CONSUMERS : Rx for Teens : L.A.-Area Doctor Has Staked Much on Showing Them a Positive View of World
Dr. Alton Takabayashi decided two years ago to put on a show, an exposition for youth to offer them positive images of the world, rather than the daily problems they confront such as gangs, drug abuse, pregnancy, poor school performance and other social and health woes.
But Takabayashi, an obstetrics and gynecology specialist at the Kaiser Permanente, West Los Angeles, found his dreams hard to fulfill.
It wasn’t as easy as Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made it seem when they tossed together events in their 1940s teen films. In the 1990s, Takabayashi found, you just don’t go out and hire a hall and put on a show.
But after many setbacks--including promotional disappointments, miscues in alerting local schools and problems in finding corporate sponsors--Takabayashi, who said he has taken out a second mortgage on his home to help underwrite the event, will see his goal realized this weekend.
Teen Expo ‘90, which sponsors say is the first exposition of its kind for Los Angeles area teen-agers, will be held Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
It will feature more than 200 exhibits by corporations and nonprofit groups; a job fair; health exhibits; college and technical school counseling; computer exhibits; modeling and fashion shows; makeup demonstrations; rap groups and other musical, dance and comedy acts; professional stunt shows; a live television broadcast; sports demonstrations; and “Secrets,” a play for young people about AIDS.
“It’s really just about kids having a positive experience,” Takabayashi said last week as he helped assemble 700 Teen Expo ’90 posters to be delivered to schools countywide. “Everything is being done for the kids. The job fair, for instance, isn’t for the kids to come in and sign up for work that day, but to talk with various corporations about jobs and futures.
“From workshops, they’ll learn things such as how to fill out job applications, about checking accounts and credit, practical things they need to know,” he continued. “A hearing institute is coming to tell them how not to damage their ears with boom boxes.
“Most of the time,” he added, “everybody wants to talk about drugs and gangs. The problem lies with responsibility. You have to teach kids to be responsible. If they’re not, it’s real easy to blame someone else and give yourself an excuse for not doing something.”
Takabayashi, a Hawaiian-born Japanese-American, cited one of his three sons as an example.
“He got into trouble fighting in school and he had to take the responsibility for his actions,” he recalled. “If you don’t teach them to do that, they’ll never make it. A lot of parents do false boosting, install false pride and pump up (their teen-agers’) egos so much that they don’t make it (as adults).
“Kids need to learn that everybody has their limitations, but we want you to function 100% of your capability. If you do that, you can make it. . . . It’s time to get parents back involved with their kids.”
Said Beth Dolan, who with Derek Brown is producing Teen Expo ’90 for Takabayashi: “The idea of the Expo is to give kids a chance. The whole thing is about self-esteem.”
Dolan agreed to go to work on the expo late last year after her friend and hiking companion, Linda Rosner, asked her to help out.
Rosner--who runs Artisans, a public relations firm, with her husband, Keith Gayhart--joined with Takabayashi after previous promotional problems cropped up.
“He delivered our baby,” Rosner said of Takabayashi. “He knew I was in public relations, but he didn’t ask me for a long time because he didn’t want to jeopardize the doctor-patient relationship. We talked about it and decided we could work it out.”
Expo hours will run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.
Admission is $5 per person. “I think that’s low enough that kids can come up with that amount,” Takabayashi said, “(but) high enough that it can promote self-esteem in the kids, knowing they really worked to get there.”
Ten percent of the exhibit space is being donated to nonprofit groups that assist and support teen-agers; 25% of the net profit, Takabayashi said, will go to the Teen Expo Foundation, a nonprofit group he set up to help support area youth groups.
For his part, Takabayashi says he would simply “like to break even” on the show, on which he estimates he has spent $100,000 to $150,000.
“My larger dream is to take it to other big cities and let kids there know that we think kids do things well, and that they can think and make decisions,” he said.
Takabayashi and company received some assistance in promoting the show last week from Stuart E. Gothold, superintendent of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, who urged his principals of junior and senior high schools to offer their support to the event.
“The exposition will be fun, but will also have a serious purpose,” Gothold said in a school bulletin. “It hopes to steer teens away from gangs and drugs and toward productive ends. . . . We must seek to make a difference in young people’s lives any way we can.”
Deciding they needed a promotional video for Teen Expo, Dolan and her husband, Luis Remesar, went to Van Nuys High School to recruit teen-agers to do a rap video for the show.
“We were doing this on a seat-of-our pants budget--no budget really--but we decided we didn’t want professionals; we wanted kids the other kids could relate to,” Dolan said. “A friend wrote the song for us and we auditioned the kids. There were 25, all rappers. And all of them had written songs for the audition. Most were boys. These kids are bused in from South Central every day, a 1 1/2-hour trip each way.”
The night of the session, Dolan said, the uncle of one of the girls was killed in a gang shooting. “They live with this kind of thing all the time. We went and picked up the kids, and she came out and did the recording session. We paid them a little honorarium and had makeup and hair people there. After the taping, my husband and I took them out to dinner.”
Commented Khalid Kambron, a Van Nuys High senior who became one of the rap group and will serve as master of ceremonies for the talent shows on Friday, Saturday and Sunday: “We can really learn a lot from this. It’s a great idea and we’ve been trying to promote it around school. There will be college advisers and Army recruiters and games and music. There will be a lot of information there.”
