Cool Shades

Last Friday my favorite sunglasses in the world snapped in two!

I loved them for how I imagined they made me look (perpetually glam, a harried movie star chasing her children about the city incognito). And they held a great memory. Jonathan and I had gotten them at Oliver People's on Sunset at a party where DJs played music with a big back-beat and beautiful shoppers quaffed foreign beers. Two salespeople fought over which glasses looked better on me (because both looked GREAT, of course!) They were called La Donna.

So when they broke I nearly wept.

My husband told me to go to Retrospecs & Co. This is the store owned by the two original founding parents of Larchmont Charter West Hollywood. The store is run by a husband and wife team. The business was born out of a college dream of Jay Owens. He loved old spectacles. So after college he began traveling around the country in an RV searching for and restoring old glasses from the golden age of eyewear. He would fix them up and sell them. Little did he dream that one day he would sell his glasses across the country--from Aspen to Madison Ave. And have his own store on one of the trendiest little strips in Los Angeles.

They are two of the coolest people you will ever meet. To me they embody the enterpreneurial spirit of America--before the world went corporate. They have huge hearts and a can-do spirit. And they are good businesspeople, too.

Jay and Marya's store is on Melrose--just steps from the Pacific Design Center and the Bodhi Tree. The shop is small and chic. Deep drawers are filled with the coolest glasses you have ever seen. And they know how to make you look good!

They pulled out Seventies glasses that made me look like Joni Mitchell or Elton John, and movie star glasses that made me look like Sophia Loren. But in the end they encouraged me to get some one-of-a-kind shades of gray-blue buffalo horn. I have never seen anything like them. They are a work of art. And in them--I tell myself--I am a work of art.

And, Jay promises me, you have never felt anything like Buffalo Horn. The specs won't slide and sweat like plastic. They meld to your head!

Check it out!

Pictures from the Garden

Here we are in the Larchmont Charter West Hollywood garden, pounding our herbs into butter. Pictures of courtesy of the fabulous Alana Cortes. For more info, go to my Eco-Literacy post. For more on the Chez Panisse Foundation and their fabulous Edible Schoolyard Curriculum check this out!

Eco-Literacy

When we were invited to help start my son's charter school, THE main founding parents, Marya Francis and Jay Owens, kept going on and on about eco-literacy. The term was so bourgeois, upper-middle-class, urban angsty that I just ignored it in the moment. That was not why I was interested in the school.

But with time I have become deeply moved and committed to the idea. Marya, a quiet, powerful visionary, slaved to make her dream come true. She did not care if anyone else was interested. Through her work and initiative this fall Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation came down to meet the Larchmont Charter Schools. The schools put together a fabulous lunch, prepared by organic chef mama Margarite Mees, and served Alice and her friends a fresh, delicious lunch out on the schoolyard with the children.

Those there had been warned that Alice would be tired, exhausted from a busy trip, and they had about a 15 minute window to get her attention or not. They did it! They broke through and Alice fell in love with the school. The Larchmont Schools have been accepted to be An Edible Schoolyard. The program is designed to teach children to grow food, to prepare food, and to eat better. It is to teach a connection to the land, the earth, local farmers, our community and the food we eat.

Today, Waters has a wonderful piece in the NYT about why schools need to feed kids good food. She argues, with powerful facts and figures, that school lunch should not be a cheap dumping ground for leftover corporate agricultural products and a gigantic junk food distribution system. She argues that we need to dump our current school lunch program and start again from scratch. I agree.

Today I go to the school garden with my boys. A group of devoted mothers have transformed an asphalt patch behind the school into a magical place. There are greens, herbs, flowers, a tiny fountain with stools and scarecrows made of recycled items. It is a tiny zen place in the middle of this urban jungle. It is a lesson in how you can create beauty and green out of nothing. The kids love it.

They water the plants and sniff the leaves. Last time we made salads out of every kind of green we could find. Today we will harvest some herbs and make herb butter. My son has started eating salad--in large part due to this garden. Nature is my place (though gardening is not my strength) and I am deeply moved to see the children watering, harvesting and eating what they have grown. Far more than I would have expected.

I have become an Eco-Literacy convert. I read Waters' biography and watched the old French movies that gave her famous restaurant its name. I surf the web at night trying to learn more, and I have become a fan of Andrew Goldsworthy, the fabulous British artist who creates ephemeral works in nature. I am ready to subscribe to an Eco-Literacy newsletter for kids, and to really get into it.

This is my favorite part. Real Eco-Literacy teachers emphasize that you do not want to teach children about all the harm that has come to the earth. You do not want to teach them about polluted oceans, falling Amazon forests, or other horrible things they cannot do anything about. You simply want to take them out into the woods, the forests, the deserts, the oceans and teach them to love this world. When they see how beautiful it is, when they sense its magic, they will spend their lives trying to protect it.

Changing the World

Last night I went to a gathering to meet the new educational director (John Lee) of the Larchmont Charter Schools: the original, and the new one (Larchmont Charter West Hollywood). He is a dynamo. He has done Teach For America, run the California Charter Association, been a teacher and principal in an urban charter school. Now he is here to help us grow into a movement, a chain, a middle school and a high school. He is here to help us find a site, use our volunteer hours effectively, and get lots of grant money for the future. He wants to send his kids to our school.

At the meeting I ran into two old friends from the Los Angeles Times. This morning one wrote to me: i feel like you're part of a Che Guevara-esque movement - and all for your children. so noble and inspiring!

Well, who wouldn't want to be compared to Che. How cool!

And it does feel like a revolution. Not a bloody revolution, but a quiet stealth revolution for good.

But most of all I realized that I am ready for activism. I became a journalist because I believe in activism. The job of a great journalist is to find the problems in society, tell those stories, and help bring about change. At least that is why I became a journalist. But after awhile it is tiring to be a journalist. You are not doing. You are observing. And after years and years you long to be able to state your political party, to declare your affiliations, to shout from the rooftops what you care about, and why. It becomes exhausting to pretend you are unbiased and objective. I never took that pledge, nor believed in it. But what a relief to be able to throw yourself into something wholeheartedly. To be an actor, an agent for change, and not just writing about it.

It feels good.

First Day of School at Larchmont Charter West

Today we took Theo to his first day of kindergarten. I swore I wouldn't get emotional. I think he has been ready to go to school for a year. But as we drove him to school, and I walked him past the principal, upstairs, watched him put his tote bag in his new cubby, and walk in and pick his name out of the pile and put it in the "present" column, then walk off to his little table by himself my eyes welled up with tears. I am proud of him, that he is so ready, and he is jumping in. And I am proud of us, that in nine months we did the impossible: we started a new school! It is filled with an amazing principal, an amazing vision, a kick-ass kindergarten teacher, children of every nationality and social class (his table: Theo, Omeed, Ondine and Sasha) and the most super-mod mini furniture I have ever seen. It is a new era.