Your Rickshaw Awaits, Milady

Tawny Terborg is fond of saying, “With a little will and a lot of sweat, you can make it up the hill.” She ought to know. The 35-year-old Irvine resident is a rickshaw puller (and the only female one) working at Universal Amphitheatre.

Rickshaw drivers are a sometime feature at Southland venues, where they ferry visitors long distances to and from parking lots.

Terborg’s route is a quarter of a mile long, a full rickshaw is often several times her weight, and she works for tips only. Why does she do it? Because her passengers have a blast--and besides, she said, “I’ve got shoulder muscles you wouldn’t believe.”

Her first experience with rickshaws was at the Irvine Spectrum with her brother, Mark, who is disabled because of a head injury he suffered 10 years ago.

“We decided to take a rickshaw back to the car, and the moment my brother got in, the look on his face said it all,” Terborg said. “He wasn’t riding in a wheelchair, he was having an adventure.”

She began working with Green Limousines, a San Diego-based group of rickshaw drivers that serviced the Spectrum until their contract expired last year.

“We are a bunch of misfits. It is hard to find a place for rickshaws, but the amphitheater has taken us under its wing,” she said.

Terborg, along with four male rickshaw pullers, will be working the amphitheater for the run of the Rockettes shows, which end Tuesday. Unfortunately, she said, tips have not been too plentiful.

“The crowd is mostly over 50 and they think $1 is a good tip. At the Sting show, someone gave me $100,” she said. “But it’s from the heart and that’s what counts.”

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Employees of Senior Care Action Network, a nonprofit health and social service provider for seniors, are volunteering on Christmas Day to field calls from people who might be feeling low.

“This time of year, seniors often miss being able to talk to their relatives and children because families are so mobile,” said SCAN spokesman Paul Kenkel. “This is an opportunity for them to talk to someone that day.”

SCAN, which has four offices in the Southland, provides services such as cooking and cleaning to seniors who might otherwise have to live in nursing homes. And, as far as volunteering on Christmas Day goes, Kenkel employees didn’t need any coaxing.

“The idea was met with a lot of enthusiasm.”

Calls will be answered Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. PST. The toll-free number is (800) 247-5091.

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From now until Dec. 31, Internet users can create a digital legacy for themselves by logging onto https://www.20thcenturytimecapsule.com. The site solicits writing submissions, photographs and audio files to be stored on CD-ROMs inside a time capsule that will be opened Jan. 1, 2100.

The CD-ROMs, with the equipment and programs necessary to read them, will be placed in a triple-walled, fireproof, hermetically sealed storage case, filled with inert nitrogen gas and encased in a bulletproof plastic outer shell. (The contraption looks more like a floor safe than a capsule, but who wants to store their legacy in a regular old floor safe?)

The capsule will then be entombed in concrete and lead and interred next to the clock tower at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., where, presumably, it will be protected from any kind of terror that could befall us with the turning of the millennium.