at that point that it was going to be writing necessarily, but certainly I think that's where it all began. His first story was about Godzilla, which he wrote in a spiral notebook and drew accompanying photos. He eventually edited his college's literary magazine and wrote a column for the newspaper. But it's his work for the LA Weekly Paper, Easy Reader that earned him an Excellence in Arts Award for Literary Arts. I entered a contest, a tall tales contest, and I wrote a story and I think that was back in 1982. He started freelancing for the community paper. One day, the owner asked him if he wanted to be the entertainment editor. It sounded rather good, so I said yes, and that's been over 22 or three years now. He started off writing two to four articles a week about different local artists, even though he's written hundreds of pieces, he still finds new subjects to feature. And I suspect some of these people that I'm writing about maybe they weren't even born when I started at this point. Was Polski has a fairly simple interview process. We will meet some place and I'll have my tape recorder and often a camera to take a picture of them too. He'll tape 30 minutes of conversation and transcribe it to get a better understanding of his interview subject. That's my raw material and then I'll turn that into the article. It takes him about two days to finish. Currently he writes three articles a month covering theater, the opera and art shows. He's interviewed L.A. Ardice June Wayne and play right August Wilson. But there've been other people like Werner Herzog and Peter Bogdanovich. I mean, people that are relatively well known. Even with all the articles he's written, Wispolski has a unique view on his career. I've always considered myself not a journalist at all, but a novelist. And I don't have any published novels. I've written a couple and I've been writing one. He's been working on it for 20 years. It takes place in South America. And I traveled there with an artist who's been dead for 200 years. But it doesn't matter because it's all part of the whole scheme of things. He hopes to publish it one day, but for now he's happy with his current work. Whenever I write something that I'm pretty pleased with and I see it in the paper or the magazine and it looks pretty nice on the page, then that at that time will be something that I'm really proud of as an accomplishment. Something else he's proud of, his Excellence in Arts Award-Win. I think the Cultural Arts Commission for thinking highly enough of my newspaper contributions on local arts and entertainment, although I must acknowledge Easy Readers Kevin Cody for having kept me around for over 20 years and for allowing me quite a bit of leeway, especially for my often feeble attempts at humor. It's nice to be recognized and it gives one a little bit of maybe self validation or something. Validation that was Polsky says artists need from time to time, giving him confidence for his next project. He wants to combine pictures with anything he writes. For Excellence in Arts, I'm Renee Ing. The I'll turn my head and have to, until my 70s. He's a great college for our kids. Out of the question, will I always be working weekends just to stay out of debt. Is the American dream? Out of our reach? Not if we can help it. We're the national endowment for financial education. A non-profit organization dedicated to helping people just like you get smart about their money. Log on to smartaboutmoney.org today and start taking control of your financial life. Help us closer than you think. fans of the TV show Loveboat may recognize this face Ted Lange that's known for his role as the bartender on the long-running show, Lange carved out a very successful entertainment career that started at a young age. When I was in the ninth grade, I was a class clown and the teacher gave me the lead in a play and the play was a Christmas carol I played Scrooge and in order to shut me up for the rest of the year he would promise me the lead in the next play. Lange caught the acting bug early. He went on to perform in Macbeth and fell in love with theater. The Oakland native wanted to study drama in high school but had to convince his counselors first. When I was in high school, they wanted me to go into auto shop because at that time we're talking about the 60s and 1960s. That was the thing that they felt African Americans would be most suited for. Lange got his way and flourished on stage in high school. I really enjoyed being on stage. I didn't get nervous. I loved the communication between actor and audience. He studied drama in college and eventually joined a theater company in San Francisco at the age of 18, playing the lead role in Romeo and Juliet. From that point on, I was like set on this is what I want my career to be, but I wasn't really making any money I was doing odd jobs to make money but my goal was always to be. But I wasn't really making any money. I was doing odd jobs to make money, but my goal was always to be a professional actor. Lange went on to perform on Broadway in the musical Hit Hair, developing characters that would prove useful later in his career. I would discover little characters and I kind of put it in a pocket and I'd save that. So that when I got a chance to audition for film and television, I said, oh, that's like, uh, Georgie, I'll pull out this Georgie character. In addition to love boat, Lange starred in TV shows, including Mr. T and Tina, and that's my mama. Ah! Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to unite in holy matrimony. He eventually turned to directing television shows and writing plays, which is what earned him an excellence in arts award for literary arts. The longtime Torrance resident prides himself on listening to everyone's suggestion, regardless of the role. Sometimes I'll change it because I'll see the actor has a strength that I don't have as an actor, or I try to bring their weakness up to a strength to, because it may be crucial for the plates, depending on the play, depending on the actor. That can lead to a long process of rewriting. And then what I do is when I put it on computer, I print it out, then I rewrite again. Lange draws his inspiration from different sources, especially Shakespeare. He wrote a prequel to Othello and will perform it in Los Angeles on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. Lange also likes to dig up little-known facts. I take the footnote and I put it on the page. So I'll write a play about George Washington and his favorite slave, William Lee, and Martha's favorite slave, Only Judge. Those footnotes turned into his play called George Washington's Boy. I've pieced together the things about George Washington's life that included his slaves so that you get a broader view of what his relationship was with his slaves and what Martha's relationship was. His latest play, Let Freedom Ring, was performed at the Necono Theater in February of 2016. Lange says he's grateful to show his work in Torrance. These are two of my actors. They belong to the unofficial Ted Lange Repertory Company. It's unofficial because I can't pay them. So let me set this up for you. In La Frida Marine, it is 1846. The Liberty Bell was stolen and then retrieved. And when it was wrong, it cracked. The community started to know about me. And there's nothing better than being in the community that you're in and being able to contribute something in my particular case artistically to the Torrance community. He was surprised at his excellence in arts award win. I was excited I told my I said hey they like what I'm doing here. Although he might be the one most recognized, Lange says he was excited to meet other winners at the awards ceremony. I loved it. It's good that everyone knows everyone. I think that's essential for artists is that we should know each other and we should support each other. So that's I'm very pleased about that that's going on The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The you I'm going to get free G. When you earn your GED diploma, the barriers in your life fall. Take the first step and get free GED information in your area at 1-877-38-GED or yourged.org. Earn your GED diploma and begin your brighter future. . The Arts were saving grace for Larry Watts. The place where I felt most comfortable was the arts. As a matter of fact, I didn't think had I not had that available to me in high school, I probably wouldn't have graduated. His passion for the arts led him to earn a degree in musical theater education from Cal State Fullerton. Watts performed on national tours of sound of music and fiddler on the roof. Afterwards he was chosen for the Ellie Music Center's exclusive professional arts program. 22 students from all of the United States, 11 men and 11 women, chosen to be trained as stars. That was a year long worth of that. But after he finished the program, Watts wasn't sure he wanted to keep performing, so he took a break. Decided that maybe I shouldn't do that for a while, went to work for the City of Pasadena. Jobe me crazy. Then started working for a dinner theater called Tibbies. That eventually led Watts behind the scenes to directing. He's worked at theaters from San Diego to San Jose. Eventually, his name became well known in the South Bay after directing at Palace Verde's Peninsula High. And once my name got known on this area, I was approached by the conservatory. And that's been almost, I think, 13 years ago. and I've been working with them ever since. That's the South Bay Conservatory. Here they are rehearsing for a show. Watts has directed dozens of young performers in the group, even some as young as five years old. I didn't think at the time that I would like the little ones as much as I do, but they're like little sponges. They just take everything. And it's wonderful. On average, he directs between eight and ten plays a year, passing on knowledge from his acting days. As a director, I can also see it from the actor's point of view, because when you haven't done both, you can't really understand both minds, because it's a different mindset. But it's the effect performing has on the students that he loves the most. We see them grow into confident adults. So by the time they leave here I think they're ready to take on the responsibilities that come with being an adult. And some of his students even move on to pursue a career in musical theater? It's love. It's 1,500, 2,000 people loving you. That's pretty great. When you're not playing your faces are always animated. Your bodies are always animated. Now someone explained to me what I'm talking about. Inspiring students with his love for musical theater earned Watts an Excellence in Arts award. I'm not one that people will tell you that I don't toot my own horn. So when my horn is tooted, it's nice to know that someone is taking the opportunity in the time to say what he does is very good. So good that two of his conservatory students honored him with the performance at the Excellence in Arts Award ceremony. Because we know we have been changed for more. Caitlin Kristin singing the song that they did for me just even now I get choked at just choked me at because I don't have children so to know that they feel that for me is incredibly touching. He hopes people who watch his shows walk away equally touched. I would love to believe that through the the shows that we do kids and audiences we can reflect on the good things in life. What's prefers plays with a positive message. I tend to love the simpler stories, the stories that deal with simpler emotions, and the stories that have a positive message. When What's Isn't Directing, he's running a costume rental company to professional and community theaters. I've been fortunate enough to be able to create my vision probably a lot more than a lot of directors because I do design sets and I do the costume design so I can see the full vision and make it come to for a vision. Leaving Watts to watch proudly from the wings as his students perform after weeks and weeks of rehearsal. I kind of sit back and watch everybody watch it all come together and watch everybody enjoy themselves. The The Asian nofoil just won many invasive species that are threatening our nation's fisheries. Do you have the heart to prevent the spread of harmful invasive before it's too late? Before you leave the landing, inspect, clean, and drain your boat, motor, and live wells. Properly dispose of any invasive species you find. That includes dumping, not releasing into the water, your unused bed. Hey, remember these three simple steps. Inspect, clean, and drain. Do your part to halt the spread of invasive species. For every pound you lose, that's four pounds of pressure off the knees. To find out more, go to fightartrightispaying.org. The the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the Torrance native Allison Lockhart started dancing as a child and hasn't stopped since. I literally used to gather kids in the neighborhood and put dresses on them and just make them dance, a routine that I just made up, you know, not to music or anything. But Lockhart says it wasn't until she was a teenager that she learned about partnership dancing. I remember being a teenager watching the movie Dirty Dancing and at that moment I really saw a partnership dancing and kind of the passion that it can have between just a man and a woman on the dance floor and I felt really intrigued by that. Little did Lockhart know that was her future. She now owns the dance lounge in Torrance, a studio offering five classes a week with three instructors, including herself. All the teachers have to pass a vigorous test. So that, you know, we can verify that we know how to teach it from the footwork that counts the amount of turn, the styling and everything. Lockhart studied dance at El Camino College, the dance factory, and an Arthur Murray studio. She's been teaching since 1997 and opened her studio in 2011. She loves the moment when it clicks for a student. And a lot of times, you know, I'll get people that are totally afraid to step onto the floor. And I love seeing the moment when it actually all clicks and they're doing exactly what I told them to do. Lockhart says students as young as five years old to almost 80 walk into her studio, they can take private and group lessons. Yeah. I really want people to experience dancing and feel like they're dancing when they're out here. She encourages students to go out and dance for friends and family after honing their skills. She believes the social aspect of dance is one of the best parts. It's really contagious energy and once it happens you want it again and again and again because it's so much fun. And it's fun for the body. Our body stays physically fit throughout this process because we're always challenging ourselves. We're moving to fast music, we're moving really intensely but to slow music. Currently her studio offers everything from ballroom to rhythm to Latin dance. She holds large parties at the dance lounge for students to perform in front of others, along with social gatherings, lock heart, also choreographs. A lot of times it's a certain beat to the music that will kind of sing to my heart a little bit. And I feel like, okay, if I'm wanting to move, when I'm hearing this song, then that's how other people are going to feel. She says her male students are typically more rigid when they first walk in, but they loosen up. There's a specific way to target your fundamentals. Once that happens and they see the results, then I think that men really realize it's all just a process again. She says women are more relaxed when they first take her class, but typically you have to learn how to follow. It's Lockhart's dedication to her students that earned her an excellent and arts award. I mean I was kind of floored by it because I feel like to be in a pool of such established people it was such a real compliment to what I've been doing and it just felt really really good. Lockhart had no idea she was going to win. There are people out there watching it. I had no idea. Which was really exciting to know that and really heartwarming. The night we run the answers, we all know. Yeah. She hopes one day to expand her studio and offer more classes, but for now, she's content to watch her students succeed in class. It's like everything just ties in all of a sudden and then they even realize I'm dancing. Hey, Kit, what's shaking besides me? Dad, there's something wrong with the fridge! What? Oh, a snack! Got energy hulks in your house? Now you have the power to do something about them. Log on to energyhulk.wolk. Speak as in... You have the power to do something about them. Log on to energyhulk.woke. Because... you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I. But by its location along, the building was a very large building. The building was a very large building. But by its location alone, here on the familiar axis of American history, it was destined to become a prominent stone in the nation's crown. The first problem architect I am pay faced was the shape of the site, an asymmetrical setback trapezoid on which his building would have to respect the classic symmetry of its older sister and serve also a combined function as an exhibition space and a study center. And there were other challenges. The field height will relate perfectly with buildings on Constitution Avenue and a hundred feet will relate very well with buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue. And if we pick these two heights, we can begin to develop some interesting values. The desire for outward textural compatibility led them back to this marble quarry in Tennessee. Here, forty years ago, the materials for the original gallery had been carved from the same geologic formation. The close correlation of texture, shape, and color were critical. So into the hands of the family that had overseen the quarrying of the original gallery marble went the color. The Architects model revealed how he divided the trapezoid shape into triangles to serve two related but separate functions, a quiet center for the study of the visual arts and a public art gallery, with a grand public space in between. And crash upon you. What happened, having there putting up? Well, that escalator attached it to the old building. The workers whose hands would convert the design into reality were asked to share as equal partners in the final undertaking. They had raised many buildings in their time, but this was a different challenge. I was there trying to help everybody remember that we got to do it just right. And if you hit a place three times with a vibrator, that won't hurt it. If you miss it one time, there's an event. That's gonna hurt, that's right. You're not just out there pouring concrete, you're capitalizing architectural concrete that people are gonna see forever. And you don't get a second shot at it. What you do is there, man. There's no way to hide it. You either gonna brag about it or you're gonna be off with shame, one of the two, so you gotta do it right. You'll just never do anything like this again, your life, and so you better live it up this time, once around, this way I look at it. Ha-ha. Ha-ha. Ha-ha. Ha-ha. Ha-ha. On every detail, there was to be no compromise and precision. No margin for error. Working with con... On every detail, there was to be no compromise and precision. No margin for error. Working with concrete, iron and steel, wood and plaster, they were working in tonnages and crafting in inches. The sharp corners and angles dictated by the design had to be joined in perfect alignment. Skilled cabinet makers fashioned copper forms of clear-grained fur, finished and rubbed like fine furniture to avoid blemishes and imperfections on the final pore. After weeks of weaving steel, the moment of truth. Music I'm going to slow slow, but it's alright. I'm going to get it. I'm going to get it. I'm going to get it. We're not driving that deep. I'm going to get you. They had performed a delicate triumph in architectural casting. In the fall of 1975, the bearing walls and concrete work were in place. Now, they were ready to receive the marble. It would take three and a half years to prepare properly in place the 7,081 tons of Tennessee marble that would adorn the outer skin and inside walls and floor. Unlike its predecessor, it would have no cornices or trim to cover mistakes in joining. Each meeting of stone would be exposed, leaving no room for error. The marble would expand and contract with the cycle of the seasons. They had to invent and design a neoprene gasket permitting the building to breathe without distorting the knife-like detailing of the facade. No stone was placed indiscriminately. Each was positioned for shape, texture, and color. The parts giving unity to the whole. Major artists of international reputation, men like sculptor Henry Moore and the creator of the mobile Alexander Calder, came to share ideas with gallery director Jay Carter Brown about their works commissioned by the gallery to enhance and celebrate the new building. And then a couple more pieces come out. That's right. Here it is. That's the front room. The artists had been chosen because of their preeminence and their genius for creating monumental works for monumental spaces. Oh, right. I'd love to have a little bit of the gospel. You do give it the opportunity to relate in scale, to trees, and other things, and not just the building. All my argument was not to have pieces that are attached to the building. You know, it's like, you've become like reliefs. It's a decoration to the architect. Yes. I think you should have a sculpture that's separate from the architecture, to give scale to the architecture and to the sculpture. Yes. And you have a space. It would prove to be Calder's last work of epic proportions. I may go. And he would approve its fabrication one week before his death. The ultimate space for Calder's work was the third major element in the building's design. The space frame and main skylight would be constructed 80 feet above the level of the concourse floor, creating a lofty canopy with a 500 ton steel frame. Using aluminum and double-pane insulating glass, it would span 16,000 square feet, more than a third of an acre, culminating in a public space unique in architecture. And it would receive light in a selective fashion, to illuminate but protect the artwork within. Fildering from England, France, Spain, and from across America. Calder and more. Art. Cairo. Miro. Motherwell. Rosati. There works to be placed in the grand spaces. I The This building is a gift given to the nation by Paul Mullin, Elsa Mullin Bruce, and the Andrew W. Mullin Foundation. But it is more than that. It is a statement as one critic wrote of perseverance and excellence against which all buildings and builders must now be measured. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a kid. in job, Kate. We gotta score, yo. You want me to do- I got the bus here, man. I got connections. We holding up traffic. Let's go. I'm not letting you waste your life like that, yeah. You want me to do it? I got the bus here, man. I got connections. We holding up traffic. Let's go. I'm not letting you waste your life like that, yeah. Today on Community Cooking, we have guest chef Elizabeth Cercio making homemade ruscetta as a starter, then spaghetti with muscles that will have you craving more. We are cooking with some of the best chefs from right are you? How are you? I'm good, thank you. I'm good to see you again. Thank you. Happy to be here. Well, you know, last time we're here, we let everyone know. You are a private chef, but you're one that comes with an impressive resume. You serve as some some some pretty famous clients. Yes. Entertainers, Martin Lawrence, I think you were saying who else? Mariah Carey. Mariah Carey. Okay. Uh, Jacqueline Smith. Okay. And I think you were saying who else? Mariah Carey. Mariah Carey. Okay. Jacqueline Smith. Okay. And I think Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton. All right. That's pretty good. Oh, the secret service. The secret. That's a good one. That's a good one to get the secret service on your side. Okay, well, you have brought with you today another fantastic menu. We're gonna start off by making spaghetti with a sauce of mussels and tomatoes, and then you're also gonna do a brusqueta for us as well. Yes. Great, great. And you were explaining, you were from Brazil, you were a Portuguese Brazilian, and you were saying that this is, while it seems Italian, it's actually very much a Portuguese dish. Yes, it's from Portugal. Okay, is this something that you grew up with? My dad left from Portugal. Okay, alright, so plenty of seafood in Portugal, I know that. All right, I'll tell you what, why don't we start going through some of the ingredients that you're gonna use in this dish in this spaghetti? So I have some garlic, red chili, fresh... Oregano? Oregano, fresh tomato. Okay. I just boil them, take the skin off, take a little the seeds off and I'm gonna use it. Okay yeah so this is important to say so you didn't use canned tomatoes for this. I don't like it because it has too much preservatives. Right right you made you made your own and you just put those into boiling water until the skins start to peel off the skins and then take out some seeds and that's what you're left with. Yes. Beautiful. And this here we have some white wine. White wine. And then we've got our pasta and you're using spaghetti today. Yes. I would imagine you could probably change that with another pasta though. Yeah, we can use a linguine. would be nice as well. And then we have of course the star of our dish, the muscles, correct? And these are also pre-cooked. Yes. Yeah, we can use a linguine. And then the linguine would be nice as well. And then we have, of course, the star of our dish, the mussels, correct? And these are also pre-cooked. Yes. And why don't you explain how you did that? You have to, when they bring home, you have to rinse them. Really well. They have a lot of sand. They also have the beard on them, too, that you have to pull out. Right. And then you put some olive oil on a pan, let the oil get very hot. OK. And then you put some olive oil on the pan, let the oil get very hot. Okay. And then you just jump them in there and put the lid on. So they're gonna open and they got, you have this. That's what comes out. This gold. This is right and it is every, isn't it? It's a gold. This is delicious right here. This is what's gonna make that sauce. Yes. That's what they call it the liquor. Yes. That comes from the muscles and it's a me- It is every, isn't it? Is that gold? This is delicious right here. This is what's gonna make that sauce. Yes. That's what they call it the liquor. Yes. That comes from the muscles. And it's amazing that this many muscles yielded that much liquid, but they do. Yeah. And it is truly, truly delicious. You could put that in a coffee mug and drink it. That's a gold. Yeah, right. Okay, so let's make our pasta. I would imagine you probably want to get this pasta dropped through, is our water boiling? Yeah, I think we are. Yeah, look at that. Here it is. Yeah, right. Okay, so let's make our pasta. I would imagine you probably want to get this pasta dropped in what is our water boiling? Yes, I think we are. Yeah, look at that. Here are chef. And is there anything in that water? Yeah, put some salt in olive oil. Okay, so you do use olive oil, because I know that some chefs say yes, some chefs say no with the, everyone says yes to the salt. You need the salt to flavor this. To look, wow, look at that. To flavor the salt. You need the salt to flavor the... Well, look at that. To flavor the pasta. But a lot of chefs... Some chefs will say no olive oil, some chefs. I use because they don't get sticky. Right. Sort of coated. A little bit, not much. Okay, so how long are we letting that cook for, Chef? Between nine and 11 minutes. Excellent, okay. And then we're gonna cook that till it's just al dente. Yeah. Great. And for those who don't know, I mean, how would you describe al dente, just sort of a little bit of a toothsome chew, right? When your bite is a little, natural, hard, natural soft. Right, shouldn't stick in your teeth, but it shouldn't be mush. Yes. Somewhere in between. Great. Okay. So, should we get started on our sauce? Sure. All right. And where do we start with that? Olive oil. Okay. The meantime when they got a little hot, I'm going to chop it up, the tomato. Oh, perfect. These are the tomatoes that you prepped. Yeah. It looks beautiful. So much nicer to use a fresh product than a canned product when you can. I don't like nothing from the can. Nothing at all. No. So we're just doing a little bit of a dice here just to kind of break it up because this sauce doesn't cook very long does it? No, it's very quick. That's nice, that's nice. That's another thing a lot of times people think that sauces that you put on a pasta have to take a long time but not all do. I mean there are some very quick sauces. Only the tomato sauce. Right, like a marinara or a pomodoro sauce. me sometimes today is to make. Wow! That's a look. That is a long time. But a simmer for two days, when you eat them you cannot believe it. Really? Yeah, I learn how to make it. Don't throw this away. Oh, not going anywhere. I learn how to make with my my mother-in-law, the tomato sauce. She's the best cook I have ever seen. Really? Yeah. And your mother-in-law, she also Lebanese? She is from Lebanon. And she makes an Italian sauce? Yeah, because her husband was from Italy. OK, there you go. All right. Yeah, sort of half-do. I think this is done. This is done. Okay. So we've got our perfectly cooked pasta ready to go. And do you want to turn that burner off or? No, because I'm going to put some. Oh, okay. Oh, that's right. The butter trek. Yes. Right. Yeah, butter does make things taste really good. That's the French people said. That's right. Everything with butter tastes better. That's right. And then also something else that sort of keeps it from sticking as well, gives it a little bit of oil. You don't use any of the pasta water in this sauce? No, because I have this. Oh, that's good. Yeah, true. Now this one. Right. And why would you use pasta water when you have liquid gold? Well, they're kind of the pasta sauce that make. It's got a little bit dry. I use the pasta water. This is done. Okay. I'm gonna change it. Can I borrow this? Yes, you may. Thank you. Alright. I'll put this in here. Yeah. Great. And now I'm going to put that garlic. Alright. And this here looks like chili pepper? Yes. Okay. Is that a serrano? Yeah. Red serrano. Yeah. The little one. Alright. So they're garlic. You cannot cook them much because they got bitter if they got dark. Right. Yeah. That's that you can smell it. Nothing worse than like burnt garlic. Yeah. They cook very quick. You're pretty much starting from the beginning at that point. You're starting over, I should say. All right, here you go. And then what are we doing here? Just kind of just kind of getting the flavor out, right? Yeah, now I'm going to put the wine in. We do this a little bit. And that's just dry white wine, like a shardine, or an abiruseo or something. Oh yeah, that smells really good. Yeah, I think also too shellfish and the chili, the heat from the chili works really well with shellfish, don't you? Yes, yeah, I don't put that much because some people didn't like true spicy. I'm good with it, but yeah, I've got some of the, And one of children actually? He's, they got an inversion to spice. Yeah. But for the most part, we're pretty good. I really enjoy it. Like I said, I think that it works so well with shellfish. Okay. And put the tomatoes now. All right, fresh tomatoes that have been seeded and peeled. Yeah, this is going to take a few minutes. OK. All right, just going to bring that all together. Yeah. Now we're going to put the salt and pepper. OK. Got to give it a little bit of seasoning. What kind of salt do you use? You use kosher? Kosher, always. Yes, yeah. Great. Much easier to handle, much easier to season correctly, right? Yeah, because salt has a problem. You can put it on, but you can't forget it out. That is correct correct. And for some reason, table salt, that iodized salt is so easy, things go from under season to to salty very fast. With the banana one, not with this one. Not with that, right? Right here. So now this is reduced a little bit. Okay. Smells great. Smells great. And we haven't even added our liquid gold yet. Now. Now I'm going to put your egg on it. Okay. Fresh egg on it. You prefer that over the dried for this? If you use fresh, you have to use less than the dry one. The dry ones too concentrated, you have to put less than the fresh one. Those flavors concentrate. Fresh oregano is really pretty awesome. I think it's much more floral than the dried. Yeah. You know? No, I don't use that much dried spices or herbs. I like the fresh ones. Right. Right. You're absolutely correct. And you know, why not? I mean, we live in Southern California. We get all of that, so might as well use the fresh. And then how long does that have to go before we add this? Just a few minutes. It's almost done. Now I'm gonna put a little bit butter on this. Oh, here, yes. On this sauce. Oh, I like that, too. Not much. I like that, too. Brings it all together, makes it nice and creamy. Make a little, thinking. Right, sticking in a little bit, sure. Okay, so you're just kind of showing how they just, easily they come out of the shell there. It's very easy. Right. Great, yeah. You're just removing a little bit of the adductor. Yeah. Okay, there's a, as you can see it here, on the shell, this is called the adductor, and that is what fastens the actual muscle to the shell. So sometimes when you remove it, some of that comes with. And not that you can't eat it, it's just fairly, it's chewy and fairly indigestible. But that's the nice thing. Yeah, you don't want to cut. So whenever you can take that off, that's good. I mean, all shellfish have them. That's how they adhere themselves to the shell. Great. Great, look at that. It looks to me like we're almost ready to toss some pasta. The recipe is 6 pounds of muscle. Which sounds like a lot. I have 3 pounds here. Right, okay. That's okay. Half the recipe. Half the recipe, okay. Yeah. Sounds like a lot, but actually mussels weigh a lot because they have shells. And it sounds like it might be expensive and it's really not. Mussels are actually fairly inexpensive. Yeah, it is. Much more affordable than a lot of other shellfish. Okay. Oh, that's going to be great. Alright,, so I imagine you're just going to mix that around, let everything come together, and we're ready to go. Yeah. It's perfect. I will allow you to do that. We'll get cleaned up, and we'll take a break, and on the other side, we're going to make a little brusquetta. So don't go away. We'll leave right back. Alexa, how do you tell Phasparagus is still good? If it's not moldy or slimy, it's okay to eat. Enable the new skill from save the food on your Amazon Alexa and help fight food waste. Bye, you look good. Hi. Hoping for a crisp breeze to help keep you alert. Oh, oh, he took a sip of water too. That'll probably help. You're probably going to turn down the radio too. See, you could focus. Right? Probably OK? Isn't OK. If you see a warning sign, stop and call a cab, a car, or a friend. I think the waterline is what really drove at home. I blew on them. Welcome back. I am in the kitchen with Chef Elizabeth Cercio. We have finished our pasta, which smells divine. And I cannot wait to get into that. It smells so good. But now we're going to make some brusqueta. Yes. All right. And I've got the bread. I imagine you probably want me to start dealing with this. start dealing with this. Please. You want me to cut it for you? Sure. Great. Tell us about the other ingredients we've... Yes. All right, and I've got the bread. I imagine you probably want me to start dealing with this. Please. You want me to cut it for you? Sure. Great. Tell us about the other ingredients we've got here. This musarella, they come in the water. And it's the baby, the tiny mozzarella. Yeah, they have a little big size. When it's a little bigger than this, I cut in half. The chile and genie. Yeah. Okay, those you get cut in that, but these you don't have to cut it all. No. Perfect. So, but I don't put them when they come off the water on the bread because they got... the chelanjini. Yeah. Okay, those you get cutting out, but these, you don't have to cut it all. No. Perfect. So, but I don't put them when they come off the water on the bread because they got soggy. So what I do is I dry them out first. Drain them and then put them on some paper towels and really get the, because there's a lot of moisture, they sit in water. Yeah. That makes sense. No, it defeats the purpose of toasting bread. It's going to taste horrible. It makes soggy, right? Yeah. So we've got our mozzarella. We've got these beautiful little baby tomatoes here. These grape tomatoes. It defeats the purpose of toasting bread. It's going to taste horrible. It makes soggy, right? Yeah. OK, so we've got our mozzarella. We've got these beautiful little baby tomatoes here. These grape tomatoes. Cherry. Cherry tomatoes. Yes. And a little bit of olive oil, some balsamic that you've reduced down a little bit. Yes. Thickened it up over heat so it gets a little thick and serpy and then salt and pepper and basil. Yes. All right. I will start on the bread. I'm going to cut the... All righty. And we're just doing like, what, inch slices? Yes, please. OK. You got it. All right. Yeah, I mean, brusqueta is something that I think most people recognize and enjoy. You know, it's like, I don't know too many people who don't enjoy Briscetta. But this is one way to do it. There's so many things you can do on top of toast. So, has another recipe that I used to make for a potato like the bruschetta? Okay. I make the white sauce, bichamel sauce. A bichamel, okay. And I put some chopped spinach. Okay. And then I cut the bread like this. And I put on top the bread. A little bit, Parmesan cheese, it put in the oven. With the sauce? No, it makes all together. Oh, okay, so the cheese goes in the sauce. No, no. The beshamel makes with the spinach. Okay. And then you spoon it up and put here on the top. Right, okay. A little promise on cheese on top. Oh, because that beshamel when it bakes, it gets bubbly and brown. It needs to die for. Right, right. It's like an in lasagna, how it bubbles up and makes almost like cheese or like a moussacacah, like the Greeks make, you know? Good, that sounds great. I'm gonna actually steal that from you, I think. I'm gonna give that a try. Yeah, when I was in Italy, I was always surprised at how many, you know, we eat pesqueta, like just, you know, Sort of one way, but the Italians, they put a lot of different things on toast. Mushrooms, like a mushroom ragu. It's a nice, it's how many, you know, we eat pesquetta like this, you know, sort of one way, but the Italians, they put a lot of different things on toast. Mushrooms, like a mushroom ragu, you know, all sorts of things. I like different stuff. Well, you know, and I think to what's great about this is that it's a really, it's a great, you know, appetizer for party or if you're, you know, if you have people over, it's a great appetizer for a party or if you're having people over, it's perfect. So we're just gonna line these up here. All right, get these going. Let you do your thing with the tomatoes. Look at that, I think we're gonna fit perfectly. All right, I'm gonna save these to dip in the juice of that pasta. If that's okay with you. Just put a little bit of olive oil on each of them. Okay. Just a few drops, but then. Okay, look at me, I'm cooking over here. All right, just to get this nice and brown. All right. How'd I do? Here we go. Thank you. Okay. De-side your way. Okay, so we're going cut side down there. I'll give you a hand. Two per slice. Can put a little tree. Three. Okay, we're going three. Okay, and I think we're going to need actually, I was one tomato off. There we go. Okay, I'm coming there. Perfect. All right, so now this... Let me try. Take this a little bit. Here, from here, put in a paper. Okay. Because they're still in the water. And then how long does this go into the oven for? Just to melt the cheese. Just to melt the cheese, okay. And we're gonna... You're gonna toast the bed very quick. 350? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, okay, so 350 until we melt the cheese. One more here. Oh, one more tomato. One more here. Okay. Yeah, that's 350 there. Yeah, okay. So 350 until we melt the cheese. One more here. Oh, one more tomato, okay. I missed the tomato. There we go. One more here. One more there and one more there. Thank you. And then I think we need a few more pieces of cheese over here. I think we're good to go. One more here. One more tomato. I say I kept that one at two because it was so small but I'm going to use a small tomato for that. There we go. But we're going to keep them all the same here. We don't want anyone to feel cheated. Because that's the thing. And when you cook for three kids, you give one of them a slice with two tomatoes on it and another one a slice of three, they're going to call you on that. No way they're going to let you get away with that. Okay, this is done. All right, beautiful. Into the oven it goes. Into the oven. Till the cheese melts and then we're going to take a break, but when we come back, you're You're going to over the break when they come out. You're going to dress them with more olive oil, balsamic, and some basil. And salt and pepper. And salt and pepper, perfect. All right, and then we'll eat. So, you get this in the oven here because I am getting hungry. And we are gonna take a break. So, don't go away, we will be right back. Guess what? I have some news for you. There's free food right there, junk food. You see that truck? Hey! And we are going to take a break, so don't go away. We will be right back. Guess what? I have some news for you. There's free food right there. Junk food. Do you see that truck? Oh! It's a two Michelin star chef. All for free, ladies and gentlemen. All for free. Here we have a past $1 with some revechable and pesto. Enjoy. How are we doing? So what do you got going on underneath that plate there? This food is really about to be thrown away. Yeah. Well, is there some... How are we doing? So what do you got going on underneath that plate there? This food is really about to be thrown away. Yeah. Is there something wrong with this food? Where did you get it from? From farmers markets. They put aside the ugly vegetables and the ugly fruits. Here atop, soft avocados. There was all food that was going to be discarded. Even though drink you had is made from like a little bruised peach. Did it taste a little bruised? It's good. The average person throws away 24 pounds of food a month. A lot. Not a lot. Go visit SaveTheFood.com for more information. Thank you. Check food time. Welcome back. I'm in the kitchen with Chef Elizabeth Cercio and as you can see our brusqueta has come out of the oven and it's gorgeous. I mean this is perfect brusqueta. That is the color that like if you looked it up in the dictionary that's the color that brusqueta would be by definition and you can see the cheese is perfectly melted. Our tomatoes just starting to blister. And now you're gonna finish this off, actually, show people what you do. I'm gonna put some salt and pepper. Here, I can slide that over a little bit closer. Thank you. You still hot, so be careful there, chef. Okay, a little bit of seasoning on that. Yeah, of course, there's not a problem. Right, I'll give you a hand actually. Thank you. I'll look at that. Okay. Yeah, I know it's nice is I love when things like this, when you season warm things, it opens up the oil in the pepper and you smell it. Yeah. Love it. Okay, and then a little bit of olive oil. Extra virgin. Extra virgin. Alright. And then you're going to finish it off with your reduced balsamic.. Yeah, it does. It gets very sweet. Actually, if you reduce it enough, you can almost use it as like syrup. Yeah, it's almost... This one is like a syrup. Right, right. But you could reduce it to the point where it's like you put it on berries, or you put it on... Cakes. Cakes, right? Like pancakes, even. See how thick it is? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh, that's gonna be good. Beautiful. And as you can see, we have our pasta here that just smells incredible. And I get to dig into all of us. Yeah, that is nice and thick. Look at that. It is. Look like a syrup. Uh huh. Yeah. And then we finished that off with a little bit of basil. Yeah. It's got to give it a little green. The Italians, you notice a lot of things, a lot of their food has the colors of their flag. You notice that? Yeah. The red ones. The red ones. Right? Yeah. It seemed to work that into everything really well. Well, Italian food is one of the best food. Oh, it's great. The whole world, right? Simple, but it's clean and just delicious. and it's really very much ingredient driven. You know, because of the... Great. No, all right. Simple, but it's clean and just delicious. And it's really very much ingredient driven. Because of the fact that that area of the world, everything grows. You know, so when they sit there and they tell you, we have the best tomatoes in the world or we have the best artichokes in the world. They mean it. They mean it. They're right. You can't argue with it. And then of course you have the the artisan purveyors who make parmerjano, regiano, and prosciutto and things like that. They're right. You can't argue with it. And then of course you have the the artisan purveyors who make parmigiano, regiano, and prosciutto, and things like that. And you know. Have you tried to eat the pasta that you're making sardine the cheese? Oh, no, I know what you're talking about. I've heard of that, but I've never had that. Oh my God, you'll have to try it so good. Okay, so what she's referring to is they'll actually do a pasta where they'll take a wheel of Parmesan or Reggiano that has been hollowed out. And the pasta is made inside of there, so it picks up the cheese. And from what I understand, it's incredible. I've never tried that, but that's very good. Oh my God, that's bucketless stuff right there. That is great. Alright, well I think I'm going to dig into this because I can't wait any longer. It smells so good. I'll give that a little bit of a toss and I'll make sure I get a muscle in here. I'm going to give this a nice little twirl. All right. Mmm. That is so good. Wow. You know, it has a bit of a sort of a chappino flavor to it. You know, the soup, the instant francesco, the fisherman's soup, that has the tomatoes and all the different seafood. But it's sort of invokes that a little bit. But this is so delicious. That's not overpowering. Not at all. It's funny, you think of pasta. People think of pasta as being a heavy dish. But when you have it made right, it's really not. It's really not. Chef, that's delicious. Thank you. I really like that. OK. I'll have some brisqueta. Please. All right. Wow. Sweet with the tomatoes, cheese, the saltiness, and perfectly toasted bread. You can't go wrong with this meal. I'm stealing this. I'm very happy to see we enjoy the food. I know we spoke about our break. You got to kind of like cook for people who enjoy actually eating your food right. Chef, thank you so much for coming. You're welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. I hope you come and visit us again. Thank you very much. You know just goes to show you we really are cooking with some of the best chefs from right here in our own community. On behalf of myself, Chef Cercio, everybody here at Community Cooking, thank you for watching, we will see you next time. to show you we really are cooking with some of the best chefs from right here in our own community. On behalf of myself, Chef Cercio, everybody here at Community Cooking, thank you for watching. We will see you next time. All right, we're going back in. I'm going to do this. If you'd like a copy of the recipe seen on this show, send us a self-adjusted stamped envelope to the Office of Cable and Community Relations. That's 3-3-5-0 Civic Center Drive Suite 200, in Torrance, California, 90503. Be sure to note the show number displayed on the screen. And don't forget you can find all the fresh ingredients used on today's show at the Farmers Market. Visit the one here in Torrance at Wilson Park. That's located at 2200 Crenshaw Boulevard. They're open every Tuesday and Saturday from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. rain or shine. And if you'd like to be a guest on our show, email us at community cooking at torrentca.gov and check us out online at youtube.com slash torrentscitycable and like us on Facebook at community cooking TV. Now everything you are going to do someday is on the calendar. Introducing a new day of the week. Someday. Want to retire someday? You'll want a my social security account to help you get ready. Get yours at socialsacurity.gov. I believe that home is where your pet is. And that loving an animal means never giving up on them, never letting them go. I believe that when you spare a new to your pet, you'll have to increase the number of homeless animals. Because every dog in cat deserves a place to call home. I believe that I found my best friend at a shelter. And you can too. We believe that together with best friends, animal society, we can bring about a time when there are no more homeless pets. Visit ambassadors.bestfriends.org. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm Hope with Kowski, your host of senior scene. Did you know that falls are the leading cause of broken bones and injuries leading us to go into the hospital? According to the National Council on Aging, one in four seniors, age 65 and over, fall every year. On today's show, we're gonna meet some seniors who have taken falls and learned secrets on how we can prevent those falls. torrents fired. The Torrance Fire Department tells us that 9-1-1 calls come in every day to aid a senior who's taking a fall and some pass out, break bones and some even can't speak. And they say one of the most common places in the home for accidents is in the bathroom. One thing to think about when seniors are in the bathroom, let's say a shower or a bath and they stand up from the bath, they really need to give themselves a moment to allow their body to adjust from the sitting to the standing position because physiologically there's changes going on is going on in just that short time span. So they give themselves time to adjust and then step out of the shower. We've all stood up and you know been lightheaded you know because we stood up too quickly. This can theoretically happen more in certain age groups. A very important thing that needs to be done so that the paramedics can enter the home in a timely manner is to make sure seniors have all elements in place. And this will allow the first responders to enter quickly. Typically, when we get a call, either the patient or a neighbor or a family member is called, and sometimes it's because they haven't been in communication with the resident or the patient. Occasionally our residents have a medical alert alarm that they wear so if they do fall or have any medical issues they can push that alarm and we are alerted through our dispatch to respond on that resident. There has been occasion where we show up and we don't have access because we don't have a key or there's no neighbor or manager of the Department Complex to let us in. So we always can get in. Sometimes we may have to do some damage to do it but when it it comes to life safety, we have to do what we're going to do to make sure we make entry. When we do get in on occasion, we have found patients that have been there on the floor overnight because they didn't have any way to communicate, you know, to get help coming and we were alerted through a family member that wasn't able to get in contact with them. Having all your medical history in place for the first responders is really a life-saving thing to supply. The emergency team is making guesses on what condition of health the senior is in and must start from scratch. When we arrive on scene and assess a patient they're unable to communicate with us and we have no information about that patient. We always investigate in the immediate area to see if they have any identification or any a lot of times people will have their medications nearby. So that'll give us their name, that'll give us a general medical history, and then we're always going to take the patient to the hospital and treat them depending on their injuries or medical condition. When we arrive at the hospital, we let them know what we found. Our constanier's doctor gives us a look at what happens to adults as they pass their 65th birthday. What causes these falls and their balance problems? Her field as a geriatrician is to help this age group through the aging process, giving them the information and how to prevent these falls. When you come to a geriatrician, you're going to be getting a comprehensive geriatric assessment. This basically means that we go over all different aspects of your health, not just medical, but psychosocial, biological. We do a comprehensive review of your medications, and we really look at you in the setting of a whole person as opposed to just a medical problem. Dr. Lawrence sees patients of all ages and says, it's not about the age, but how they have taken care of themselves. Age is just a number. We truly believe that here. I emphatically believe that. You can see a 55-year-old who is as frail and as sick as a 95-year-old and you can see a 55 year old who is as frail and as sick as a 95 year old and you can see a 95 year old who is as healthy and vibrant as a 55 year old. So physiologic age is really the basis of how I categorize patients as opposed to just their chronological age. We all want to aid successfully, but what are the secrets that we should know and then start living the instructions that our doctors tell us to do? As you age there's a couple of or several diseases that happen to the eyes that are going to increase your risk of vision impairment which impair your gait and balance because you use your vision to see where you are in space. You can test this on yourself. If you close your eyes and lift one leg up, you lose your balance. And that's because you need more than one sense to keep your balance, right? So things like macular degeneration, glaucoma. And by sharing their health history with their doctors, they can better help access what is going on, especially when things may not be working as well as when they were younger. Cranial nerve 8 is responsible not just for hearing, but also for your balance. So, hair cells actually also tell you where you are in space. So they're little nerves that are present that can tell you where you are in space and you also have little rocks in your ears. We call them auto-lifts. And auto-lifts sit and fluid within your ear canal in the inner ear and they let your body know where you are in space. If those become dislodged for any reason or fibrous that your canal is often does with age, you will not feel as confident of where you are in space. Dr. Lawrence has one amazing 98 year old patient that is as sharp as a tack and in great physical shape, but has taken several falls that has led to broken bones. In Dorothy's case, there's a few things you need to consider. She does have hearing impairment. She does have vision impairment. As you age, the one thing I didn't get a chance to say is about the proprioception. So I often call this the sixth sense. And it's the ability to know where your limbs are in space and you have peripheral nerves that do that. So nerves in your feet, primarily as well as in your hands, they're nerves that can tell you my foot's to my right and on the ground, my foot's to my left and on the ground. As you age, you get some vascular disease and the blood supply to those nerves decrease and you get almost little strokes to the nerve you can and you're going to have less of an input to your brain about where you are in space. Diseases in and of themselves like diabetes are going to make that worse. Vitamin B12 deficiency is going to make that worse. So there's a variety of medical conditions that affect the nerves, that then affect your ability to maintain balance. Dorothy could be a role model for many of us seniors. Her life's story for a 98-year-old could be told in a book, when meeting her you be surprised at how active she is. We started that year, we got involved in it that year and I had a job in the civilian arm of the air corps, it was called the Occupational Analyst. I did that for a year and drove all over different air bases in Northern California and And I met the man who eventually became my husband. But he was a pilot, a shutdown during the war, or the POW. And we married after the war, obviously. Dr. Lawrence applaud the life that Dorothy is living, and how she is still so engaged in the outside world. She wants to remind us that when a doctor tells their patient to be careful when they are moving around in this world, that they take it seriously. She understands the negative stigma that a senior might find by using a walker or a cane. There's a couple of issues that I think lead to falls unnecessarily, more commonly than anything else. One of them is pride. So for reasons that are, you know, unclear to me after I've seen all of the devastation that falls can do, people do not want to use walkers and canes. Their life-saving in many situations and absolutely need to be used so that people can keep moving. The worst thing you can do for yourself if you need a walker or cane is not just not use one, but stop moving, which is often what happens because you're afraid to move because you're afraid of falling. If I had a magic wand, I would tell people that you need to put your pride aside and intrinsically have the self-esteem to know your worth, to move forward, despite what other people are saying about you or thinking. That's what I try to instill in my kids, and I try to instill in my patients too. What a lot of my patients don't know, but I know because I've been a physician and seen this is that having a fall and getting an injury from it often results in a fate worse than death, which is permanent nursing home placement. You're no longer able to care for yourself. And so I try to put a healthy fear of falling into my patients, which is, listen, you need a walker. If you have a walker, you're not gonna fall. Or you're less likely to fall. Another patient of Dr. Lawrence is John. He also took a few painful falls recently, and you might be surprised to find out why. There's a cascading event in medication prescription, which is that I prescribe you a medication for your diabetes, and then this medication causes nausea. So then I prescribe a medication for your nausea and the medication for your nausea causes you to be constipated. So then I prescribe you a medication for that and then it's this whole drug cascade where if I had just changed the diabetes medication to begin with for which you were having side effects, the entire polypharmacy issue could be eliminated, thus reducing your risk for falls. So I wouldn't say, you know, when it's every medicine isn't needed and one of the biggest problems seniors have is that they are looked at as a list of diseases. I can't say that enough. They've heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and that becomes them. It becomes their list. And then a medicine is matched to each of those diseases. When in reality, they're a whole person that lives in a certain environment with certain limitations, and if you don't consider those, you are doing them harm. It was his medication that we're interacting with each other, causing his serious life and death events. It happened when he was having a procedure done at the hospital. I wasn't beaten fast enough. It was down into the 40s and got even down into the 30s with the regular and several times I actually died for three or four seconds. In fact, when I was waiting to have it done, I died for six seconds. Nurse Brandon says, you just died for six seconds. So, yeah, so very serious. John now boasts about the different types of walking assistance tools he now owns. He loves the freedom he's getting around and he has no worries about what people think of him as he's using them. I have different kind of walkers not just the one. For instance in the house itself I have a wheelchair and I fold it together and I use that to go around my house with that because it has four wheels to it it, gives me good balance, and I also put something in between if I want to carry it around. And then when I go outside, I have a three wheeler. When I go shopping, I get out of the car. And then I have another one with the four wheelers, two of those. So it's... There's four wheelers, are walkers? Yes, they have a seat in them. And that's the one I use when I go to the park, feed the squirrels, because then I can go and sit down. And I usually, in a case like that, I usually try to walk a mile in the park. And that way I'm able to sit down and the squirrels know me now. Dr. Lawrence informs us about the different ways we can improve our stamina and balance as we age. It was fun for me to spend some time with the 98-year-old Dorothy, and she gave us a look at some of the types of exercises she does at home and also when she goes to the gym. A study came out that looked at what the best exercise was for aging muscles. And they compared normal exercise, which would be endurance, to weight lifting, to something called high intensity interval training. High intensity interval training is where you work very hard for a period of three minutes. You rest for three minutes and you alternate it with working hard and resting. And this can be riding your bike, working hard in the pool, running, you know, depending on what your physical limitations are. It actually changes the DNA within an older person's cells when they do this kind of exercise, the high-intensity interval training. It is such an amazing thing that we have this science that to know that when I recommend to my patients that they do the high-intensity interval training, They're literally changing their cells to be stronger, younger, more durable. So with this study, new recommendations are being made about how older people should be exercising to really optimize their muscle health. The combination of too many medications and the way that a person with a medical condition gets up out of bed could also be a factor behind false. Dr. Lawrence gives us information on a better way of getting up. When you're getting out of bed. So like John would be a case of this where he went from lane to city and to standing. He became late headed. And so when you're getting out of bed, you're going to crumble there. So having your walker right next to the bed or having, you know, drinking a glass of water before you get up, making modifications within your home so that the environment is optimized. And as a society, we need to do better with making sure that the sidewalks don't have cracks in them, that it's a really senior and friendly environment. That started about 10 years ago. When it started in about the age of 90, your legs began to get a little weak and they progress themselves And I'm not proud of myself. I have my wheelchairs and I have my helpers and all that, the three wheelers and four wheelers. I'm not ashamed of being in public with those because it's very important to me that I don't fall. Yes, that's good. And even around the house, I have chairs located all around that I can always get on to something. Falling is is is not the answer. The Torrance Fire Department wants to make sure that all 911 calls or accidents on the streets and within our city continue to be serviced in a timely manner that they are noted for. They are constantly re-evaluating their emergency call procedures and looking at how to keep it at their very high standards. The importance of keeping our guys available for those emergencies or fires is critical and vital to our community here in Torrance. It's a little bit of a balance. The EMS industry is changing a little bit where we're asking our paramedics to do more treatment. There's more treatment options available to patients so they can go to many different destination hospitals where they can be treated for specialty care for stroke or for trauma. So we're asking more and more of them. So what we've learned is that if we can get in front of some of these emergencies instead of waiting for them to happen, which our guys do very well and they always are very good when they come on scene and take very good care of the patients, but if we can reduce it and prevent the injury from occurring in the first place, that would benefit everybody and keep our guys in service for those emergencies as much as possible. The Torrance Fire Department has developed an educational tool offering classes and information for our senior community. Torrance decided when they recognized that their call volume was over 10% of their total call volume were related to injuries from falls. They decided to partner with a third party organization, as you mentioned, partners in care. And they provide a eight week course for seniors. It's about safety, how to prevent falls in your home. There's a little bit of exercise involved. There's a guest health care professional that comes on week seven or eight and answers some questions about how to appropriately use a cane, maybe some questions about medications and so forth that they may have. So after that eight weeks, then our plan from there is to bump them into a more active class, maybe a tai chi or some royals where they can gain some balance and a little bit more activity because that's really proven to be the best way to prevent a fall is to become more active. And some of these seniors are starting just from a chair. They're starting holding onto a cane and that's okay. As long as they start moving and start gaining range of motion and a little more balance, it equals less falling. So that's what we're after here in Torrance. There was a collaboration with our Torrance City librarian to assist with these amazing classes offered from a nonprofit organization called Partners in Care, which also garnered national recognition. The fire department was working on their end knowing their desire to decrease falls and their calls on falls. They had already been in touch with the nonprofit and then they reached out to the library knowing that we were concerned about the same issues. Seniors falling in our libraries and the library and the community services department, we're working on how can we get ready to help our aging population? What I was able to bring is experience in programming, access to meeting rooms, and the ability to take registrations and do promotion. So we started by having a senior safety fair at the library, which we did last September. We just opened our doors to agencies from Partners in Care, the Torrance Fire Department, South Bay Village, our senior centers, everyone from the telephone company to bring senior telephones to be able to use to our local hospitals came. And we use the safety fair as a way to really look at what are the needs in this community and what are people interested in. I then partnered with the Fire Department for the rooms to host the classes, so they're being held in some of our park rooms. We took registration for the first class to see how it went. And now the Fire Department is filling these classes with referrals. And some of the logistics just opening and closing the doors, providing a DVD player, making sure the instructors have what they need and that's being handled by the library. I hope today's show has inspired you to take advantage of all the things that you've learned. Get in shape, stay balanced, don't have any faults. I'm Hope with Kowski reminding you, knowledge, it's a powerful tool. Tune in to senior C next with you. for're spending money like a bunch of putzes, do you hear me? Twelve dollar burritos, fifteen dollar cocktails, the heck are you thinking? If I had arms, wasn't too dimensional and didn't die over a century ago, I'd give you my patented stovepipe pile driver. How'd you like that? The choices yours start saving or receive a figurative chinbeard body slam from Honest Abe cause of the cyclist's behavior. Sometimes it's the motorist's lack of attention. Let's look at some safety tips for sharing the road with bicycles and motorcycles. First of all, as a motorist, you must keep in mind that bicycle and motorcycle riders have the same rights and responsibilities as vehicle drivers while in public roads. Respect their right of way because they are entitled to share the road with you. Look carefully for cyclists before making turns, merging into traffic, changing lanes, or when opening doors next to moving traffic. Look over your shoulder and use mirrors before changing lanes. Motorcycles can come into your lane within seconds, which is why looking over your shoulder is essential each time you change lanes. Road hazards such as potholes, gravel, wet surfaces, pavement seams, and railroad crossings pose hazards to cyclists. They may cause them to vary their speed, change direction, or fall suddenly. Drive attentively and be aware of how these conditions affect cyclists. Statistics show that a high percentage of injury collisions are caused by failing to yield the right of weighed cyclists. Remember, courtesy and common sense promote traffic safety for all, so here's what you can do to help prevent collisions at intersections or roundabouts. Make a visual check and use your mirrors and turn signals before entering an intersection around about. Look for that bicycle or motorcycle rider that just might be in your blind spot. Bicyclists are even more difficult to see and can easily disappear in vehicle blind spots. Follow the ride-of-way rules. Remember to yield to any vehicle already in the intersection or arriving first or to the vehicle on the right that reaches the intersection at the same time as you. This includes bicycle and motorcycle riders. Never assume cyclists will give you the right of way. Here are some tips when passing cyclists. Try to avoid passing cyclists on two-ling roads. If you must pass, be patient and pass cyclists on the left when it's safe. As you pass, allow safe clearance between you and the cyclists. Don't squeeze cyclists off the road. Remember, they have just as much right to be there as you do. On freeways, you will at times find a special lane called a high occupancy vehicle or HOV lane. Motorcycles are allowed to ride in these lanes and may very well pass you. So be on the lookout for them. Check your blind spot. The roads are crowded enough, so the best way to prevent a collision is to distance yourself from other vehicles and cyclists. This gives you more time to react and space to maneuver. Allow a cyclist a full lane width, although it is not illegal to share lanes a cyclists, it is not safe. Allow a 4-second following distance for motorcyclists. You will need this space to avoid collision should the rider fall. Never drive your vehicle in the bicycle lanes. The only exception is when making a right turn. You must be within 200 feet of the corner or a driveway entrance before you can merge into the bicycle lane. Also, do not speed up to overtake a bicycle just before making a right turn. Merge into the turning lane behind the bicyclist. Then make the turn. When using a turning lane, watch for bicycles making left and right turns. They are required to use the same turning lanes as vehicles. Look for any hand signals from the bicyclist that indicate their turning or making a lane change. One final thing you may not be aware of. Bicycles and motorized bicycles are lawfully allowed to ride on certain sections of freeways when there's no alternate route available to them and when signs are posted. As a motorist, remember to keep in mind that bicycle and motorcycle riders have the same rights and responsibilities as vehicle drivers while on public roads. They are entitled to share the road with you, so please respect their ride of way. Make the roads a safer place for everyone. We need to talk. I'm just not satisfied. You're slow. You're forgetful. And you're a little small. I want more. Faster. A bigger, a of... Well, you understand. I'm sorry, baby. But I thought you should know. When the time comes to move on, make sure you're recycled your old computer. Visit eRecycle.org to find out more. How far would you go to help someone? Would you go to the end of your driveway? Would you cross the street? Would you cross an ocean? Would you go if you could use your knowledge to teach someone? And in the process, maybe learn something yourself. Life is calling. How far will you go? Peace Corps. you Welcome to LA Parks. I'm Monica Recreation Coordinator. Today on my channel 35, and I'll be teaching chair circuit. What you'll need is a sturdy chair, resistance bands and or dumbbells, water and a towel. Let's get started with the seated march. Shoulders relax and roll back. Bracing to that core, as you're getting your fitness equipment together, don't forget to like and share today's workout on Facebook. Begin to increase your range of motion. Abs are a little bit tighter every time you bring that knee up towards the chest. Today's workout will be all about 30 seconds with our time frame. So we'll be doing 30 seconds of cardio, 30 seconds of straight training. Switching it up from the comfort of our chair to standing up. Pressing those arms up. Deep inhale, exhale as you raise those arms. Give me four more. Quick, five minute warm up and then we'll go right into it. Good job. Arms across the body. Extend that leg. Adding that rotation by squeezing your abs in nice and tight, focusing a bit more on those love handles. Give me about 10 seconds here. You got it. We're gonna go into a full extension, opposite hand, opposite legs. We're going to reach and lengthen here. 30 seconds. Really lengthening here, elongating through your spine. Less than 10 seconds. Get job, We're going to go back to that march. Right here. Bigger movements. Really pumping those arms. Getting that heart rate up. Slowly. Yeah, gradually here. We're going to stand and sit. You can go into a standard squat or come all the way back and down into the comfort of your chair. Get ready ready less than 10 seconds to go. Drive those knees up a little bit higher last few seconds when you're ready. Walk your legs speed out stand all the way up up, sit all the way down. So since we're moving today and switching it up every 30 seconds, less into your body, if you need to take that break, yes. Do the movement a little bit longer or you need to shorten up your time. That's perfectly fine. Those knees are slightly bent at the top. You are still pushing off both toes and heels. Blast you. We're gonna go into a full extension, low kick. Your goal right now is to extend and reach those toes. If you're not touching those toes just yet, don't worry about it.'re going to come as far forward as you can. Continue that rotation warming up those abdominals here. In 10 seconds we're going to go into a full sit up. We're going to round that back, engage those abs and we're going to open up that heart and chest right here. Walk your legs speed out arms cross. Your range your pace or 30 seconds. Breathe with me here. Nice and tall. Belly buttons is spine. You got it. We're going to go into lunges, side to side, toes needs forward, out of our chair. Yes, get ready, ready, give me one more. Carefully come up, toes needs forward, hands from the hips, keep that chest lifted. Yes. So you're sitting on to one side as you lengthen the opposite leg here. Take your time. Use your abdominals and glutes, especially the glutes to come up. Exhaling and telling on your way down. Last one here. Other side, yes. Get your ass. Get your ass. Back to that march. This time we are out of our chair. We're going to go wide and narrow. 30 seconds out and in. At your own pace, setting up nice and strong. You got it. We're going to grab those weights in less than 10 seconds. Shoulder presses with our march. At any time, you need to adjust each exercise by doing just the shoulders, just the upper body, listen to your body and do a split workout versus a compound move. So go right into that march, seated, palms face you and press up. So we're here for 30 seconds. And we'll switch it up again. Lean back a little bit, that neutral spine, that rounding or slouching, abs are definitely engaged here. You've got it as you bring those weights up. Think about stretching out those arms and X, only to the mouth. Last two here. Good job. We're gonna hand you the hips, come forward, just a bit. Draw the elbows straight up. Think about squeezing the upper back. Squeeze the squeezing those shoulder blades To make it a bit more challenging you're gonna straighten out those arms easier Bend at about a 90 degree angle. Yes last you Right back to that march and press. One more set and we'll move on. We'll range, lean back a little bit, race it to that core, not rounding that back. You got it. All the way up, all the way down, really working those shoulders, taking your time. Less than 15 seconds. If this gets a little bit too much for you, you can always adjust one dumbbell or no weight at all. Hands from the hips, right into it, set up, straight arm or bending at those elbows at about a 90. You got it. Come on. If you're feeling this music, you can always tap it out here. Yes, come on Breathe that chest is lifted neutral spine release squeeze the upper back Those shoulder blades here last view Head and neck aligned with the spine. We're going to grab that resistance band and switch it up. Good job. Lower those weights off to the side out of your way. We have biceps and a leg extension focusing a bit more on the glutes. So you're here, using those handles here, stepping onto that band. That hand is on the chair for support. So you're here, you're going to go into a one by a curl. You're going to stop roughly at about 90 and then go into that extension, squeezing the butt. You're balancing like you want to spread those toes and you want to bend that knee. When you're ready, begin. We're here for 30 seconds and we'll change sides. Release squeeze. Focus on engaging those glutes. Engaging that core versus swinging. Now, if you do not have fans today, that's fine. You can still use those dumbbells, canned goods, water bottles, and then just focus on that extension, really squeezing the butt. Don't think about kicking back. Last one here. Excellent job. Other side. Same. Fun move. Set up for success. Right of that vice-pro Pearl, stop halfway. Lift to squeeze, 30 second push. You got it, come on. Try not to slouch on that curl all the way up looking straight ahead. We have triceps coming up, but we'll break up this strength exercise with a little bit of cardio. All 30 seconds, you're here, give me two more. Take your time. Really squeeze that core, squeeze that bum. Good job. Take that fan off the side out of your way. Going into a seated jack. Arms straight out to the side. So options you can alternate or bring both legs out and in at the same time. 30 seconds. You got it. Come on. Breathe with me here. Arms are kind of low, stopping at shoulder level. Kick it up. Come on. Need to slow it down. You're here. All arms instead. Come on. Breathe. All legs. Last 10 seconds. Half fun with this one. Finish off with me here. Come on. Try steps. We're going to use those dumbbells. You can always use that band if you need to. Before we go ahead and do that, grab a quick drink of water. All right, we're going to use one dumbbell. Ship that body, pull it on that chair, the elbow is in. One at a time, you're going to fully extend, really flex to make that muscle and then slowly return. So that head comes forward a little bit so that you do not hit the back of your head. Yes, good posture. You're not rounding that back. Your abs are engaged. You're about halfway here. Slow control movement. Switching sides in less than 10 seconds Get ready ready really flex Think about flexing making that muscle versus squeezing that dumbbell You have one more repetition right here Beautiful shake it out Other sides same fun movement all triceps here 30 seconds. Let's go Slow control movement breathe we're gonna repeat those jacks you're gonna have the option of standing up if you are comfortable seated with that cardio move with the jacks, you are welcome to remain seated You more here for Three Last two one more one more Excellent, so go right into those jacks Flex your options switching up the arms for your up're up with me here. 30 seconds, you got it, come on. Toe tap, lift that heart, lift that chest. Pull the extend that leg, point those toes. Now pick it up, you're down to your last 15 seconds. Come on. We're going to go back to those shoulder presses. We're going to slow that pace down from that knee up, focusing a bit more on our abs by bringing those knees up a little bit higher. So we're going to to take the cardio out and focus on range. Press up, knee up. 30 seconds moving at your own pace. Lean back just a little bit. Exhale as you raise those weights. Exhale as you Metnia. Yes? Beautiful. Finishing off. Give me about 10 more seconds here. Breathe. We're going to go into those kicks similar to what we did earlier in our warm-up. Last one each side. Instead of a single kick,'s gonna be a double kick So you're here One and two and switch at that rotation Working those abs. Yes You got it 30 seconds Rock your best. Making sure you're exiling on those kicks. Come on. Breathe. We're gonna go back to these kicks a little bit later and we're going to run it straight 30 seconds on each side. Good job. Let's go into squats. Options here. It's going to be with or without the weights. If you need assistance, you'll be using your chair to carefully come up and down. Otherwise, you're gonna walk your legs forward a bit. Your knee angles are aligned. The weights are in front of you. Stand up straight. Sit all the way down. You got it. Pushing off to pose and heels. Exhale as you stand and hell as you lower. 30 secondsecond push. Let's go Shoulders are relaxed and roll back No tension on those shoulders Think about standing straight up carefully sitting back down You're already halfway. Come on Beautiful Keep it up. We're gonna go back to that cardio. Quick beat. Small yet quick movement. Awesome. Waits off to the side out of your way. Right on time with the beat. Right on time with the music. So you're here. Relax the arms, moving as fast as you can. Right here, come on. Light on the feet, balls of the feet. Can you do this one standing? Of course you can. Otherwise, you're here with me seated, shaking out those legs. Lift that chest up, brace that core. Deep inhale, deep exhale. Lasty seconds here, four, breathe, two, good job. All right, let's go right back to our weights. Switching it up, we're gonna go into our bicep curls. It's gonna be a combination. We're gonna come all the way up center here. Come all the way down and then palms facing me. Yes, so we're just switching up the angles of your bicep curls doing two versions of them versus one. Take your time. We're gonna go into our kicks, 30 seconds on each side and then we'll go right back to our triceps. Well, body workout today. How are we doing? How are you feeling? Last few seconds. Come on. Really flex. Make that muscle. If you want to switch it up and go into a hammer curl instead of a regular bicep curl, more power to you. The switching up the angles here. Really flexing making that muscle. Last one here, finish strong. Good job, blurring those weights. All right, same leg, 30 seconds, adding that rotation each time. Let's go. A little bit more power behind your kick. Do your best on that extension, on that reach. If you're here today touching your shins, your quads, your knees, that's perfectly fine. Do your best. Come on. Feel that leg. Your heart work. Right into it. Let's switch. 30 seconds. Rotate, rotate. Finish off. Last few seconds here. Triceps coming up. We're gonna stand for this one. You'd like to have a seat. Listen to your body. Remain seated. Last two here. Good job. Shake it out. Let's grab a quick drink of water. So we're switching from resistance bands to dumbbells. Just in case if you have one over the other, maybe you have a preference today. Fans are easier to travel with. Less weight. All right, same concepts. Working the back of those arms. So you're going to adjust that band to make it challenging for you. Pinch on the hips, use that tearful support elbow in. You're gonna lift all the way up and stop halfway. So there's a relaxed, rollback, neutral flatback. 30 seconds each side right here. Gazing slightly ahead of you, you're not gonna lift up. Nor are you gonna drop down. You're gonna focus on extending and stopping halfway. Yes, don't go into a bicep curl. We did that a moment ago. Your main focus is to work up the back of those arms. Yes, keep it up. You more reps. Challenge. Pause a bit at the top. One more here. Excellent job. Take it out. Other side. Same fun move. Working those triceps. So once again you're gonna adjust that dance so that it is challenging for you. At any time need to readjust to make it a little easier, more power to you. Same thing, 30 seconds. The elbow is nice and high. Holy it's skin, three here. Two more. Last one, last one. Beautiful. Lower that band down. Off to the side out of your way. Right back to a cardio. We're gonna go back to the quick feet. Switching up the hand movements. You're gonna push forward and back. Open up that chest. All out, 30 seconds, let's go. Really opening up, squeeze the upper back shoulder blades, really flex. And work that chest, work those pecs. Abs are still engaged. Slow movement, strong movement with the upper body. All quickness with the feet. Finish off here, less than 10 seconds. Going back to those dumbbells. We're gonna focus on our quadriceps, strengthening those knees, good job. Grab quick, drink, water towel off if you need to. So the weight that you add on your quads is completely optional, yes. The good thing is we're doing it for 30 seconds versus a minute. You can do that for 30. With the weight, a little goes a long way. So you're here, toes straight up, all the way up, almost all the way down, right? That leg stays straight the entire time. You're holding onto that weight, almost quads. Think about bringing those knees up towards your hips. Building the abdominals work as well. Beautiful, excellent. Lifting at the same time. Come on. Checking in, put your legs, try not to tense up. Give me two more. Shake it out. Other side. Getting ready in about five seconds. Set up for success. Everybody relaxed. 30 seconds here. Let's go. If you like to add this in on a regular basis, you could always adjust that resistance. So in the future, add two dumbbells. Drop one weight and then go to no weight at all. Yes, or reverse it. Start with no weight and then increase by using one or two sets of dumbbells. One more, one more. Good. Good job, placing that weight off the side, going back to that march. Big movements, 30 seconds, we're gonna switch it up to a cross. We're gonna bring those arms across the body, across the chest, working once again, our torso, our movements, and a little bit more shoulder work. Options to push forward or to punch. Last few seconds. All out right here. Staining punch. 30 seconds. Really rotating here. Kick that leg out the side. Come on. Switching it up in less than 10 seconds. We're gonna go back to that resistance band. Work our shoulders a little bit more. We'll do that a lot of raise, a little bit of cardio. Whew, and then we'll call it in today. Once again, both three to use your dumbbells instead. To make the work a little easier, you're going to walk your feet in. To make the work a little bit more challenging, you're going to walk your feet out. See you here. Stopping at shoulder level. Take your time. Exhale. Inhale into your right hand. So I feel you want to lift both arms at the same time. It's still too difficult. Nero stands. Still too difficult. What can you do? You can alternate. yes. Take your time all about the quality of the movement, never quantity. Now that's why I typically work off time not reps. Over time you will build strength, cardiovascular as well as your endurance. And then you see a difference, a change over time, give me two more. Your own pace. Finish off, come on. Strong shoulders. Right here, good work. Let's take that band off to the side. We're gonna go to the extension, so hamstrings, we're gonna swoop up. Yes. Feel the stretch that lower back. As we onwind into our stretches here. Come on. We get those fingers toes. Swoop up. Deep and hell. Deep exhale. We get those fingers too. We're gonna carefully come up. Walk your legs speed out, not hip dances. Hip dances apart. If not a little bit wider, you're gonna rotate, rotate. Big movement. Full range. You got it. Other direction. Breathing in the nose, exhaling nice and slow. Let's open up those hip flexors, going to a nice deep lunge. You're here. Use that chair for supported feet too. torso is upright. This time if you like, take those arms behind you. Walk those hands back and down as you gaze up. Keep it up. Deepen, hell up. Center. Exhale. Reach for those toes. From here, shake your head yes, no. Bend those knees, nice and tall. Other side, let's open up those hips. Once again, nice comfortable deep launch. Tuck that helmet under switching it up. Pump space, you round that back. Drop the chin down towards your chest. Great job today. Hope you enjoyed today's 30 second in the lap. Push, excellent once again, let's touch those toes. Touch the floor if you can. Take a moment to breathe. To release here, bend those knees. Just as lift the defense a lot. Taking off the legs. Let's have a seat. Now we're gonna go a little bit deeper to our hamstring stretch. Obviously, hand opposite leg. Rotate. and hold. Clancing prep, inhale up, exhale, other side takes your hold. gonna go into that elbow pose. If you have a side that's a little bit tighter, needs a little bit more love. Come on, we're going to go to that side first. Lensy, wrap, strike a pose have to go back to the gym. I feel like I'm going to have to go back to the gym. I feel like I'm going to have to go back to the gym. I feel like I'm going to have to go back to the gym. I feel like I'm going to have to go back to the gym. I feel like I'm going to have to go back to the gym. Switching slides, even the left, exhale, strike, pose and then open up. Good work, good work. So any questions, comment suggestions, let me know in the comment section down below. My job is to cater to you. You want to see something more a less of maybe it's a piece of fitness equipment. Like Monica, I want to start pressing this chair. I don't know. Release, deep it all up. Walk the legs, feet out. This time you're going to reach for those ankles and then give yourself a gentle massage around the calves, your shins, your quads. Yes. Nice and tall, deep inhale up. Exhale, push out, release. One more, nice and tall lengthen and exhale, relax. I appreciate you all joining me. I look forward to like this video. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I hope you'll like it. I'm sorry. What is that thing? Looks like somebody's double chin. What's the last snack in our fruits and veggies? What is that thing? Looks like somebody's double chin. What's the last snack in our fruits and veggies? I'm Joe Greedon. Welcome to Curiosity Quest Goes Green, the show that continues to explore what you the viewer are curious about. Well today our quest that came to us from Eileen in Southern California and Eileen wrote Dear Joel, I would like you to do a show teaching me all about fake grass and why people put it on their lawns like my neighbor. Well Eileen, because of you we've made our way all the way to Davidville, Alabama where our journey begins learning a grass. That's a different kind of green. So let's get started on today's Curiosity Quest Goes Green. I'm gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's gonna be the one who's'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not a bad guy. I'm here with Steve from Prigra. How's it going, man? It's going great. How are you doing today? Nice to have you. Great. Well, tell us a little bit about Prigra. Well, Prigra is a synthetic turf company that was brought to bring all the new technology that's been in the athletic playing field business forever and bring that to the residential end user. interesting because in doing some research for the show, you guys not only make it for big sport stadiums, these fields, but you make them for our backyard. residential end user. That's interesting because in doing some research for the show, you guys not only make it for big sport stadiums, these fields, but you make them for our backyards now too. That's right. We make a product that is designed specifically for homeowners, for cities, parks and wrecks, those type of things that's more user friendly and more realistic looking. We have a big process in front of us, right? This is a huge process. There's a lot of steps. going to be seeing. Today you're going to see what you're going to start off with packages or resin that's a lot of steps. What are we going to be seeing? Today, you're going to see what you're going to start off with packages or resin that's brought in in real cars. And it's going to be mixed with color concentrated or a master badge. And then that's going to ultimately turn into a yarn system. This is a polyolifen yarn system right here. I'm sorry, what? It's a polyolephane yarn system. In other words, that's a yarn system that uses all polyolephane based components. It's 100% recyclable. Nothing goes in the air when it's manufactured and nothing goes in the ground. Oh my goodness. We got a lot of work out of us. We got a lot. How do they make fake grass? Seats. Well, they probably put it in a machine and kind of plastic and other light products. It doesn't grow. But it's still green. I think they get like a carpet base and then they have a bunch of people just stitching through. I think they get a factory. Actually I think that they get like plastic sheets and then they like put them in pieces somehow. This is actually the extruder. This is the whole the whole massive part the start of the entire system. This is where all the initial work is done. So all of the pellets for a lack of a better term, right? The resin. The resin going here, heat up, and then is this where they become ones, well I don't know, one piece of grass? Well if you can imagine, you may have seen us spaghetti making machine at some point, but what you're doing is you're taking all of those polymers and you're taking that recipe that's all entered into a computer. And that's all mixing together. Very, very uniform. It's just a long barrel with a screw. OK. And as that moves down, there's heating chambers. And you'll see each of the heating chambers. And that's controlling the temperature all the way down until it comes to the spinner wrap. the head when it comes out. That's so, whoa, I gotta ask you, what's a spin-a-ret? Give us an answer. What is a spin wrap? Spinner wrap is somebody that you sit down on the table and you spinner real fast. A ride? A spinner wrap is one of those little round things. It's like a little top. You twist it real hard. And so that's a spinner wrap. Because it spins, and it's going in a direct, then you put the spin and wreck. You have a spinner wrap. A spinner wrap spins really fast. And gets attention very well. All right, so what is a spinner wrap? Well, a spinner wrap is a plate of metal that has a lot of holes drilled to it or cut into it with a wire EDM machine or a wire cutting machine to make a very specific shape of a hole that the molten resin runs out to. From here we start the drawing process and what we're doing by drawing it is stretching it so you'll notice that these wheels right here are turning much slower than the ones downstream. And what that does is you're making it have more tenacity by stretching it just like a piece of taping. So it starts off like this and then goes like this, but gets longer and longer and longer. That's exactly it. Get you not here. Fun fact, fun fact, fun fact. Here's your fun fact fact home owners use up to 10 times more toxic chemicals per acre than farmers The piano strings are thinner the thinner and longer and they're moving faster. Oh, yeah They are I just realized that. Oh, yeah, look at that. That's cooking off camera. He told me if I break one of these strings They're gonna be mad at me. I don't want to break one. Don't break one. Don't be very light. We're taking the water off right here. Oh yeah, OK. Also, you know what's amazing? This is a relatively simple process. I think the extrusion in itself is very, very simple. It's the consistency can play the harp. Watch this, ready? Ladies and gentlemen, please. Finally, how about rock and roll? You can't handle that. We got to stop. Fun fact, fun fact, fun fact. Here's your fun fact. Homeowners apply about 4 million pounds of pesticides to their lawns and gardens each year, and some of it gets washed into our water supply when it rains. From this point, we have like big pieces of yarn. Right, what's happening here, it's taking all those ends and there may be a hundred ends or a hundred and twenty ends, and now it's starting to divide it up into the number of ends that you want on each package and these are take-up winters and so this is taking it up from the extrusion line at 8 ends per package. 8 ends per package. There's 8 yards on each package. When you say in, you're individual strings, right? Individual monofilament yarns. Individual. Uh huh. Liberty and Justice justice. And mono for one. Mono. Mono, right? Filament? It's a fiber filament. Filament? Yarn. Yarn. It's not easy. No, we just put them together to make it sound like more. How long you been doing this now? 33 years. Yeah, it's easy for you. So it's all going on here and it's going to be one like one string right here. Well, that's a package with eight on eight yards, but they haven't been twisted yet. We still got a It's easy for you. All right, so it's all going on here and it's going to be one string right here. Well, that's a package with eight on eight yards, but they haven't been twisted yet. We still got to take it to a twisting operation to twist it. There's three or four more processes down the road. Okay, I take back what I said earlier about the simple process. This is not simple at all. No, it's not ready to play on just yet. Alright, so you've had me bring all these big old spindles of yarn over here, huh? Right, that's all the straight yarn yarn right off the extruder. Right off the extruder now. What are we doing with it here? Now what we're going to do is take these straight yarns that are eight to an end and we're going to bundle them together by twisting them. We're going to twist this yarn on the twister so we can then process it through the tuffing process at the next step. If you try to run these through the needle, it'd be very difficult to get all to get all light up and through there, but if you twist them together it's very easy to get them through the needle and through the be very difficult to get all light up and through there, but if you twist them together it's very easy to get them through the needle and through the processing. Okay, alright, so what is it doing then? Well this is a ring twister and so this is going around and it's putting a twist, this is putting 36 twists per meter on this yarn. Can I touch that? You can touch it a little bit. A little bit. You want to touch everything. I want to touch everything. I do want to touch everything. Wow, that's going really fast. And then that tells you how many meters on that cone and that this will automatically stop and then automatically doff and to take it off all by itself. So at this point, is this ready to be grass? That's not ready to be grass. This is ready to be grass. This is ready. This is ready to go right on the tuffing machine. The tuffing. We're going to see this tuffing. We're going to see this tuffing. It's a huge sewing machine. What does it mean to texturize the yarn? Spin it. To make the yarn into a design. It could look like a worm. Leave it together or something. start patting it so when it gets warm, so when you needle it through, it's tetra, it has its own texture. To play with it, touch it. You know like if you twist it a lot, that's fun. That would be texture. I this is obviously very smooth. and put a crimp in it and heat set it and texturize it. You call this texturizing the yarn? This is texturizing a yarn. So this is obviously very smooth. That's the straight yarn. This is the texturized yarn. Feel how like that is now. Oh, wow. Oh my goodness. So this is like half of this. This one to make four or five of those. Wow. That's really light because it's all text rise and very bulky. Now how is it doing that? It's going through, it's coming across in the straight yarn. Uh-huh. It's going through, it's coming across in the straight yarn, it's getting stretched between the two draw rollers and then all the work is done right in this very little piece and there's more yarn going in than coming out and it's being heat fed in there. Fun fact, fun fact, fun fact, here's your fun fact. The EPA estimates that yard waste accounts for 18% of the refuse that we historically have dumped into the landfills. One of the questions that brought us here was, Ilyne wanted to know why people put this on the yard instead of regular grass. Well, there's a lot of reasons, but the primary reasons, especially out in California, is water conservation. There's water shortages there. There's water shortages in other places across the country. But a lot of people are very concerned about the environment, wanting to get rid of the pesticides, the herbicides, the emissions from the lawnmower that puts out more emissions than your car. And so a lot of people are really worrying about their environment now and doing the right thing. Okay. Now what about places? Obviously, we live in South California, so it's drought, but other places we don't have drought. I mean, flying in here to Atlanta, when got to Atlanta, drove here to Alabama, it was green everywhere. Do you have drought situations here? We do occasionally here, but even in the places like Seattle and where Washington, Northeast to the Northwest, where you have lots of rain in places, the buying, one of the major reasons for buying synthetic grass there is they want to, it's too much water. They're getting too much water on the ground, the kids get out there, they're playing it, they get muddy, they walk in the house, and it creates those issues. So it can be a lot of different issues. So problems with water and problems without water? They both can be a problem, absolutely. Alright, so we've made synthetic grass strings. Haven't made the grass yet. Nope. We've only made the yarn and whatever we haven't used, we've thrown back in the recycling process here at the plant. And now we're moving to Georgia. That's where Georgia where we're going to start to make the dirt. Wow. There's a lot more stuff. There's a lot more to go. We're only a third of the way there. What is tufting? When you're tuft? Squeezing together and kind of like pounding and squeezing just to make it so it's tuft. It's not easy, it's difficult, but fun. Tufting is one of those Greek words. It comes from Greek for my like tuft and eang. put them together and you have toughing. But I think what it really means is like a really big tough guy. He's toughing. It's a Greek word. Like you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like me. Yeah, yeah. Preparing the soil for grass, to grow grass, or grow anything. Flowers, plants, trees, Whatever. Oh my. Alright, so we move from Alabama to Chatsworth, Georgia. We're going to learn all about tuffing. Steve, what is tuffing? Well, tuffing is the processing which you take the yarn that we brought down from Alabama and start sewing it in to a fabric to make it the artificial grass. So it's a sewing process. We're going sewing process. We're going to take these yarns, we're going to run them through a needle. It's going to go down through a tupping machine, back up, and it's going to cut the bottom side and make a loop, take that loop and make a cut into it and make it an artificial grass part. Alright. So let's go tupping. Let's go we're gonna do some tapping now. Let's go and we're going to dish them tough and now. Let's tough. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ All right, to work up on the catwalk and we're getting ready to go tough team. You're going to do some toughing right. It's just sound so cool, you know. You're getting a lot of tough team. That it is cool. And you're gonna actually make some turf right now. You're gonna push the button, you're gonna start it, and you're gonna start making some turf. It's in my hands, all those comes of yarn behind us are going through these veins up above us. When I push this button, it's all coming together. It's all coming together right now, right in front of you. All right, ready? You've got to watch the yarn. Oh, I have to watch the yarn. You're ready. OK, so I've seen them stop and start this quite a few times. What am I looking? It's all coming together. It's all coming together right now, right in front of you. All right, you ready? You can go to watch the yarn. Oh, I have to watch the yarn. You're ready. OK, so I've seen him stop and start this quite a few times. What am I looking for in order to stop it? You're going to push the stop button, or you're going to pull this top cable up here, and that's going to stop it. Okay, and so if I just see something hanging, you need to push the stop button. And then we'll do a man. And then we'll do a man. We, we, we. We, okay, here we go. Okay. Keep holding it, don't let it. And then we'll do them in and then we'll do them in we we We okay here we go You're making you're making turn You're gonna break down, pay attention. I pay attention. I'm looking for problems, I don't like that. We good, we good, we good. That's something you should know, though. We good? Wow, look at this. No problems, this is really good. You're really good at this, aren't you? I'm awesome. I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I didn't do it. We shut it off. Oh, okay, they have a problem on the back side. Which means it wasn't my problem, right? Oh, it was. She said yes it is. Oh. Is that good? That's good. All right. Whoo. Fantastic. Yeah. So I fixed my problem. Oh, there we go. She cut that off. I fixed my problem. Now I'm going to go check on the other side, right? Yeah. Well, you got to do the cut side on the other side. Corral. Well it's a good thing you're not a barber, but you get there. Thanks man. That looks pretty good. You're looking good. No you're looking good. You're getting there. Thanks man. That looks pretty good. You're not looking good. You're looking good. All right see I'm getting there. Look at that. And it looks like this. Now that really looks real. I was going to say this synthetic grass looks almost ready to go. It's perfect. That's very good, perfect, absolutely. All right, so we're looking at what the finishing run? Yes, this is the coder, and we're gonna do the, we're gonna put what the finishing run? Yes, this is the coder, and we're going to put the urethane on the back and make the finish carpet here. So when we put it through the tufting machine, there was nothing on the back of it to hold these in, right? Right, it came over and grayed goods. So there's nothing on the back, you see you can just pull those tufts out. just take one and pull it out, comes right out. I ruined it. No, you didn't, but it's still good. All right. But what we're going to do is we're going to put a coating to hold all those tunnels. you see you can just pull those t just take one and pull it out. That ruin it. No, still good. All right. But we're going to put a coating all those tuffs in place. So we're watching it be encoded here. This is the actual applicator where you have the doctor bar, the bed and the polyurethane coming up and being treated on there just like a big huge squeegee. Just going back It's just laying out a. That's cool. It's just laying out a line of urethane, and then the Dr. Bar which is on top, it acts like the squeegee. And the bed plate underneath, the distance between those two is very accurate and very uniform. And that way you're always putting the exact amount of urethane on all the carpet. You just want me to continue to roll this is the end of the process this is where we roll it up after it's all down through the back end of the oven it's been appropriated ready for the rolls good job I'm a stop good time to stop all right so it's been appropriated so what's the preparation doing the preparation is putting holes on a 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1st centers so the water can run through the process so when you have the turf laid out and it rains the water goes through it vertically Now why is it, I see this plane going to, why is he doing this? That's the perforation. That's what that is doing is that's heating some spikes and that's poking through the turf and it's quarter rising and it's melting it around the hole so it doesn't come unravel there or it doesn't lose toughs there. Oh okay. Like at the end of a rope when you burn the end of the rope so it doesn't come on down. Cool after it's perforated then it comes back and goes through the quality control area. It goes to a place where you can both be the back of the turf and the front of the turf. So it doesn't come undone. Cool after it's perforated, then it comes back and goes through the quality control area. It goes to a place where you can both be the back of the turf and the front of the turf. And this front of the turf is where it's all laid out so you can visually look at it and inspect it, occasionally turf surf it, and then it rolls up. So I'm gonna turf surf is what you're saying, right? You're gonna turf surf.. We're going to teach you about turf surfing. Do you want to know what turf surfing is? Alright, now we're in the drop zone here because it's moving closer to us. Well, move out of the way. This is going to go down into the rap station and now this is where it's actually rap. Okay, now we're standing on the raping right? This is the plastic that's going to be wrapped in. It's going to be tied on the ends and then that's going to go on a truck and go back to California to the job site. We're going back to California. We're starting California. We went to Dadesville, Alabama, chats with Georgia, and now back to California. Absolutely. That's what we're going. Let's go. I'll see you in your blue jeans. Let's go. What is synthetic grass? It's green. That's synthetic. Environmental. Manmade grass. That's at a green stuff that you see on football field I think. Hey grass is polky Hey grass, yeah, hey grass, right? Yeah, yeah, it is synthetic. All right, we made it all the way from Georgia. Nice to see you made it. We made it. All right, now we brought it with us. We did all that work back there, and now what are we gonna do? Well, that's actually the turf you made, and now we're gonna unload this, and we're gonna start installing the shard right here. It's crazy because we came from Georgia, what was really cold. Right. And it's raining on us here in California. You brought the rain with you. No, you brought it with you. I was following you. You brought the right. All right, all right. So we're installing it here, huh? We're gonna install it right here. We're gonna start digging. I'm gonna introduce you to Jason right now. All right. Let's do it. Fun fact, fun right, all right. So we're installing it here, huh? We're gonna install it right here. We're gonna start digging. I'm gonna introduce you to Jason right now. All right. Let's do it. Fun fact, fun fact, fun fact. Here's your fun fact. Grass clippings dumped into storm drains and creek banks are a major cause of water pollution. All right, he must be Jason. Joel, how you doing? Good, good. I brought the grass with us here. So what are we going to do? Okay, we're going to work. All right, well, what is this here? Those are your gloves. We're going to compact it and grade it and then we're're gonna put our grass down on top of it. Okay, and we say, we, you mean you and me. You and me. I'm gonna supervise your gonna day. I watch when the snapper fingers dissolve and be done. Okay, ready? One, two, three! Yeah, I saw that. Ah, you see that? It get back, we did such an incredible kick you around. Look at that. It wants to grow. Look at that. The grass wants to grow. This is your, nice and easy all the way. I got a boat working. I got a boat working. Don't fly it. Don't fly it. All right, let's get this over here. Now we're trying to keep the waist at a minimum. So we want to overlap by just a couple of inches all the way around the edge. I suggest what is in fill? We use infill for a lot of different things. The biggest thing is the weight. The grass is held down with the weight of the infill and it also helps to keep the blade standing up. So when we brushed the blades back like you did earlier, we dropped the infill down in there and it kinda helped some stay standing up straight. So that'll fall back over again like you for. It's amazing. It's gorgeous. You did an unbelievable job. I mean, we took this from start to finish. You went from resin through tuffing, through coating, through shipping, through pulling it off the truck, installing it, digging, you did it all. I did it all. I did it all. No, that's not really true. There's a lot of people watching me as I installed it. No. You did it all. I did it all. I did it all. No, that's not really true. There's a lot of people watching me as I installed it. No, no, this looks great. I mean, really, like you said, we took it from start to finish and it looks really good. It looks real. It looks like real grass. It looks 100% natural. I'd say no. Where could you everyday people? And then where can I go to get this lawn if I wanted to put it in my lawn? Or where could their parents go if they want to have their parents installed in their lawns? Well, it's no longer just for the... every day people. I mean, where can I go to get this long if I want to put it in my lawn or where could their parents go if they want to have their parents installed in their lawns? Well, it's no longer just for the stadiums, like you say. This is a product that everybody can have. You can get it at Armstrong Garden Center. You can go to Costco and get it. We have a network of qualified pre-group pros like Jason that you met that can do a professional job and install it yourself, you can do it, do it yourself or type models. There's a lot of different things you can do. I mean, obviously job and install it yourself. You can do it, do it yourself, type models. There's a lot of different things you can do. I mean, obviously I did install this myself. Well, this is one a little bit larger. You wouldn't want to do this type of job yourself, but a smaller area you can do it and do it yourself. This one is where you'd want to call in a pre-group row and have it done right. Absolutely. Steve, thank you so much, man, seriously. This has been an eye opener and very educational. Well, it's nice to have had you here. It's nice that you went to Alabama and Georgia and saw every single aspect of this from resin all the way. Thank you so much, Mansor. So this has been an eye opener and very educational. Well, it's nice to have you here. It's nice that you went to Alabama and Georgia and saw every single aspect of this from resin all the way to the beautiful finish line. This is truly the most traveled show we've ever done. He's coast to west coast. Well, I think Steve at Pregray, Jason at Always Green, and everyone involved in helping us create and make this beautiful synthetic lawn. I especially want to thank you, I lean for sending us on today's Curiosity Quest goes green. Now if there's something that you're curious about, you gotta let me know. Go to kvcr.org, click on the Curiosity Quest link and simply tell me what you're curious about. And it can be your thoughts that send us on our next green adventure. Now remember, this is our planet and it's our responsibility to take care of it. So I'm curious, have you gone green? I'm Joel Green and I'll see you next time. If you'd like to order a copy of this episode or a previous episode, visit us at www.curiosityquest.org. The cost is $19.95. The Nature Conservancy, Protecting Nature, Preserving Life. These are just a few of our spectacular and diverse California state parks, providing clean air and clean water and magnificent treasures for all of us to enjoy. The incredible diversity of California is what we at the Nature Conservancy care most about. And so as we've looked to conserve a representative sample of what makes this state unique, we can't think of a better partner than the state parks system. For 50 years, the nature conservancy has worked to strengthen our state parks, protecting these and other parks around the state, adding and helping to manage more than 100,000 acres of state parks. Nature Conservancy has been a partner of our department for decades, and they play a really crucial role in identifying lands for conservation and working with us to set those places aside that are just magical, fabulous pieces of land that we need to conserve. The Nature Conservancy has helped secure land for endangered species such as Big Horn Sheep and Anza Barrego State Park and a supported parks with critical planning policy and scientific expertise. We find them just a delight to work with. They're smart, they have the expertise, they're creative, they're flexible, they look at the challenge and figure out what's the best way to solve it. The nature conservancy is committed to improving our state parks and making them accessible to every California. What excites me most are the places where we've been able to work with state parks to create opportunities for Californians to get out and experience what makes this state so incredible. The Nature Conservancy, a proud partner of California State Parks, visit nature.org slash California. Stronger, healthier babies. Learn more about healthy babies at marchofdimesbaby.org. Hey kid, what's shaking? Besides me, he he. Dad, there's something wrong with the fridge! What? Oh, a snack! Got energy hogs in your house? Now you have the power to do something about them. Log on to energyhog.wolk. Speakers nobody likes an energy hog. Hey, it got Charlie! Yeah, who cares? Hello little friends. Mother, let me go and do the day.