KIDDING WITH WORK : ‘When I Grow Up’ Exhibit Offers On-The-Job Playing

It was a supermarket manager’s nightmare. Customers filled the aisles, pinching produce, comparing labels on cake mixes, thumbing through coupons. But they weren’t buying.

Surveying the scene, Mark Rollings took the problem in hand.

“Everybody shop!” barked Mark, 8, his fingers poised over the cash register keys. In a moment, baskets were filled and shoppers scurried to the checkout stand. Rollings greeted his first customer with a smile, weighed each item and calculated the total.

He announced, “$5.54,” then, “Oh, yeah. Come again.”

Eat your heart out, Joe Albertson.

“When I Grow Up,” an interactive exhibit at the Children’s Museum at La Habra, has given Rollings and thousands of other gradeschoolers some playful “on-the-job” career training in everything from supermarket checking to data entry to brain surgery. In a dozen fully outfitted learning areas, waitress wanna-bes can hustle burgers at a mock restaurant while pint-size doctors and dentists “operate” on giggling patients. The exhibit, which continues through Jan. 5, is recommended for ages 4 to 11.

As with most of the museum’s exhibits, local businesses have contributed to “When I Grow Up” by lending equipment, clothing and other props, and by providing basic information on their businesses to museum docents.

Docents and gallery aides then translate the facts into children’s terms during gallery tours. To create a mini-veterinarian’s office, for example, Dr. Richard Glassberg provided an examining table, cages, anatomy charts and X-rays (along with a few dogeared copies of Today’s Animal Health).

The Sizzler Restaurant chain loaned menu boards and uniforms, and interior designer Francois Thibeault created a designer’s corner, complete with fabric swatches, color charts and window coverings. Museum staff members rounded out the show with a costume rack bearing everything from surgical scrubs to construction workers’ reflective vests and a mock supermarket stocked with empty dry-good containers, plastic produce and shopping baskets.

Taking a break from their “jobs,” Mark Rollings and his classmates at Fullerton’s Richman Elementary School offered various opinions on the world of work.

“A job is something you do to earn money to pay for your house and to buy groceries . . . at other stores,” Mark said.

In the eyes of Sergio Ojebe, 9, who aspires to be a “guy who makes drawings that they use in the newspaper,” a career is “something that happens to you when you get big and don’t have to go to school anymore.”

Sergio got a head start on his vocational training by spending his visit hunched over a drafting table with a ruler.

According to gallery assistant Pauline Hanson, “When I Grow Up” was designed to “give children a better idea of the tools they might work with in various professions.” Office machines such as the typewriter, adding machine and the functioning computer and cash register--anything with keys that could be punched, mashed or monkeyed with in any way--are among the most popular items in the display.

And, Hanson said, the hands-on experience also gives children a “better concept of the importance of working together on the job. And that’s a lesson they can put to use right now.”

Decked out in lab coats and equipped with a stethoscope and tweezers, “doctors” Yah Asari, 9, and Khang Nguyen, 9, proved that cooperation does not have to mean conformity. Discussing their recent “surgery” on Phavanna Sundara, 9, they had conflicting diagnoses.

“She had something bad in her stomach, so we had to take it out,” Yah decided.

“No way,” Khang countered. “Her heart wasn’t bumping, so we fixed it.”

“When I Grow Up” is one of four displays to be offered over the next year by the 14-year-old museum. Upcoming exhibits include “Body Wonder-full,” an exploration of anatomy and health from a child’s perspective presented by the Sacramento Science Center from Jan. 21 through April 20, 1991; the “Children’s Art Festival,” a series of non-competitive children’s art displays and workshops running May 6 through June 8, and “Kids in Touch,” an examination of the many types of communication, which runs June 24 through Sept. 14.

The recently expanded 12,500-square-foot facility also offers a toddlers’ room with play structures and toys for the under-5 crowd, a nature walk with 50 taxidermied animals and the Kids on Stage room, with costumes, set pieces and other theatrical equipment.