Odds & Ends Around the Valley : That Piercing Feeling

Clip-on earrings as clunk-tech artifacts? Possibly so. Pierced ears are becoming a cultural commonplace.

“Babies everywhere are getting their ears pierced,” said Mark Josephs, national sales manager of ear-piercing equipment for Eri Labs in Van Nuys.

So, too, are men of all sexual persuasions and ages.

“I do boys who are 9 and 10 years old. Their mothers bring them in,” said Carla Kravet, manager of Jewelrymania at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. “And I get men up to 50 years old--gay and straight.”

You thought “multiples”--up to five holes in an ear--were the rage? Well after a certain point, as developers would say, there’s nowhere to go but up. The upper ear--yes, right through the cartilage--is the last frontier for people whose exuberance for pierced earrings exceeds their lobal conditions.

And then there’s the nose.

“The first day, I kept wanting to dig it out of my nose,” Tandy McClain recalled about her nose ring. “It felt awkward, like you had something really gigantic in your nose. It’s just a matter of getting used to it, though,” said the Van Nuys High School teacher’s assistant and Cal State Northridge student.

“It didn’t really hurt. A quick feeling--felt like a pinch,” she said.

It’s not so easy to find a shop or boutique that will pierce noses or upper ears. “We don’t recommend it because of the danger of infection,” Joseph said.

Nonetheless, the pierce goes on.

For Your

Reference

“You never know when you pick up the phone exactly what you’re going to get,” mused Judith Tetove, senior librarian at the Sun Valley Library, a branch of the Los Angeles city library system.

“It’s kind of like playing Trivial Pursuit every day,” said Judy Sanchez, branch manager of the Sherman Oaks facility.

The buck always stops at the reference librarian’s desk. “People will call and ask anything in the world. ‘How does a camera work?’ or ‘I own land in Indiana. Can you find out if there’s oil on it?’ It’s not always funny. Sometimes it’s just bizarre,” said Marilou Schaaf of the Chatsworth library.

The Sun Valley branch receives 40 to 50 calls a day. “But a busy branch can get 500 or 600 questions a day,” Tetove said.

Michelle Epstein, young-adult librarian at Sun Valley, fondly remembers a caller named Josephine, whom she dubbed “Our Lady of the Telephones.”

“She made her living writing letters to presidents of companies and making complaints. She even knew which books we should use to look up the company information she wanted,” Epstein said.

Recently, people have been asking reference librarians at the Sherman Oaks branch to recommend novels with “no depressing parts is them. We’ve been getting a couple of requests a week for that,” Sanchez said.

The solution? “Read older novels, such as ‘The Secret of Santa Vittoria’ by Robert Crichton (1966) or anything by Georgette Heyer, whose books were published in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” Sanchez said.

Hamming It Up

In a natural disaster, who you gonna call? Probably no one, because your telephone will be out of commission. But ham-radio operators hope they’ll be on the air.

To keep themselves prepared, about 40 San Fernando Valley hams, members of the San Fernando Valley Amateur Radio Club, will be participating in this year’s national Field Day. From 11 a.m. June 24 to 11 a.m. June 25, at Tree People park on Mulholland and Coldwater Canyon drives, these amateurs will operate under emergency conditions, trying to make as many contacts as possible with other hams locally and across the country.

“What they want to do is test their capabilities,” explained aficionado Rosemary Willis. “They set up outside with portable generators and take food and water with them.”

Willis is not a ham, but said, “I’ve been involved with it because my husband has been one for 45 years now. He calls me the busiest non-ham in amateur radio.”

What’s the best part about being involved in amateur radio? “Listening to the space shuttles when they’re orbiting. The ultimate is to talk to space,” Willis said.

Without even having to choose a long-distance carrier.

Tree-mendous Back Yard

He’s the first to call it an obsession. “I’ve been like this since I was 10 years old,” Brad Bjork of West Hills confessed. His passion is for gardening. Specifically, plants and trees that bear fruit and vegetables.

On his 60-by-120-foot home lot, he has 35 fruit trees, including apricot, tangerine, mandarin orange, apple, grapefruit, nectarine, persimmon and plum. He’s also growing hundreds of clusters of grapes.

Because all those trees block the sun from the ground, he’s training pumpkin vines up toward the roof. “One year I had about 25 big jack-o’-lantern pumpkins growing on my roof,” he said, laughing.

Frequently his enthusiasm for gardening spills over into someone else’s turf. This year, he has planted half of a neighbor’s back yard with tomatoes and squashes. “I used to have a huge garden among several houses in Sherman Oaks,” he recalled. “I just ask people, ‘If I give you some of the produce, can I use the part of your back yard that you’re not using?’ I started out at 10 years old as a sharecropper.”

In the 15 years he’s lived there, Bjork has never thrown out a single leaf or grass clipping. “To me, that stuff is like raw gold,” he said. He uses it for mulch.

But come harvest time, he can’t eat fast enough. What he doesn’t consume himself, he gives away.

Overheard at . . .

“It used to be ‘See you later.’ Now everyone says, ‘See you soon.’ Why the sudden optimism? I’ll see you when I see you.”

--Woman speaking to a friend at Jerry’s Deli in Studio City