Happy Trails For Kids was established in 1993 by Palisadian Pepper Edmiston to give recreational opportunities to children who have physical or mental disabilities or serious illness. The nonprofit organization was originally inspired by Edmiston’s son, David, who was brain-damaged and epileptic as the result of chemotherapy treatment as a child: he passed away from an aggressive seizure in February. This year, under the leadership of two of Edmiston’s children Jon and Susan Abrams, both graduates of Palisades Charter High School, UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School, a weeklong camp will be added for children who are in foster care. Volunteers are sought for the new camp and are needed for eight days as cabin counselors or as part-time activity specialists. There will be a training program prior to the beginning of camp. UCLA students can earn two units of credit for volunteering the full week. The residential camp program held in Malibu, is cost-free to participants ages 8 to 13, and runs from August 30 through September 6. Activities include riding, hiking, surfing, swimming, a ropes course and campfires. Campers will return home with a photo album, t-shirt, sleeping bag and, most importantly, with memories of the fun and friendship that camp provides. In addition to Jon and Susan’s participation, brothers Matt and Ben Abrams will serve as cabin counselors, William Edmiston will teach music and Charlie Edmiston will shoot photographs. Shannon (Jon’s wife) will act as the camp therapist. In honoring the memory of their big brother, David, the Abrams and Edmistons hope to bring happiness and adventure to campers. Meanwhile, Happy Trails for Kids will continue its work by providing a dude ranch stay for children with disabilities and their families at the Alisal Ranch in Solvang. Also in operation is Happy Trails Farm at Ramirez Canyon Park in Malibu, a day program for students in L.A. City Special Education classes, who visit during the school year. ‘Most of the Happy Trails’ boys and girls come from urban settings, where exposure to the natural world is rare, if not nonexistent,’ Susan Abrams said. ‘All of our programs begin with the inherent calmness, freedom and healing qualities of the great outdoors. There is extensive interaction with animals. Riding a horse for the first time creates an enormous sense of accomplishment for a child, and the chance to help care for farm animals can be both empowering and therapeutic.’ For more infromation, visit www.happytrailsforkids.org or call Susan Abrams at (310) 207-1544.

For those suffering withdrawal following the ‘American Idol’ finale, Theatre Palisades offers an antidote: a musical revue, also designed to suit those who never watched ‘Idol,’ preferring their entertainment less manufactured, more real. ‘Smokey Joe’s Cafe,’ with music and lyrics by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, opened last Friday at the Pierson Playhouse.   Whatever your take on pop culture and taste in music, you’re likely to find something to enjoy here. The production showcases 37 hits from the ’50s and ’60s originally performed by The Coasters, Elvis Presley, The Drifters, Peggy Lee and other pop, rock ‘n’ roll and R & B artists.   ’Smokey Joe’s’ debuted on Broadway in 1995, garnering seven Tony nominations and winning a Grammy for the cast soundtrack. The playbill notes that the production is ‘an homage to the original Broadway version,’ so some of the credit or blame, for what works or doesn’t, may fall elsewhere.   Filled with standards such as Presley’s ‘Hound Dog,’ The Coasters’ ‘Searchin’,’ and ‘There Goes My Baby,’ recorded by The Drifters, the song list could seem dauntingly long, but the show is generally well paced.   The vocal performances are mixed, but everyone in the nine-member company has at least one song that allows them to grab hold of the audience and not let go.   The two dance captains, Amy Coles and Jacob Nixon, offer the most consistently energetic showmanship. One member of the audience at intermission said Nixon had the ‘loose ankles’ of a ‘real dancer,’ and his abilities are highlighted in a turn as a jangly-limbed drunk for ‘D. W. Washburn’ and in the enthusiastic gospel hallelujah of ‘Saved.’   Other moments fall a bit flat because too much is left on the performer’s shoulders. This is community theatre, without the big budget, eye-catching sets and dazzling gimmickry of Broadway, so the company already has a lot of pressure to capture the modern audience’s short attention span. The quick set changes further limit set and prop choices.   But sometimes a little can go a very long way. Coles does a great job with just a chair, a sparkly black dress, and a hot pink boa about 12 feet long in the winkingly seductive ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Some Cats Know.’   And in ‘Teach Me How To Shimmy,’ a white go-go dress, draped in rows of fringe and animated by Kristin Towers-Rowles as she gives herself over, body and soul, to the shimmy, does not need any help holding the stage. It’s one example of costume designer Ann Somers Major’s ability to outfit the company in strong style through numerous changes.   Some of the songs also stand on their own, riding on the audience’s excitement at hearing the first bars of a beloved oldie. Saturday night’s crowd was swept up more than once, clapping in rhythm and even singing along.   Yet even typical crowd-pleasers can fall short, such as ‘On Broadway.’ It’s a tough melody to begin with, and it’s one of the times when sound is an issue for the show. The band’s volume overwhelms the singers, though the four-man orchestra offers a good performance throughout. And without microphones, only some of the show’s singers do a consistently good job of projecting to the back of the house.   A handful of sets could have benefited from different casting, but when director Lewis Hauser gets it right, he really gets it right. Michelle Tuthill couldn’t have asked for a better chance to break the audience’s heart than with ‘Pearl’s A Singer.’   Hauser and co-director Victoria Miller shouldn’t have felt the need to include all four women in ‘I’m A Woman’ just because of a gender match. Tuthill and Rena Phillips’ life experience and big, belting voices power their contributions. But Coles and Towers-Rowles, great elsewhere, don’t match up here.   Clever choreography by Miller manages to turn some songs into skits, even without a book. Steven Flowers also deserves special mention for his warm and winning singing and dancing. He’s at ease whether leading or backing, and if the company were a sports team, he’d be named best utility player.   Overall, ‘Smokey Joe’s’ is well worth seeing, and youngsters who think ‘It’s not my kind of music’ might be surprised to find themselves clapping their hands along with those recalling the magic of first hearing these songs.   ’Smokey Joe’s Cafe’ plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through July 19 at Pierson Playhouse, 941 Temescal Canyon Road. Tickets: 310-454-1970.

In 1895, Mark Twain performed in Australia as part of his worldwide tour. From June 22 through 24, he returns to the United States in the form of Chris Wallace, who will present his one-man show, ‘The Mark Twain You Don’t Know,’ at the Pierson Playhouse, 941 Temescal Canyon Rd. In his dramatic reading, Wallace includes posthumously published and largely unknown stories, taking on all the various narrative tones of Mark Twain. The stories attack hypocrisy with a blend of skepticism and mockery. ‘Letters From the Earth’ offers an ironic conversation between God and his archangels on the human ‘experiment.’ Wallace’s clear gift for character acting is best displayed when he acts out dialogues from the early parts of ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ The American-born Wallace has lived in Australia since 1994. Before he left Los Angeles, a psychic friend said, ‘I want you to be Mark Twain in Australia.’ Wallace says that he had always had an interest in Twain, so when she said that, it took him aback. ‘Around 2003, I started thinking about what she said and ploughed through some of my Mark Twain books,’ Wallace says. ‘This show is the result.’ Performances on June 22, 23 and 24 begin at 8 p.m. Tickets ($20-$18): call 310-454-1970 or visit the box office between 3:30 and 6 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday.

  John Bennett Petrick, son of Bud and the late Lori Petrick of Pacific Palisades, and Sara Tracy, daughter of Sande and Larry Tracy of Grass Valley, have announced their engagement. The bridegroom-to-be graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor of science in retailing and consumer sciences. He now works as financial advisor/chief executive officer of Perennial Financial Services in West L.A.   Tracy graduated from the University of Texas with a bachelor of science in communications, with an emphasis on radio, television and film. Today, she works as an actress.   The couple plan to marry next May 22 at the California Yacht Club. They report that they intend to honeymoon ‘somewhere tropical’ and will reside in Culver City with the aspiration of returning to Pacific Palisades so their kids can attend Palisades Elementary and sit in the Lori Petrick Garden and share the same small-town experiences and memories that John cherishes and remembers so vividly.

When ‘Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies’ by Reyner Banham was published in 1971, it was met with scorn in some circles because it embraced the City of Angels. The critics, steeped in the work of East Coast urbanists Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, reviled Los Angeles. In the opinion of the New York Review of Books, Los Angeles was ‘the Ur-city of the plastic culture, of Kustom-Kars, and movie stars, nutburgers and Mayor Yorty and the Monkees, the Dream Factory, fantasy land, Watts and the barrio, glass and stucco-built, neon-lit, chrome-plated, formica-topped.’ Yet, looking at this list in 2009, it seems to touch on so many of the prominent issues of the last generation, from popular culture and design to our deepest social trends and troubles.   While Banham focused primarily on architecture, his book also was a study of the history and urban environment of Southern California. The book has just been reissued by the University of California Press and features a new foreword by Los Angeles architect and scholar Joe Day that captures some of the significant ways the city has changed since Banham wrote about it.   Architecture historian and critic Banham (1922-1988) arrived in Los Angeles from his native England in 1968 to work on four talks for BBC radio on the city. They were ‘Encounter with Sunset Boulevard,’ ‘Roadscape with Rusting Rails,’ ‘Beverly Hills, Too, Is a Ghetto,’ and ‘The Art of Doing Your Thing,’ which focused on the outsider art and craft tradition in Southern California, from decorated surfboards and crash helmets, to Simon Rodia’s iconic Watts Towers.   In these early radio pieces, Banham’s Los Angeles ecologies began to emerge: the beach, the foothills, and the freeways, with a fourth, ‘The Plains of Id,’ about the flat sections of the basin and valley, that would develop later. His subsequent book was interspersed with four essays on the city’s architecture, focusing on early practitioners (such as the Greene and Greene brothers) to the exile architects (R.M. Shindler and Richard Neutra chief among them) and postwar practitioners Craig Ellwood and Palisadians Charles and Ray Eames.   Banham also wrote on the importance of symbolic architecture in the city’s commercial zones, such as realized in the Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard or a variety of fast-food establishments. He chronicled the history of local transportation, from the interurban rail system, to the freeways of the 20th century.   Banham also appreciated the important of the high and the low, the functional and the symbolic, and how the city’s built environment reflects the region’s geographical complexity.   For Banham, Pacific Palisades represents the line where the beach community ecology, ‘Surfurbia,’ meets the ‘Foothills.’ He defines the stretch of beach as running from Orange County to Malibu, from R. M. Schindler’s Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach to Craig Ellwood’s 1955 Hunt house on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. He writes: ‘Between the two, the beach varies in structure, format, orientation, social status, age of development, and whatnot, but remains continuously The Beach.’ He notes that the houses standing between the beach and the highway in Malibu create a ‘private preserve.’   On the importance of Santa Monica Canyon, he elaborates: ‘It is the point where Los Angeles first came to the Beaches. From the garden of Charles Eames’ house in Pacific Palisades, one can look down on a collection of roofs and roads that cover the old camp-site to which Angelenos started to come for long weekend picnics under canvas from the beginning of the 1870s.’ The journey could take up to two days in each direction.   In his beach section, he also visits Venice (which ‘has the charm of decay’), the nascent Marina del Rey, and oil-rigs off Long Beach. The beach communities, in the late 1960s, represented the high and the low, the rough and the finished, the fantasies of one generation (theme and amusements parks) abandoned, but not yet recast into the gentrified communities that emerged in subsequent decades. The Foothills, in Banham’s time as in our own, represent the ‘fat life,’ the desire for the Arcadian life dating back to the city’s origins. The foothill ecology is about ‘narrow, tortuous residential roads serving precipitous house-plots that often back up directly on unimproved wilderness even now; an air of deeply buried privacy even in relatively broad valley-bottoms in Stone Canyon or Mandeville Canyon,’ he writes. Banham only touched on the danger of mudslides, brush fires, and the other threats associated with life in the foothills.   ’Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies’ provided a whole new way of writing about cities. Initially taken as a drive-by approach to Los Angeles, it has emerged as a central text on the city. As Anthony Vidler notes in his 2000 introduction to the book, Banham’s work ’emerges as a tightly constructed part manifesto, part new urban geography, that, joined together, form an entirely unique kind of history.’ For Vidler, Banham ‘engages the city as it is, refusing to lower its gaze in the face of sprawl, aesthetic chaos, or consumerist display.’   Perhaps because of its uncompromising vision, Banham’s book has remained au courant. ‘I’ve read the book once a decade,’ Joe Day said in a recent interview with the Palisadian-Post. ‘I discovered it while an undergraduate at Yale. I was desperate to find a site for architectural projects and ended up siting my last project in the cloverleaf of the 10 and 405 freeways.’   Day, now 42, recently reread Banham’s book to write the new foreword. His essay seeks to discuss some of the major changes that occurred in Los Angeles architecture and its urban identity since the publication of Banham’s book in 1971. Aside from the physical changes of the city, Day notes how rich the last 20 years have been on new scholarship on Los Angeles and how much of that writing has been fostered by the J. Paul Getty Research Institute.   Day’s involvement with the reissue was serendipitous. He received a call from Lindsie Bear, an editor at the University of California Press, to brainstorm a list of names of people who might write an essay for the reissue. ‘The further we got into the conversation, the more excited I got about submitting an essay for the book. Within two to three months I had a rough draft.’ For Day, Banham’s book is about the ‘potential of Los Angeles. It introduced the notion of recursive history, a form of writing urban history that introduces new themes and cycles back on itself to recalibrate its findings as they are produced. It marks a shift in urban theory.’   Out of this recursive history came Mike Davis’ 1990 ‘City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.’ While Day was pursuing his master’s degree at Southern California Institute of Architecture, he met Davis. The two later co-taught a course on prison architecture and infrastructure, a topic that has stayed close to Day’s own work. His current scholarly project looks at the impact of the growing number of prisons and museums on the cultural landscape in the last 20 years.   During the decades since ‘Los Angeles’ was published, Day thinks the city has becomes ‘normalized’ and Banham ‘canonized.’   ’Los Angeles is no longer the mid-century exception; now, it’s more typical than prototypical,’ he said. ‘Los Angeles is a provocative place–a capital of design and design education. It’s categorically different from the time of Banham’s writing.’ In Day’s mind, the present Los Angeles is no longer defined by the sunshine or noir binary, but rather plays with the range between simplicity and complexity in the cultural spectrum.   In the short space of his essay, Day was only able to touch on the diversity of voices in the city’s architectural and design community. He’s an active member: working on designing a series of screening rooms for the Columbia College Hollywood in Tarzana and on a forthcoming exhibition based on his research into museums and prisons.   When Day goes home to Silver Lake each night, Banham isn’t too far removed: he and his wife, the political scientist Nina Hachigian, have a two-year-old son named Reyner Avo Day.