[img]2327|right|||no_popup[/img]In a fascinating wedding ceremony last evening in the brightly lighted Dan Patacchia Room at City Hall, modernity married tradition.
Around a long rectangular table, a dozen craftily creative, immensely adaptable Culver City ladies, one gentleman and two humming sewing machines happily gathered to herald the birth of a new plastic bags-free era, starting two weeks from Saturday, on Dec. 28.
As of that date and forever more, 75 Culver City businesses, out of consideration for purifying the environment, will be prohibited from serving plastic bags to their customers.
If community members had been witness to the open-borders enthusiasm and unswerving environmental commitment of these desirable kinds of bag ladies (and bag gentleman?), they might have dashed home and set fire to the last surviving plastic bags by their hearths, until, of course, their hearths’ content.
Shhh. Not a Crinkly Word
On another hand, it should be reported, but in noiseless, velvety undertones, that one plastic bag from Target – believed to be a double agent – was espied on the premises. A certain nameless bag-creator, married to a well-known musician who could only afford three letters in his last name, proceeded to weave a handsome carrier out of the plastic on the convincing grounds that “as long as it’s here, we might as well use it.”
In an engaging scene that should restore faith in old-fashioned American ingenuity at the peak of a high-tech era, the ladies (and gent) were crafting their own bags for both symbolic and pragmatic reasons.
Some mature persons in the Patacchia room widened their eyes because they had not seen live sewing machines since days of yonder deep into the preceding century.
The enormously witty Frances Talbott-White, most commonly associated with the League of Women Voters, appeared to be the leader of the band. She has knitted, sewn and generally created out of hole and whole cloth much of her life.
Nearby were the mother and daughter team of Margaret and Disa Lindgren, applying the most rudimentary tools ever invented – their 10 gaily dancing fingers and a handy scissors or two – to bring to life useful grocery-shlepping bags made out of tee-shirts unlikely to be worn again or even born again.
Rallying Cry
In charge of the sewing machines were Michelle Weiner, the face and soul of Transition Culver City, the main Progressive sponsor of this 2½-hour evening, and Amy Bauer, a recent arrival from Brooklyn. Ms. Bauer expressed unblinking confidence that the sewing machine is – not will or may – staging a comeback among the ambitiously imaginative. She attributed the sewing machine rally to a cultural attitude. “It’s the whole DIY generation of everyone wanting to make everything by hand for themselves,” Ms. Bauer said.
En route to the evening’s City Council meeting, Vice Mayor Meghan Sahli-Wells dropped in to greet participants and salute their creations.
“This is a wonderful, wonderful outreach and education tool to let people know about our plastic bag ban,” Ms. Sahli-Wells said. “I am very excited about this.
“It was through Transition Culver City and Michelle that I began working on the bag ban in 2010 before I was on the Council,” she said, recalling a sunny summer Sunday afternoon when dozens of plastic bags were strung forth and back across the Courtyard of City Hall.
“We called it a community think tank. The context was that the state Legislature had just failed to pass a statewide (plastic) bag ban. We wanted to get together as a community and search for solutions to the bag problem.”
Last evening’s sew-in was the most recent attempt to knit together community minds to a serious concern for the welfare of the environment.
