College students, bookbags looped over their shoulders, flooded the sidewalks in Westwood Village last Wednesday afternoon, hurrying to their next class or slipping into a cafe to recharge. Just off the street, on the second floor of the UCLA Extension building on Gayley, another breed of students gathered for their weekly two-hour meeting, and everyone had done their homework. In a small classroom, a group of 13 older adults sat around a table discussing ‘The Philosophy of Art.’ They read from Aristotle’s ‘Poetics,’ viewed slides of 4th-century B.C. sculpture, and debated how these works of art might have affected Aristotle’s thinking about art and beauty. The students–retired lawyers, doctors and artists–engaged in a stimulating and organized debate, raising their hands and challenging one another’s opinions. Though they had years of life and professional experience behind them, many were new to the study of philosophy and art. They shared a curiosity and desire for learning. What brought them together was the PLATO Society, a continued learning program for retired or semi-retired men and women. Founded in 1980, PLATO (Perpetual Learning and Teaching Organization) is affiliated with UCLA Extension but it is self-governing, so members are in charge of admitting new members, choosing the curriculum and coordinating discussions. PLATO members are people who ‘love to expand their knowledge base,’ says Mimi Harris, the current president of the organization. Many members ‘spent their lives preparing for their careers as physicians or CEOs, and they may have missed studying other things, like the classics.’ David Hirsch is a good example. A retired attorney and senior advisor at Masco Corporation, one of the largest manufacturers of products for home improvement and new construction, Hirsch joined PLATO a year ago. ‘It fulfills a need in me to learn about things I don’t know,’ says Hirsch, who was a philosophy major at Pomona College and has spent the last two summers studying British history at Oxford’s Merton College. ‘I guess I just never got enough schooling.’ Hirsch is currently co-coordinating ‘The Philosophy of Art’ course with Sally More, an artist with a BFA from the University of Illinois. Prospective members complete an application with their career and educational background, then are interviewed by three PLATO members. The membership fee is $425 a year. ‘During the year I was chair of the [membership] selection committee, we didn’t reject a single person,’ says Palisadian Naidu Permaul, who has been a member for four and a half years. ‘For the most part, PLATO appeals to people who have their weekdays free, and that tends to be retired individuals. We have a few people who continue to work, but they work at their leisure.’ For Permaul, joining PLATO was a refreshing change from a career spent working in the human resources department for the County of Los Angeles. Having earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from UCLA and having studied medieval history at the graduate level, Permaul joined PLATO because his interests in history, politics and philosophy ‘lend themselves to lots of discussion and sharing of ideas.’ Like the Athenian philosopher Plato, who wrote in dialogue form, PLATO members study and debate ideas in an interactive context–by participating in weekly study/discussion groups (S/DGs). Three 14-week terms of courses are offered each year, with a choice of about 25 subjects per term that range from art to science, music to history and literature to politics. Members are encouraged to enroll in S/DGs on subjects they do not know a lot about. This kind of diverse educational experience appealed to Leonardo Chait, a Palisades resident and cardiologist, when he retired five years ago. ‘Doctors talk shop all the time and it’s very boring,’ he says. ‘PLATO provided me the opportunity to learn many different things, to widen my horizons and also to meet people from very different backgrounds.’ Chait has proposed topics that have been selected by the curriculum committee, such as the ‘History of Oil,’ which traced the uses of oil from lighting lamps to fueling automobiles. Some of his other favorite S/DGs were ‘American Culture and Art Since 1945’ and ‘The Films of David Lean.’ During the standard 14-week term, each member becomes the discussion leader for one meeting and is responsible for preparing a presentation on some aspect of the course topic. Two members are designated in advance as the coordinator and co-coordinator, leading the group and making the first two presentations. When Permaul coordinated a course on ‘Documents and Declarations,’ he prepared a list of possible presentation topics–from the Code of Hammurabi to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Monroe Doctrine’for each member to research. ‘Our history is replete with various important documents and declarations,’ Permaul says. ‘Many of us are familiar with them by name but we really don’t have a good feel for what they’re all about, what they were trying to address, the conditions of the times that inspired them, or who stated opposition and why.’ Members spend varying amounts of time preparing for the weekly, two-hour sessions, and it is not uncommon for coordinators to put in 20 to 30 hours of reading and preparation. ‘Everybody feels very responsible for his or her presentation and they come in prepared to talk for two hours,’ says Permaul, who is currently co-coordinating an S/DG entitled ‘Middle East Quagmire: Part I–Zionist Thought,’ anticipated to be the first of a trilogy that will examine the quagmire of Israeli/Palestinian politics. With a smile, Permaul adds that presenters are lucky if they are able to talk for 20 minutes straight. ‘The people in PLATO won’t let you lecture. They like to talk, they like to voice their opinions.’ ‘People are pretty objective in PLATO,’ says Joyce Ferris, a Palisades resident and longtime PLATO member who joined the group at its inception, when she was in her 50s. ‘They’re there to discuss, not to argue, which is nice.’ Ferris, who earned a bachelor’s degree in humanities from Stanford, was a stay-at-home mom and raised six children, volunteering for many years at their schools and church, Corpus Christi. She jokes that when her husband retired from his job as a TWA pilot and was suddenly home all the time, she needed to get out. That’s when she joined PLATO. ‘You take art and music courses, you go on field trips,’ says Ferris, who also serves on PLATO’s library committee, helping other members navigate and research in the small, compact library in the UCLA Extension building. ‘You’re a student again–an elderly student.’ Most PLATO members are in their 60s and 70s, but undergraduate UCLA honors students like Rodolfo Gonzales can also participate in PLATO courses for college credit. Gonzales, a psychology major enrolled in ‘The Philosophy of Art’ S/DG, has enjoyed stepping outside the comfort zone of his peers to learn alongside PLATO members. ‘They have a wealth of knowledge about them,’ he says. ‘We have good discussions.’ ‘The sessions can be instructive and they can be enlightening,’ says Permaul, who remembers that, at the conclusion of one S/DG on ‘Causes of War,’ members ‘walked away chastened by the realization that, contrary to our pre-impression, religion is not a major cause of war.’ They studied Thucydides, the fifth-century B.C. Greek historian and author of ‘History of the Peloponnesian War,’ which recounts the war between Sparta and Athens. ‘Thucydides concluded that there are principally three reasons for war: interest, fear and honor,’ says Permaul, who felt that Thucydides was right about interest and fear. ‘Some people have challenged me on the U.S. Civil War. I’ve not made up my own mind.’ Permaul’s one complaint about PLATO is that the organization does not have enough conservative members. ‘I wish we had many, many more,’ he says, ‘because we end up preaching to the choir.’ Currently, the PLATO Society has 361 active members (making presentations) and 43 active associates (attending S/DGs but not making presentations). Members are eligible to audit regular UCLA courses of special interest, subject to the consent of the instructor. Members are encouraged to participate in other PLATO activities, such as the Colloquia, a series of monthly lectures that bring together the entire membership of the Society and feature prestigious guest speakers on subjects ranging from pre-Columbian culture to a consideration of God, man and genetics. The Colloquia are usually held at the Skirball Center. Past speakers have included John Dean, Arianna Huffington and Gordon Davidson of the Center Theatre Group. PLATO also organizes ‘Brown Bag Lunch Lectures,’ or noon presentations at UCLA by PLATO members who speak on their field of interest or expertise. For more information, visit uclaextension.edu/plato or call (310) 794-0231. ————— Reporting by Associate Editor Alyson Sena. To contact, e-mail: newsdesk@palipost.com

The words of Tennessee Williams in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ echoed through my head long after I left Theatre Palisades Saturday night. Here’s Tom, the young man whose ambitions have been forfeited to family obligations. ‘I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space . . . . I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. . . . I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!’ Most audiences are familiar with ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ which tells the story of an overbearing Southern Belle mother, Amanda Wingfield, and her absentee husband, ‘a telephone man who fell in love with long distances.’ Her son Tom supports her and his sister Laura by working in a job he detests while seeking solace in his writing and the movies. The fourth character in the play, the gentleman caller Jim O’Conner, represents the hope that Amanda so desperately needs, that her painfully shy daughter Laura will be successful in a relationship, which in turn will ensure Amanda’s future. This haunting drama was a semi-autobiographical account of Williams’ life. His family lived with his mother’s parents until he was seven. Family life disintegrated after the father, a traveling salesman and heavy drinker, moved them to St. Louis. The security that Williams and his sister had felt with the grandparents slowly disintegrated as they shuffled to 16 different places in 10 years. Since Williams was shy and ostracized at school, he and his sister Rose found themselves becoming increasingly close friends. Laura is patterned after Rose, who in later years suffered mental illness and then underwent a prefrontal lobotomy. Williams is one of America’s greatest playwrights, and “The Glass Menagerie” is one of his most famous plays, along with ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ and ‘Streetcar Named Desire.’ His plays are a favorite with actors because the characters are rich and multidimensional, despite being burdened with fatal flaws. Williams’ dramatic roles may deceive an actor into thinking that their inner dialogue needs to be intoned with a bravura to match the larger-than-life characters. It’s difficult to master the nuances, to help the audience see a real person, rather than an actor or actress in a role. Judging from the women who have played Amanda Wingfield– Laurette Taylor, Helen Hayes, Maureen Stapleton, Joanne Woodward and Katharine Hepburn’with only two winning critical acclaim, one can appreciate that accomplishing subtlety is no small feat. At the Theatre Palisades production, Drew Fitzsimmons, who plays Tom Wingfield, is relatively successful in displaying the conflict that his character feels. On one hand he feels responsible for his sister and mother’s welfare, but on the other hand he is slowly suffocating. Tom describes a magic act to Laura. ‘But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail . . . . There is a trick that would come in handy for me–get me out of this two-by-four situation!’ The Gentleman Caller Jim (Olev Aleksander) and Laura (Catherine Day) have nice chemistry. Jim is well on his way to fitting into his character, selling Laura the goods that he needs to believe in himself. The set designed by the play’s director, Sherman Wayne, is particularly effective, especially since Tom reminds us in the beginning that this is a memory play. The gauzy effect produced by using curtains gives the effect of something a bit distant, a different time–just as memories are. This is one of the most memorable sets I’ve seen at this theater. Special mention should go to the costume designer, Diana Mann. I specifically liked the clothes she chose for Amanda (Martha Hunter), particularly the dress worn for the dinner with The Gentleman Caller. Why the director chose not to use some props, like a leg brace for the impaired Laura, or put some type of liquid in the glasses, I don’t know. I did find it annoying to watch people pretend to drink out of empty glasses, especially since there was such careful attention to other details. I also didn’t like the last scene with Amanda and Laura sitting together on the sofa, when Tom asks Laura to blow out the candles; the focus, I feel, should be solely on Laura. She should haunt the audience, just as she’s done to her brother all of these years. Community theater is a valuable resource to people in the Palisades; without the long drive to downtown L.A., it is available in our back yard. Despite the uneven acting, as long as great pieces, such as Williams’ ‘The Glass Menagerie’ are produced, audiences will be assured a satisfying theater experience. ‘The Glass Menagerie’ continues at Pierson Playhouse, 941 Haverford, through February 18. Performances run Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call the box office at (310) 454-1970. ——— Reporting by Staff Writer Sue Pascoe. To contact, e-mail: features@palipost.com

The second session of Adult Education courses starts at Palisades Charter High School, 15777 Bowdoin St., this week with course offerings including flower arranging, digital photography and the computer class, Windows XP. In March, Palisades Charter will also become home to a ‘mature driver’ education program, which will aim to improve the driving skills and build confidence for drivers 55 years of age and older. Courses will also be held at eight other site locations throughout the city, including Fairfax High School, Hamilton High School, West Hollywood Community Center, University High School, Varieties International Dance Studio in Santa Monica, Park La Brea, the African Red Tea House and PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) in West Los Angeles. A wide variety of competitively priced courses will be offered, including computer subjects, real estate, painting, floral arranging, ballroom dancing, organic cooking and several different languages. Classes are priced from $40 to $85 for one six-week session. Many of the courses offer a 20-percent discount for senior adults over 62. The Online Educational Program (OEP) of Westside Enrichment in partnership with LAUSD’s Division of Adult & Career Education has over 1,500 online course offerings for people to choose from, including such subjects as English grammar, Adobe PhotoShop CS, business management, QuickBooks, computer basics, home business, estate planning and a variety of technical computer courses. Adults over the age of 18 years who are not attending high school may register for any and all courses by visiting the Web site and downloading the mail-in registration form. Brochures may be obtained at any of the site locations listed above. More information about the program, instructor biographies, course list and brochure may also be obtained from the Web site: www.westsideenrichment.com or by contacting the program director, Rene A. Smoller, at (310) 312-8727 or rene.smoller@WestsideEnrichment.com.