How ‘Glass Pumpkins’ Found Their Way to Pacific Palisades

A different pumpkin variety will be featured at this year’s Palisades-Malibu YMCA Pumpkin Patch sale. One-of-a-kind, glass-blown pumpkins will be sold on Sunday, October 11 from 3 to 5 p.m. at Simon Meadow, located on the corner of Temescal Canyon Road and Sunset Boulevard. Twenty-five Santa Monica College (SMC) students and other artists affiliated with the college created the colorful orbs. Pacific Palisades resident and glass collector Cindy Simon came up with the idea of selling glass pumpkins at this annual event. ‘I love working with the YMCA and am always thinking of ways to make the Pumpkin Patch fun,’ Simon said, adding that she introduced the scarecrow contest two years ago. Simon and her husband, Bill, are longtime supporters of the Y, and they donated $250,000 to help the Y purchase Simon Meadow in fall 2007.   Simon had never seen glass pumpkins until last fall when she and her 21-year-old son, Willie, who attends Riverview School on Cape Cod, took a trip to Rochester, New York.   Since Simon has collected glass paperweights for 21 years, she wanted to visit the Corning Museum of Glass, about two hours south of Rochester. In the gift shop, she discovered glass pumpkins that ‘were piled high on bundles of hay and were like jewels, each one more beautiful and special than the next,’ Simon said, adding that she was so taken with them that she bought a couple and had them sent home.   Two weeks later, she visited her 19-year-old daughter, Lindsay, at Boston College for parents’ weekend. While there, she read in the newspaper about a glass pumpkin sale at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).   When she arrived, ‘the line was wrapped around the block and once they opened the gates, people were charging in and grabbing pumpkins’it was really an experience,’ Simon said.   She managed to buy a couple of pumpkins, which were made by M.I.T staff and students, and, at that point, ‘I was really kind of hooked.’ She has since collected 15 glass pumpkins. Simon figured that a glass pumpkin sale could be just as popular in the Palisades as at M.I.T. She shared her idea with Y Executive Director Carol Pfannkuche and Dorothy Miyake, a former Canyon School kindergarten teacher who is taking glassmaking classes at SMC from Palisadian artist Terri Bromberg.   ’Carol is always open to my crazy ideas,’ Simon said, laughing, so she agreed. Miyake approached Bromberg with the concept, and she also wanted to pursue it.   ’I was familiar with the large success of glass pumpkin sales at festivals, so I thought ‘why not try one locally?” Bromberg told the Palisadian-Post, adding that she also thought it would challenge her students. Bromberg, who has taught sculpture and 3D design at the college for six years, started teaching the glassmaking class this year. She began glassmaking at SMC 15 years ago and has taken classes at Corning; Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington; the Bay Area Glass Institute in San Jose and Palomar College in San Diego.   Despite all her training, Bromberg had never made glass pumpkins, so she invited Ali Shahvali, who formally owned the glass studio Viccolo in Van Nuys, to give a demonstration to the class on September 8.   Artist Jim Embrescia, who made glass pumpkins when he worked at Viccolo, also taught a small group of students the art form on September 19.   Simon attended that workshop with her youngest son, Griffith (a junior at Harvard-Westlake), and found it so fascinating that she stayed the entire day.   ’I was taken with the teamwork involved,’ Simon explained. ‘One person is blowing in a long tube, while another is making the globe, and someone else is working on the stem. The glass has to remain hot, but not so hot it will burst the globe. Timing is everything.’   The students have since made hundreds of pumpkins in different colors including blue, purple and even zebra-striped. Prices start at $20. Bromberg plans to sell her own pieces, which are gourds with warts and fall leaves. Embrescia will also have his pumpkins for sale.   A portion of the proceeds from the sale will support the YMCA, Santa Monica College’s glass program, and the various artists.   Simon can hardly wait to see what the artists have created.   ’I will have to buy another pumpkin on Sunday,’ Simon said, laughing that her friends call her infatuation with glass pumpkins an obsession.

Fifteen years ago, Eric Jasper played trumpet as a third grader at Marquez Elementary, where his instructor was Larry Newman. This past August, the two Palisadians won an Emmy in the Children/Youth Programming category for Newman’s Children’s Music Workshop’s 2008 production of the All Schools Elementary Honor Orchestra, which was held on May 2. Jasper, 26, attended Stanford and graduated with a double major in music composition and political science. He received a graduate degree in film scoring from USC. However, his education truly began in Pacific Palisades. ‘Larry helped me get started in the music world,’ Jasper says. ‘He is a great teacher and a mentor who gave me the confidence to keep going with my music. I owe him a lot and I thought it would be a good way to reconnect with him and the music community.’ ‘When I learned he was starting his career as a film composer,’ Newman says, ‘I asked him if he’d like to do the background for my one-hour special. I told him I couldn’t pay him, but that I could give him a producing credit.’ Newman also gave him artistic freedom. Jasper wrote six different musical cues for the opening, closing and transitional phases of the special. The concert featured 130 elementary students from two-dozen Los Angeles area elementary schools, including St. Matthew’s, Marquez, Palisades, Topanga and Kenter Canyon. The show also included interviews with parents, students, teachers and administrators on the importance of music in the school curriculum. Jasper played trumpet and keyboard for the special, in addition to recording the music, ‘a hybrid of rock and orchestral music. I wanted to capture the inspirational tone of the production.’ This was the second Emmy for Newman, who won in 2008 and noted at the time, ‘This is meaningful, since I am first and foremost a musician and a music teacher.’ This year, his special was up against KNBC’s children’s series, ‘Yip Yap,’ ‘so we were quite surprised and thrilled to win,’ Newman says. ‘The idea for the televised show,’ he continues, ‘originally came a number of years ago from one of my students’ parents, who was a producer and offered to tape the concert and put together a show for [cable station] LA36.’ LA36 has broadcast the annual concert for the past six years. This year was Jasper’s first walk to the Emmy podium. ‘It was a great feeling to be up there in front of everybody, and receive recognition for something that you’ve put a lot of time and effort into,’ he says. ‘But more than any award, my ultimate goal is to be a composer for major movies and television shows.’ Jasper has orchestrated music for two films, ‘Ninja’ and ‘Cool Dog,’ which are waiting release dates. He also arranged the music for ‘Lies and Illusions,’ a film which opens this month. While at USC, he served as an intern on ‘Lost’ under Michael Giacchino, who won a 2008 Grammy Award for Best Score, Soundtrack Album for ‘Ratatouille.’ Newman and Jasper are currently completing production of the 2009 concert program. ‘This year, there are more interviews with students, so I’m composing a piece of music for each kid that matches their character,’ Jasper says. Jasper, the son of Highlands residents Shirley and Neil Jasper, one day hopes to enjoy a career along the lines of the late Palisades resident Jerry Goldsmith, who composed scores for numerous films, including ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ‘Mulan’ and ‘Basic Instinct.’ ‘He was a master of writing great melodies and getting the maximum amount of emotion out of the orchestra,’ Jasper says. Visit the Web site www.childrensmusicworkshop.com.

It was definitely not a case of too many chefs in the kitchen when Ballantines PR principle Sarah Robarts hosted a dinner prepared and served by Norway’s international epicurean group, The Flying Culinary Circus, at her Pacific Palisades home last month. The Palisades was one stop for Flying Culinary on an itinerary that includes Singapore, San Paolo and Malaysia before heading home to Oslo. The Circus”Tor Arnesen, Hans Larsen, Mathais Bugge and Trond Svendgard”operate as kind of a Wu-Tang Clan of the gourmet world, with each member specializing in a different skill (Arnesen handles herbs/vegetables, Bugge concocts sauces/soup, Svendgard’s expertise is seafood while Larsen is the meat master). But as one guest noted, the 20-something chefs resembled a boy band. The quartet formed after Bebe clothing founder Manny Mashouf attended their first gig in Central Park, circa 2005, and flew the chefs out to L.A. to cater his event. The team has been working exclusive ever since, cooking for such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson. ‘We’re inspired by local cuisine wherever we go, but we try to make it our own,’ Svendgard told the Palisadian-Post. Lori and William Corbin, Dylinda and Craig Kaplan, Rachael Damavandi, Bruce Hulse and Theresa Heim were among the Palisadians at Robarts’ September 25 gathering, where the menu included quail and foie gras, Santa Barbara shrimps, and tuna sashimi with apple and wasabi sorbet. Also present: photographer Brad Elterman, Britney Spears biographer Steve Dennis, and Matthew Jaime and Cesar Lomeli, producers of Tequila Real De Mexico, who served up such well-received signature cocktails as the jalapeno-flavored Real Mexican and the minty martini Beso Real.

Any minute now, Palisadians will once again behold the blue-and-yellow big top rising alongside the Santa Monica Pier, marking the return of Cirque du Soleil to the area. This is an anniversary of sorts for the Canadian entertainment phenomenon that debuted here a decade ago. Of special excitement to Cirque aficionados is the return of David Shiner, who is fondly remembered for his slapstick antics and forays into the audience. For ‘Kooza,’ opening October 16, Shiner has written a show that accentuates the type of clowning that is specific to him, says Gilles Ste-Croix, the organization’s senior vice president for creative content. ‘In this show, we’re really going back to clowning, where you recognize yourself. But, in addition, there will be death-defying acts where you believe death doesn’t exist because you survive. The only other medium like this is the Olympian push to run the fastest, jump the highest and be the strongest.’ Ste-Croix, whose circus credentials were established by the ingenious makeshift stilts he put together to ease his apple-picking chores, had been attracted to show business as a boy in rural Quebec.   ’I come from a simple family, born on a farm,’ he tells the Palisadian-Post. ‘My father was a farmer, my mother a teacher, and I wanted to perform in the theater. That was not pleasing to my parents.’ So the obedient son studied architecture until he bailed for the hippie life. He moved to California, lived in a commune and audited drama classes. His entr’e into show business came in a roundabout way. Back in Quebec, he was living in a commune and picking apples to make money. One day, he figured out an easier way by attaching the ladder to his legs’voil’, his first set of stilts! In the late 1970s, Ste-Croix leaned about Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater, which based many of its performances on stilt walking. So, in 1980, he and several street artists founded the ‘chassiers (‘stilt-walkers’) de Baie’Saint-Paul and organized a festival, which would eventually lead to the founding of Cirque du Soleil with Guy Lalibert’ in 1984.   For the past seven years, Ste-Croix has been working on creating new shows.   ’I am stationed in Montreal, where I spend half the year, and the other half, I am traveling around the world to see performances, collecting ideas for developing a new show and meeting creators.’ There are currently 19 shows all over the world, in Australia, two in Japan, two in Europe and six in Las Vegas. Another is planned for next year in Dubai. ‘We have six traveling shows in big tops,’ Ste-Croix says, adding that the tent in Japan, which is white, is designed according to strict engineering standards to withstand a tsunami.   Shows developed for the big top differ from the proscenium shows, or, as Ste. Croix explains, they are two different mediums. ‘The advantage of the big top is that the performers are practically on top of the audience,’ he explains. ‘In ‘Wheel of Death,’ which is a new act for ‘Kooza,’ the performer is spinning in the air, flying from one hoop to the other, like your doing it on the laps of the audience. On the other hand, the proscenium theater offers incredible opportunities for apparatus hanging out of view above the stage.’ A new skill joining the roster of performing artists is the pickpocket, Ste-Croix says: ‘This is one of those trades that are disappearing. These magic tricks are skills that David [Shiner] worked on when he was doing cabaret.’ ‘Kooza,’ which means ‘box’ or ‘treasure,’ was chosen because one of the underlying concepts of the production is the idea of a ‘circus in a box.’ The show starts with The Trickster bursting onto the stage, like a jack-in-the-box, in front of The Innocent. The Innocent’s journey brings him into contact with a parade of comic characters, including Pickpocket and Obnoxious Tourist and his Bad Dog. The antics are interspersed with such human performance skills as chair-balancing, contortions, high wire, juggling, teeterboard, solo trapeze, unicycle riding and the Wheel of Death. Cirque performers hail from all over the world, Ste-Croix says. ‘Often, we find artists from the same family, like the Dominguez brothers, a double high-wire act from Spain.’ For tickets, call 800-450-1480.