It is hard to believe it’s been a month since the show closed. I miss seeing the ever changing piles each day. More importantly, I miss the incredible members of Stan’s Cafe.
I’ll be back to post some additional photos and comments from visitors to the show.
Thanks to all who visited and shared this incredible experience with us!
There’s just a little more than a week left to see Stan’s Cafe’s Of All the People in All the World at the Skirball Cultural Center!
We’re open regular hours this weekend. To help plan your holiday visits, our hours next week are:
Closed Monday, December 24
Closed Tuesday, December 25
Wednesday, December 26 from 12-5
Thursday, December 27 from 12-9 (FREE ADMISSION ON THURSDAYS!)
Friday, December 28 from 12-5
Saturday, December 29 from 10-5
Sunday, December 30 from 10-5 (CLOSING DAY!)
The show is looking great, it has expanded and changed over the past two weeks. I was away for almost a week and was delighted to see “the new stuff” on my walkthrough yesterday!
If you have seen Of All the People in All the World, let us hear from you! Feel free to add your comments to this post (or any other that strikes your fancy!).
The day began with a workshop with students from Canterbury Avenue High School. This was great fun and as last year very enlightening about American/L.A. culture for us Brits. Part of the workshop involves a fun game where we ask the group questions about themselves such as “Who is wearing jeans?” “Who has a cell phone?” “Who has a brother?” “Who is a Dodgers fan?”. The game is a way of helping them to see how we can learn about the world and its people through numbers and statistics. One of the questions we ask is “Whose parents were born outside the USA?” As with the workshops last year a sizeable majority of the group’s parents were in this category which, from our perhaps naïve British eyes, was exciting and surprising and suggests that the States is still a dynamic country with a very diverse and international population. It will be interesting to ask that question in 30 years time to see what the number will be then. The students were all really engaged with the workshop and the show offering some very interesting suggestions about what statistics could feature the show in the future. They also cleverly noted how the people represented by those grains of rice are connected to each other and have an impact on the way the world is now and on what it might become.
During the rest of the day we worked on sections about homelessness in the USA and LA,; travel and tourism and the population density of the different states of the USA.
-Craig
The Skirball’s Hanukkah program meant a big happy crowd milling round the centre listening to bands and enjoying a host of family based activities. Away down the corridors things were quieter for us with the rice. Occasionally large groups, like the excellent Omega crowd, made it down, but mostly the room was just steadily attended.
We had lots of bright kids through, their parents testing their knowledge or powers of deduction, using the rice piles as learning points – we heard one girl get a good grounding in labour history and early unionisation in our Garment Workers section. A young lad filled Graeme in on the intricacies of the U.S. electoral system, how a president can win the popular vote and lose the electoral college.
There were lots of excellent an provocative suggestions. A few people wanted to see a pile depicting the population of China, to which we had to explain that in all three rooms we don’t have enough rice for that pile. Then there were the obvious questions about the population of the world, which is almost twenty one times the very big pile we have representing the U.S.A..
The show grew a bit. We added a playful obituary in rice for Evel Knievel. Polar exploration and conflict in the South Atlantic are now included. Abortion came under a little more focus. I felt compelled to add the entrants in this year’s World Beard and Moustache Championships next to the four Texan Police Officers suing against having to shave their beards off. We have also added some statistics about charitable acts, a few of these link to the work of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, where much of the rice is going once the performance closes on December 30.
It was a long fun day, with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for the show from people of all ages, crucially one of the suggestions we got during the course of the day was a great place to have dinner.
James
We love doing this show in Los Angeles because people tend to be so open with their thoughts and feelings. Skeptics march directly up to you why they are skeptical. Often they’ve not understood that we have a good measure of the grains contained in a gram. They realise the show is far more accurate than they had imagined and retreat happily to look at the next bit of the show. Others think the show is great but missing or misrepresenting a key issue. These conversations are usually instructive, sometimes they push us in a interesting directions, sometimes they tell us which bits of the show need clarifying, often the reveal the preconceptions of the visitor, they always seem to end in harmony. Generally the theme is simply, “we love this show, isn’t it amazing” – which we never tire of hearing.
The history of this country makes it great material for the show. In the last two days visitors have been moved to tears thinking back to their relatives, individual grains in the mounds representing people who passed through Ellis Island or who were brought to this continent on British Slave Ships.
Lots of people have been saying they saw the show when it was here last year but that it had gone before they had a chance to send their friends. Now we are here until December 30th they are leaving with fistfuls of cards to distribute to those they think should come “I’m going to hand these out at Church tomorrow, everyone should see this”, “I’m giving this to my son, he’ll come with his girlfriend, they’ll love it”. We hope to see things get busier and busier as the runs go on. Our ambition? We notice that visitors to the Noah’s Ark exhibition have time-limited tickets stuck to their chests… we want things to ramp up to the point where it’s one-out one-in time limited tickets!
James
We’d love to hear from visitors who have seen the show in the first few days. Please feel free to add your comment to this post. Comments are moderated, so they won’t appear immediately. We will, however, post them as soon as we are able. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I am pleased to share remarks from yesterday’s opening event from Stan’s Cafe’s Artistic Director James Yarker.
“Of All the People In All the World was first performed in 2003, since then it has been around the UK, across Europe and introduced Stan’s Cafe to North America and Australia. The show has become dear to us as it has introduced us to so many wonderful and fascinating people in all these places. The Skirball is an extraordinary collection of building constructed to fulfill an admirable mission and staffed by a collection of the friendliest people we have ever come across. It is a privilege to be presenting a show we care so much about in a venue we respect so highly. To be back by popular demand is a remarkable and flattering honour and to be back by individual request is extraordinary; so we need to give some thanks. We would like to thank the staff here for their warm welcome and hard work, Jordan for his vision in inviting us the first time. The Skirball’s public for taking us to their hearts and the generous donor whose faith in us and our show has moved us deeply. God bless you all.
We will do our very best to ensure the show lives up to all this attention. You will see it is currently in its infancy and will expand and grow more full of richness and resonance as time passes. We hope that you enjoy it, that you return to see how it develops and that you send your friends and family along too.
Finally I hope that Of All the People In All the World may be the start of an extended relationship between Stan’s Cafe and the Skirball Cultural Center, we hope to see you all again soon.”
James Yarker
Stan’s Cafe’s Of All the People in All the World: The Americas is now open at Skirball! I am going to check out the exhibition now. We’ll have more reports and photos later!
I went back to the FreeRice site this morning (it has become a habit!) and learned this news. Here’s a quote from the site:
For its first seven weeks, FreeRice gave 10 grains of rice for each correct answer. On November 28, 2007, we were able to increase this to 20 grains. We hope to be able to increase this again in the future. Here is how we look at it: Your part is to play and donate the rice. Our part is to increase the amount you can donate!
We are also working to increase the number of vocabulary words and levels so that you will not run out of words to learn anytime soon…
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