The Stars Shine Brightly for Hungry Kids

For 22 minutes, the children had been waiting for their turkey dinners. So when Henry “The Fonz” Winkler yelled out, “Who’s hungry?” a hundred hands shot up. “Me!” “Me!”

“Me too!” said Winkler. “Let’s eat.”

A table of small boys in the corner farthest from the kitchen had already begun to pound their tiny fists on the table. “Tur-key, tur-key,” they chanted. And then, “Can-dy, can-dy!”

Hungry or not, kids will be kids. And that, say Winkler and other celebrities who turned out to officially open the new Kids Cafe in Venice, is why they go to so much trouble to make eating fun.

More than 500,000 children are growing up hungry in Los Angeles County and for a lucky few of them, the only hot meal they ate Tuesday--for some, the only meal all day--was served up by movie stars in a noisy dining room filled with balloons, television cameras and food, food, food.

On the early Thanksgiving menu for the media-heavy event were turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, salad, carrots, apple-strawberry juice, lasagna and rigatoni.

“There’s too much on my plate,” worried 6-year-old Anthony, pushing his designer paper napkin into his shirt. “What if I don’t eat everything? Are they going to throw it away?”

Not at Kids Cafe, he was assured. Good food never goes to waste here and if kids have leftovers, they can always take them home.

That was welcome news to Anthony. “My mama likes turkey, too, so I’m going to save it for her,” he announced solemnly.

The Kids Cafe at the Venice Boys and Girls Club is the 22nd in the nation and the second L.A. center to be opened by the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank and the Children’s Action Network, a nonprofit consortium of leaders in the entertainment industry. The first Kids Cafe here, opened less than a year ago in the Mar Vista Family Center, has already served more than 10,000 free meals to children whose families don’t have enough to eat.

The first Kids Cafe in the country was founded in 1993 in Atlanta after a 10-year-old boy broke into a community center’s kitchen in search of food for his younger brother. “Children don’t always talk about being hungry, but we know that these meals are a real blessing for a lot of families,” said Kizmet White, a Venice Boys and Girls Club leader.

Brittany, 5, knelt precariously on her metal folding chair and leaned over her plate to scoop mashed potatoes directly into her mouth. “Mmmmmmm. My favorite. More, please, more,” she asked her glamorous waitress, Kate Capshaw.

The actress and her husband, Steven Spielberg, are, with Henry and Stacey Winkler, among those who founded the children’s network in 1990 to use their personal spotlights to focus public interest on the plight of children in the United States. The network’s roster of founders reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood social activism: Norman and Lyn Lear, Rhea Perlman and Danny DeVito, Marsha and Robin Williams, Lili and Richard Zanuck and former MCA President Sidney Sheinberg and his wife, Lorraine Gary Sheinberg.

Brandon Hammond, the 13-year-old co-star of “Soul Food” and “The Gregory Hines Show,” was among the youngest network volunteers serving at Tuesday’s event. And, next to Fonzie and the person dressed up as Woody Woodpecker, he made the biggest hit.

While such television stars as Kim Delaney and Christine Lahti worked the makeshift dining room in their aprons and jeans, the young diners stuffed themselves on turkey, stuffing and pasta, leaving their vegetables on their fancy paper plates.

“I knew when I saw those carrots, there’d be a few upturned noses,” said cafe director, Stephanie Kring, who began serving the first few dozen daily after-school meals early this month. “Hungry as they are sometimes, our kids can still be picky about their vegetables.”

Sandy, 9, was helping her 4-year-old cousin wrap up a slab of chocolate cake to take home while pulling bits of paper napkin out of her 3-year-old sister’s mouth. “These kids are too hungry. They’re eating everything,” she said. “This is so good, I want to come back here every day!”

And guess what, nodded Winkler. “You’re all invited.”