If CNN, in the market for a successor to Larry King, had been in the room this morning at City Hall and caught the latest from County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, they might have requested his telephone number.
As the center-ring attraction for 75 collegiates who just had received a plum gift from the Board of Supervisors, Mr. Ridley-Thomas, the most versatile, most show biz-savvy, most intellectual and, emphatically, the most oratorically blessed of the five Sups, spellbound his audience for what might have been the fastest 15 minutes in politics.
In a tantalizingly florid but seldom witnessed scene from the rocky marriage between a benevolent government and a needy community, 75 arts interns gathered in Council Chambers this morning for a faith-restoring ceremony that melted all ice within a five-mile radius.
The collegians — from 35 universities — came to say thank you, largely but not entirely, to Mr. Ridley-Thomas.
He was the bulldog force last week behind a Board of Sups vote that will make this a summer to remember.
He was credited with selling the plan to send $250,000 to the County’s Arts Internship program to place the collegians in summer-long programs with arts institutions that not only will train them, but pay them $350 for each of 10 weeks.
The all-day program that started with breakfast at 8:30 in the City Hall Courtyard. They moved indoors for speechmaking, broke up into workshops, lunched at Media Park in the shadow of the Actors’ Gang home, formed a walking tour to inspect Culver City’s revival as an arts and entertainment hub, and concluded with an interactive art experience back at Media Park.
Beginning tomorrow, the chosen 75 young men and women from 37 different communities within Los Angeles County will file separately into their prized summer internships.
If today’s affair was the equivalent of a parental sendoff to college, Mr. Ridley-Thomas, the father of similar-aged twin sons, was a prime choice.
His main message was that the next 10 weeks are to be treated soberly as teachable moments, not a hollow fling between school terms.
While the cool coverall — but amorphous — phrase of the day, “the arts,” wears many masks, contains a multitude of meanings, the underwriting by the County Board of Supervisors is a deadly serious and focused commitment, he said.
Arguing Against Vagueness
Playing off the notion that the arts is a vague concept, he said the opposite is true about the summer internships.
“The funding,” Mr. Ridley-Thomas said, “is not an abstraction but an investment in each one of you.”
When he rises to speak, listeners never are sure which Mr. Ridley-Thomas they will be hearing — the teacher, the preacher, the philosopher, the politician, the showman, the cheerleader. Likely, all six sides will surface at propitious times in a foundationally serious delivery that is deftly sprinkled with direct humor and roof-raising encouragement.
As a former high school teacher with a Ph.D in philosophy, he stirs the separate oratorical ingredients of each into a tasty audio salad that makes his listeners eagerly yearn for the next phrase he will turn.
If it is summer time, the livin’ is easy, the catfish are biting and the audience still is young enough to appreciate a brief respite from the classroom. But Mr. Ridley-Thomas knew exactly how to shrewdly snag their attention.
It almost could have been Sunday morning at a Gospel-oriented church with the choir humming and swaying in the background. The Supervisor is subtle and clever enough to blend such scenarios into a little of each.
While lauding a deputy, Randi Tahara, for providing him with his principal motivation to lead the funding fight, Mr. Ridley-Thomas sought to inspire the collegians by opening with several cheers.
Naturally, USC (23 percent) and UCLA (15 percent) sent the largest contingents. Separately, he asked interns from each campus to send up a cheer. Despite the Supervisor’s constant prodding to thunder more volubly each time, City Hall remains located at 9770 Culver Blvd.
So the other 33 colleges would not feel snubbed, Mr. Ridley-Thomas sugared his sobering message — battle hardest for what you truly believe in — when he called out:
“I will ask you to stand and fight, nonviolently of course, for the arts because they are important.”
The reference to “nonviolence” may have been a callback to his position 30 years ago when he was very actively in charge of the Los Angeles chapter of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Sailing through the rhythmic heartbeat of Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s talk was a stout argument he laid down several times.
Why fund, why support the arts?
His response was crisp and succinct.
“They civilize our communities,” he said.
