Part of the Paint ‘n’ Sip group at Coventry Court in Tustin, CA, proudly display their beautiful summer wave paintings. Very refreshing!
Instructor Nicole Galardo is in the center (orange top).
So much fun!
~ Meloney Morse, Regional Program Director
Residents from The Jasmine at Founder’s Village in Fountain Valley, CA, eat, laugh, and dance at a summer celebration with members of the Fountain Valley City Council and several first responders.
~ Meloney Morse, Regional Program Director
In an effort to assist residents with their food needs, EngAGE has partnered with Food Forward, a nonprofit that provides fresh fruits and vegetables to needy families across Los Angeles from sources such as the Brentwood Farmers Market. Eligible residents are always grateful for their monthly deliveries of fresh groceries.
Here are residents from The Metro at Compton Senior Apartments and The Metro at Chinatown Senior Lofts in Los Angeles, CA, picking up tasty items that will find their way to dinner plates at home very soon.
~ Sandra Vargas, Regional Program Director
We had a beautiful piano concert recently at NoHo Senior Arts Colony in North Hollywood, CA. Muzhe Li, who is a master’s degree student in gerontology at USC volunteered to play some of her favorite songs for our community. The atmosphere was very meditative and elevated. Her repertoire included songs by Paul de Senneville and Yann Tiersen, as well as some of her favorite Chinese composers, Joe Hisaishi, Jian Li, and Fang He. The residents were grateful to learn about a different culture through music.
Muzhe Li will be back next month with a new repertoire. We all look forward to it!
~ Sara Debevec, Program Director
Tune in to Experience Talks, our weekly “Radio Magazine for the Experienced Listener,” on Sundays at 5:00 PM PT on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles, 98.7 FM Santa Barbara, 99.5 China Lake, 93.7 N. San Diego, streaming live online, and now syndicated on up to 100 Pacifica Network stations! Experience Talks is produced by the non-profit EngAGE, Inc.
Miss the show? You can always hear it as a podcast on the Listen Page of our website! You’ll also find an archive-in-progress of all of our previous shows there for you to enjoy. New shows are usually posted within 48 hours after broadcast.
JAMES BROWN received the Nelson Algren Award for short fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction Writing, and a Chesterfield Film Writing Fellowship from Amblin Entertainment. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine, and teaches at Cal State San Bernardino. His writing has been featured in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, GQ, and the New England Review. He’s the author of several novels and two memoirs about his turbulent childhood and addictions, entitled The Los Angeles Diaries and This River. Host Tim Carpenter talks to author James Brown about a life on the edge and living to write about it. Learn more about the author here.
This show is from our 2011 archives.
Man reading in his window: photo taken by Tim in Venice, Italy.
EngAGE CEO/Founder Tim Carpenter has just returned from a three-week visit to Italy. While there, he shared his musings on place and people, and intentional design.
7/5 in Rome:
Feeling grateful. Claire Peeps and Carrie Avery of the Durfee Foundation, my work, my life has been altered, because of you. I am on a Stanton Fellowship adventure in Italy with my research intern, Zoë Carpenter. We met today with an amazing architect and urban planning strategist around public space. We see elders everywhere here, walking, riding, sipping espresso in outdoor cafes, dressed to the nines, respected, adored. Deborah thinks they can do better, wants to be the Amanda Burden (NYC Planning czar under Bloomberg) of Roma. I think we can do better. We can normalize aging, we can create engagement and connection between public and private space. We can help people smile and ride bicycles or scooters if they want, at any age. Deborah rode one across town to meet Zoe and me, braving the mean streets of Rome, excited to talk design and public space planning with two strangers from across the globe, to lend a hand, bettering my work. Because I said I was a Stanton Fellow. Feeling grateful.
7/8 in Florence:
The challenge of my inquiry for my Stanton Fellowship, funded by the Durfee Foundation, is how to create community, not just build buildings. During my travels, I see that an intentional linkage of public and private space, a place that offers people somewhere to go, and more importantly a reason to stay, succeeds. People. That’s the prize, right? People bring people. What do people want? Comfort, greenery, water, walkability, ARTS, culture, a respect for history and neighborhood, education, fun, food, parks, views, a sense of connection and community, a sensory connection to the human spirit. We want all ages, curiosity and diversity and open acceptance to who we are. We want outside the box use of space to create a sense of place, of purpose and belonging. We want gardens and, did I mention the arts? Music, dance, visual art, performance. We want to smile and look around and see others smiling. We want accidental spill-over between our circle of life to inhabit and infect the circles of others, to feel part of something larger than ourselves. Connection. We can design buildings and places but it’s only the hardware. We are the software.
7/22 in Venice:
Thinking about place and the part it plays in our lives. Walking after dinner last night to the public gardens here, we passed an older man reading in his window. Two buildings were connected by an interior courtyard and there was art everywhere. All the people we saw were older. The man’s window looked out onto the Grand Canal and he had a glimpse of the Adriatic if he leaned out a bit. The place beautifully balanced connection and solitude. Walking back after exploring the gardens by the sea, I caught a glimpse through the man’s window again. His wife had returned and she was tossing a salad while he opened a bottle of wine. Three other residents, all older and dressed eclectically, all colorful scarves and berets and beards and wildly large hair, arrived for what was surely a Friday night dinner party. When I was a child, sneaking a peak from the adjacent racetrack, I caught glimpses of artists convening at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, a colony of like-minded seekers, and thought, hmm, wouldn’t that be a cool place to have a conversation over dinner. This little enclave made me feel that same sense of connection and purpose, excitement, joy. Place… and how it brings together people – designing this in advance, with intention, I think we’d have something.
The ladies of Cantabria Senior Apartments and Asturias Senior Apartments in Panorama City, CA, have been taking their yoga seriously. When last I visited them about six months ago, they were coming along, still on their mats, still finding their balance, focused to be sure, but definitely fledglings.
Well.
Fledglings no more.
The yoga class I walked in on this week was full of limber, long-limbed, lithe ladies, wrapped around themselves, flexed toes reaching for the skies, arms embracing a larger sense of self. I could not believe the transformation wrought by their incredible instructor, Pamela Roylance.
There was light music playing in the background — it was about as muffled as the pool balls cracking against each other in the adjacent pool room. What I could hear, was the deep breathing, the pants and grunts of humans reaching their fullest physical potential. Their faces were glowing with perspiration, their brows knotted with concentration as they inhaled and exhaled through the grueling postures.
I was in awe of them. I wished I could join them, but their practice has far surpassed mine.
This is Martha. She had never done yoga before a few months ago. She still uses a chair for some of the poses, but she is making progress fast. She thanks me over and over again for bringing this class into her life.
~ Elizabeth Sampson, Regional Program Director
