A variety of vets weigh in on Veterans Day; Caitlin Doughty gives her cat The Meow a "good death;" DrinkLA saves you time, money, tastebuds; SCOTUS frees Sherlock Holmes
Celebrating Veterans Day with John's dad, Kevin's grandma and Doualy's great uncle
Veteran's Day is Tuesday, when we thanks vets for their service, and this year, I'd like to bring back three pieces from the Off-Ramp archive that tell very different stories of service in the armed forces.
RELATED: We ask four veterans what they're doing this Veterans Day
The first piece of audio on the left (click "Listen Now") is something I filed for the late lamented public radio show Savvy Traveler that recounts my trip to Germany in 1999.
(Rabe at the Brandenberg Gate, Berlin, 1999)
My cousin Ulf and I traced my late father and mother's footsteps in Germany circa 1952. My dad served in World War II, and during the Korean War he was stationed in Germany to fight the Cold War.
SEE more photos from John's archives that tell this story
The next piece features Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson's late grandma, whose husband was the chief engineer on the USS Indianapolis. When the ship went down — one of the last to be sunk during WWII — she gave him up for dead. But then he reappeared, which is how we have Kevin.
(Former Hmong general Vang Pao. Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty Images)
Lastly, an Off-Ramp piece about the late Vang Pao, a former Laotian general who assisted American troops during the Vietnam War and is considered a hero by Hmong refugees living in the U.S. The piece is special because it was filed by his great niece, then-KPCC reporter Doualy Xaykaothao.
This piece is part of KPCC's ongoing coverage of issues affecting veterans for Veteran's Day 2014. See more of our coverage at KPCC.org/vets.
Bars, beers, baristas, boba in brand new beverage book 'Drink: Los Angeles'
When Eat: Los Angeles shut down, it was a sad day. We lost a valuable "Off-Ramp" contributor, and residents lost a smart guide to all the places you can get food and drink in Southern California. So we were glad to hear that Colleen Dunn Bates and her Prospect Parks Books team revived a part of Eat: L.A. in a pocket-sized book, "Drink: Los Angeles."
"We realized," says Bates, Drink L.A.'s editor, "that the city has become a locus for great drinking. And that did not used to be the case for L.A. We were outshone in many departments: there were better cities for beer, better cities to drink wine. There were certainly better cities for bars, and better cities for coffee. But now L.A. is holding its own if not leading in many of those categories."
BUY: "Drink: Los Angeles" from Vroman's
What happened? Contributing editor Garrett Snyder says, "One of the main strengths for L.A.'s drinking culture is what you'll find in arts, architecture, food, things like that, is that there's a lack of tradition. That used to be a negative, but I feel like now it allows — whether you're in beer, coffee, cocktails — to kind of strip things down and not have a dogmatic view of what you should have. It's produced a lot of things that are exciting, and aren't going on in the rest of the country."
"Drink: Los Angeles" includes more than 500 listings for great booze and juice bars, beer taprooms, wine stores, coffee houses, even boba shops. What you won't find: chain shops and eateries, and places that suck. They prefer to simply focus on the good and ignore the bad.
The guide also breaks down Southern California by region, and includes do-it-yourself pub-crawls in various hip neighborhoods. And for those of us who are getting increasingly crotchety about the noise level at many bars, look for the "ear" symbol, which denotes a place where you can hold a (reasonably) quiet conversation.
We ask veterans, 'What are you doing on Veterans Day?'
We put out the call through KPCC's Public Insight Network: "If you're a veteran, tell Off-Ramp what you're doing for Veterans Day." And we got some great responses:
"I'm walking in the San Diego Veteran's Day Parade with the San Diego Veteran's Coalition (my husband and son will join us as well). Afterward, we'll have lunch with our veteran friends and supporters and go to a veterans celebration in the evening at one of the local colleges. " — Billiekai Boughton
Billiekai Boughton lives in San Diego and served in the U.S. Army from 1989 to 1992 — including eight months in Desert Storm — and was named UCSD’s 2010 Veteran of the Year. She says her job was "essentially a glorified telephone operator. We had these rigs I like to describe as a U-Haul on the back of a Humvee."
Marching is important to her because it helps highlight the overlooked role of women in the military. But... "Are you glad you served?" I asked.
"No," she said candidly. "Veterans Day is supposed to be celebratory, but often it's very mournful for me. I notice a lot of sacrifice that goes unnoticed and un-thanked."
I also asked what advice she'd give my friend's daughter, who is in basic training.
"It's too late," she said. She'd have advised her to go to college instead.
"Calling up friends I served with to catch up, looking forward to the virtual/online debut of WarInk featuring 24 Veterans from Iraq & Afghanistan talking about their military experiences, tattoos, & transition back to civilian life; attending San Fernando Valley's Veterans Day parade, then hanging out with fellow veterans at some of the eateries offering deals." — Tracey Cooper-Harris
Pasadena's Tracey Cooper-Harris, who served from 1991 to 2003 in the Army, Reserves and National Guard, had what she describes as "the best job ever." Her job was to help with dogs in the service, from dogs that accompanied MP's on patrol to dogs that detect explosives.
You may remember her name because last year, a U.S. District Court judge slapped down Veterans Affairs for denying spousal benefits to Tracey's wife Maggie. (Tracey and Maggie married in 2008; when she in the service, Tracey didn't ask and didn't tell.)
One of Tracey's pet projects is WarInk, which uses vets' tattoos to help soldiers connect with civilians.
WATCH THE WARINK VIDEO: "Some stories are told with words ... others with ink."
"Since my wife and I are both Vietnam Era veterans, we will be attending the annual Veteran's Day Celebration at the VA Health Center in Long Beach. Afterwards, we will join our fellow vets at the American Legion Post 555 and later have dinner at a veteran-friendly restaurant." — Les Goldberg
Mary Goldberg joined the WACs in 1965; Les Goldberg joined the Army — he says he was in the first round of LBJ's draftees in 1966. They wound up in adjacent barracks in San Antonio, met in the mess hall, and after they married stayed in the same house Mamie and Ike used long before they were President and First Lady.
(The Eisenhower's in San Antonio, 1915.)
Now Mary and Les live happily in Santa Ana, married 47 years. "I'm very proud," Mary says. "I love my country, I love to say the Pledge of Allegiance, I'm just glad I did it."
MARCH! Saturday, Nov. 8, is 15th annual Long Beach Veterans Day parade
Be sure to listen all three interviews. Click on the Listen Now button on the left.
This piece is part of KPCC's ongoing coverage of issues affecting veterans for Veteran's Day 2014. See more of our coverage at KPCC.org/vets.
Susan Stamberg welcomed Ray and the late Tom Magliozzi to NPR
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with NPR Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg about her role in the "Car Talk" phenomenon, which changed public radio. Car Talk co-host Tom Magliozzi died Monday of complications of Alzheimer's at the age of 77.
It was 1987, and NPR was starting "Weekend Edition Sunday." Veteran "All Things Considered" host Susan Stamberg was to be the host. "And we put a call out to stations," she remembered this week, "Got anything good local? I mean, we were going to do two hours. There were to be no reporters. I, as host, was desperate! Let's see what's out there." In came a tape from WBUR in Boston of a car repair call-in show that Tom and Ray Magliozzi had been hosting for a decade.
WATCH: WBUR's "Car Talk" anniversary video
At this point, Stamberg stresses that this is her version of the story, in which she plays "the wise heroine." Others remember it differently. She says a whole line of people — from Robert Siegel (then NPR's News Director) to her own husband — said it wouldn't work as an NPR segment. But Stamberg prevailed. "These guys are fabulous," she told the nay-sayers. "Everybody loves cars, they have those incredible accents, and they laugh all the time — we're putting them on the air."
(NPR's Susan Stamberg by Antony Nagelmann)
"We were in the business of doing news broadcasts. This was our first entertainment show —really, just pure entertainment. And to me, the thing I loved the most, was just the relationship you could hear between the two of them. Tom, the older brother; Ray, the one who worked in the garage every single day. And the kick they got out of one another. And they let us listen in on it and take part in it."
Stamberg says she imagines what it was like when the two were at home at the dinner table, and she says they invited us to the table "so we could sit and get the best spaghetti that Mamma Magliozzi made, and enjoy those meals together, and laugh at those brothers."
Listen to KPCC this Saturday at 10am, when Ray Magliozzi will host a live show in memory of his brother Tom.
Santa Monica fixture 'Pete the Barber' to be buried today
In April, Peter Katsikides put a sign in the window of his barbershop on Fourth Street in Santa Monica: “Sorry, back next week, Pete.” He never came back, and we just learned that he died in October at the age of 88 or 89, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press. SMDP's Charles Andrews says he'll be buried this afternoon at 1 at Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth.
A few years ago, Off-Ramp contributor Hank Rosenfeld visited Pete at his shop, and filed a surreal report, which I've dug out of the archives and present here as a tribute to a man who loved what he was did.
RELATED: Reformed thug Vince Ciacci now cuts hair in Brentwood
It can now be told that Pete was the barber of Whitey Bulger, the fugitive mobster. Pete never knew until he saw a photo of the captured mob boss and realized, with a shock, that it was the customer who came in regularly ... and gave him a good tip every time.
LA author, defendant says Supreme Court move frees Sherlock Holmes, other beloved characters to the public
The Supreme Court Monday affirmed the rights of creators to develop characters who live in public domain fiction. The decision could have repercussions for film and TV studios, publishing houses, the stage, and more.
The case surrounds a Southern California author, Leslie Klinger, who co-edited "In the Company of Sherlock Holmes," a new series of short stories about the detective. Klinger was threatened by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
While the estate holds legitimate copyright to the last 10 Holmes stories written by Doyle, the first 50 tales are in the public domain and are not protected by copyright.
FOLLOW Klinger's copyright saga on the "Free Sherlock!" website
Klinger won in the lower courts, and the Supreme Court Monday declined to hear the Doyle estate's appeal. That will mean Klinger's book can be released on schedule on November 11.
A portion of U.S Circuit Judge Richard Posner's ruling states:
We can imagine the Doyle estate being concerned that a modern author might write a story in which Sherlock Holmes was disparaged — perhaps by being depicted as a drug dealer. He was of course a cocaine user. or) , and that someone who read the story might be deterred from reading Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories because he would realize that he couldn't read them without puzzling confusedly over the "true" character of Sherlock Holmes. ... Anyway it appears that the Doyle estate is concerned not with specific alterations in the depiction of Holmes or Watson in Holmes - Watson stories written by authors other than Arthur Conan Doyle , but with any such story that is published without payment to the estate of a licensing fee.
The heirs of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle argue anyone portraying characters from the popular detective series must seek permission or pay a licensing fee, but Klinger says that only applies to major plot points of the books under protection — not to Holmes and Watson as characters, their iconic apartment at 221b Baker Street, or even minor plot points in the protected stories, like the fact that Watson used to play rugby.
Klinger says not only can creators now base stories on Doyle's creation, but other characters are fair game, too.
"Both Tarzan and John Carter of Mars ... I think Burroughs wrote stories that span that 1923 (copyright) date," he said. "I think Hercule Poirot falls under the same situation."
Caitlin Doughty turns early trauma into a life helping bring 'the good death'
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Caitlin Doughty, author of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory."
With its taxidermy decor, Caitlin Doughty's apartment is a fitting place to discuss death. The stuffed ermine and 6-point buck are "aesthetically pleasing and they also are memento mori," Doughty said. "They're reminding us that we, too, will die."
As a practicing mortician, Doughty's become familiar with death. She's likely consumed (albeit unwittingly) the ashes from the bodies she cremated.
"It can get in strange places," Doughty said. "And it's disconcerting, but it's also kind of an interesting connection to reality and the fact that death is around us all the time."
Off-Ramp Archive: Walk through the cemetery with Caitlin Doughty
A traumatic brush with death during childhood — seeing a toddler fall from a walkway at a shopping mall — led Doughty to develop obsessive compulsive tendencies.
"I had a weird relationship with death," Doughty said. "I developed all kinds of OCD behaviors, thinking I could control death. Which didn't work, of course."
Doughty eventually moved past the experience, but her interest in death lingered.
"When I started to work at the crematory, I was really trying to be an anthropologist," Doughty explained. "I was really trying to go in there and see what the real people working with real death right now in America looked like."
I brought up how businesses like Forest Lawn and Vitas, in their radio ads, encourage people to "start the conversation." Doughty responds, "They are using something that, in reality, is very important — the idea that a lot of people die without having advance directives in place, without people knowing what their family member who's dying really wants."
The way Doughty sees it, having a plan is an essential part of grieving. "People say, 'Oh, don't worry about me... my body doesn't mean anything,'" she said. "And that's fine. But the family can often want something tangible to do and be a part of. They don't want you to say it doesn't matter, 'cause they're left behind. They have to mourn."
Doughty directly address this thought in her book:
"A corpse doesn't need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn't need anything anymore — it's more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life. Looking at the body you see yourself, and you know that you, too, will die. The visual is a call to self-awareness. It is the beginning of wisdom."
When Doughty's cat died, she applied the same philosophy.
"We buried her in Topanga in a natural grave," Doughty said. "It was practicing what I would preach for humans — with my cat. And I have to say that it's been months now since she's died and I feel pretty good. I feel sorrow and I miss her but I feel like I did right by her."
Doughty prefers this natural route over embalming.
"All the body wants to do biologically is decompose," she explained. "Once you die, it's, 'Let me out here! I'm ready to shoot my atoms back into the universe!'"
Don't expect a similar sort of transcendence to occur come Halloween.
"It's gotten more and more American, I would argue, as the years have gone on," Doughty said. "To the point that we say our true engagement with death is Halloween just shows how broken our relationship with death in America is."
With the advent of modern medicine, people lost touch with the reality of death. "You had to be much more accepting of death as something that's going to happen, because it happened so much more frequently," Doughty said. "Now you have people who are 40, 50, 60 who have been to one funeral."
Naturally, Doughty has given some thought to her own death.
"Right now, if I died in the next 10 years, I would like to be naturally buried," Doughty said. "If it's made legal, I would love to be consumed by animals. I would like to be able to give my own body back to the cycle."
Caitlin Doughty will appear at the Santa Monica Public Library Nov. 25 as part of her book tour. Visit the Order of the Good Death for more information on her work.
Art duo Kozyndan on Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary, contributing to JANM exhibit
Hello Kitty Con may be over, but anyone interested in celebrating contemporary art and Hello Kitty can head to the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo for "Hello: Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty." This exhibit mixes artifacts from Sanrio's Hello Kitty archives along with original works by artists from all over the world.
Video: This is the Hello Kitty lifestyle
Kozy and Dan Kitchens make up Kozyndan, a husband and wife team whose work is featured in the exhibit. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with the team at their Highland Park home.
"I guess I didn't have many choices between many characters when I was growing up," said Kozy Kitchens. Kozy grew up in Japan, not far from the town where Sanrio started. She said she owned dozens of Hello Kitty items as a child: slippers, backpacks, shoes, socks. Kozy says she grew out of the Hello Kitty lifestyle around sixth grade, but that for many, Hello Kitty still remains very popular.
"It's interesting she said that they don't have many choices of which character to choose — as though they had to choose a character. That's kind of the difference between maybe here and there is that it wouldn't even occur to us that we would have to have a character that we have to like and have all these goods based on that character," said Dan Kitchens, her American-born collaborator and husband. "If you go to Japan, it's really prevalent. Even business men are buying cigarettes with character toys in them and stuff like that."
Kozyndan have worked with Sanrio before making different Hello Kitty-influenced designs — one even features Hello Kitty scuba diving.
As an art object, Dan said he finds the character relatable through her facial expression. "When we were first approached to do this piece, somebody was telling me a story that they had heard about the creator of Hello Kitty. And I don't even know if it's true — it could be apocryphal. That her daughter was autistic ... and that she wanted to create this character that had a blank expression as a way of relating to her daughter," said Dan. "My sister, who's 14, is autistic as well. So I kind of had a connection based on that."
The story is probably a myth — the creator of Hello Kitty, Yuko Shimizu, hasn't brought it up in interviews — but Koji Steven Sakai with the Japanese American National Museum believes Hello Kitty's blank expression is something that millions of people relate to. "Not having a mouth means that she can be with you," he told KPCC's Maya Sugarman. "So if you're sad, she can be sad with you. If you're happy, she can be happy with you, because she has no mouth."
'Classic Alice' Web series gives a college girl's life literary treatment
Web series "Classic Alice" takes viewers into the life of Alice Rackham, a college student who responds to a bad grade on a test by deciding to live her life according to the themes of classic literature, in order to show her professor she understands the material on a personal level.
Rackham is played by Kate Hackett, who also created and writes the show. The show came out of Hackett working with a YouTube channel, but they ultimately decided not to go forward with the project. However, they handed the keys over to Hackett and told her that she was free to make the show herself — which she did.
The show first sends Alice into living her life through the lens of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment."
"It's a book that I think not a lot of teenage girls, who are the audience for this, they haven't read that," Hackett said. "I loved it, I read it when I was 16, 17, but it's not something that people are like, 'You know what I feel like feeling today? Guilt. Searing guilt.'"
Alice continued her journey through "Pygmalion," Hans Christian Andersen story "The Butterfly" and "Macbeth." Hackett says she wants to push the audience beyond the classics normally loved by teenage girls like the work of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
She joked recently that she was going to do "Pride and Prejudice," which ended up backfiring because fans got excited about the prospect. It's not an area Hackett ever plans to visit, though, as it's been well-trod by other Web series including "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries" — which shares other similarities with "Classic Alice."
"It's a bunch of redheads in a vlog-style literary adaptation. Of course we wouldn't do that!"
With her show, Hackett wanted to write a female-positive series that showed women in a positive light.
"I think we're absolutely moving in the right direction. I think the Web is a little bit easier to get away with that, because you're not answering to advertisers," Hackett said. "I hope my show fits in, as far as it was created by a lady-person — oh, me! My producers are, the whole production team, we're all women, so it's women creating a very positive, female-oriented show in what is traditionally kind of a guy's playground."
Hackett says that she wasn't the most social person in school, which comes out in the Alice character. Hackett skipped a year of high school and graduated college when she was just 19.
"There was not a lot of partying, or going out," Hackett said. "So anytime Cara [her roommate] comes in and was like 'Hey, I'm going out!' This is all I understand of that. Like, I just assume people go out in college. I don't know what it looks like."
After the initial run of episodes, "Classic Alice" was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign — one that almost didn't make its $8,000 goal .
"The last week, I think just all of the sudden, 90 percent of our donations came in. And it was just a function of the fans of these vlog-style Web series finally found us, and then kicked into hyperdrive," Hackett said. "They basically ran it for us."
In the end, the series raised almost $10,000. Hackett's advice to other crowdfunding efforts? "Aim low." She also did a previous Web series, "Kate and Joe Just Want to Have Sex," which was solicited on Kickstarter as "Sex" and was only looking for $500, before ultimately raising $2,420. Hackett credits that effort's success to people probably just looking for "sex" on Kickstarter and randomly coming across their series.
The "Classic Alice" crowdfunding helped pay for a full production team, with a mapped out storyline featuring even more intricately mapped out social media tie-ins. Rather than just the fake Twitter accounts popularized by a lot of productions, there's an immersive online world for "Classic Alice" fans including everything from fake websites to Last.fm and Goodreads accounts.
Hackett said that one of the biggest challenges she faced was how to fight the limitations of a locked-off shot in the vlog-style format. What she originally wrote for the show was more elaborate, but production costs led to the vlog format — though she hopes to do a more documentary-style series one day, and has already found ways to let the camera move a little within the show's existing format.
She watched other Web series in the same genre to look for inspiration on how to deal with the format, as well as to make sure they were setting out in their own unique direction.
"['The Lizzie Bennet Diaries'] had things like, she would put on costumes and stuff like that, and play act other characters, and that's a nice device," Hackett said. "You just want something to make it feel like you're not still in this friggin' room."
Hackett says she can see continuing to do "Classic Alice" as long as they're able to fund the production and make sure everyone's getting paid.
"I'd be happy to keep doing this, at least until I look too old to play a college student. They'd graduate at some point," Hackett said.
Or, it could go a different way.
"They just keep doing this while they're in a retirement home!"
Watch the first episode of Classic Alice below:
Hackett in the KPCC studios:
Thanks for the interview @MikeRoe @KPCC pic.twitter.com/UIlLTotuzM
— Kate Hackett (@HackettKate) October 17, 2014
Skirball Center exhibit celebrates Nazi targets who changed Hollywood
Maybe it’s time we had an entire museum dedicated to the cultural migration that transformed Hollywood when the Nazis took power. Meanwhile, we’re fortunate to have the Skirball Cultural Center’s "Light and Noir," which recreates the actual environment of mid-century Hollywood’s great immigration.
Although their monuments were simply flickers on the great screen, these migrants worked one of the greatest cultural transformations of all time, changing, through the medium of film, the way hundreds of millions of people looked at the world.
“It’s not just about the largely Jewish immigration,” says Skirball Cultural Center director Robert Kirschner. “It’s basically an American story.”
It’s the old story of newcomers assimilating and then contributing to America’s complex, mutating culture. But now on a cosmic scale.
The Skirball’s “Light and Noir” show is the brainchild of young, Austrian-born Skirball curator Doris Berger. Created with the cooperation of the Motion Picture Academy, it includes 370 items in eight sections, including a remarkable partial reconstruction — including original costumes — of Rick’s Café in “Casablanca.”
“Casablanca,” the exhibit points out, was perhaps the purest product of the emigration — with its cast of emigres including Conrad Veidt, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Paul Henried, and Ludwig Stossel, and its heartfelt expression of the agony of defeat, exile, separation and hope.
But the exhibit also shows how the immigrants’ troubled insights permeated the industry far beyond period films based on Hitler and the war.
Movies as various as “Scarlet Street,’’ “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce,” all of which were directed and scored by Euro exiles, evoked a mood and style of urban gloom and fatality that came to be called “noir.” A French word for a Central European Expressionist style, it became as American as the frankfurter during the hard times of the Depression and WW II.
“Light and Noir” gives you a panorama of the reality behind the noir. There is a simulation of the office of agent Paul Kohner, who, along with figures such as Carl Laemmle, created the European Film Fund to help dozens of talented refugees from Hitler escape to the U.S. and employ them once they got to Hollywood. There are also abundant stills on display, suggesting the unglamorous daily life many immigrants experienced in their studio work.
On the other end of that experience, there are comfortable replicas of the vast Pacific Palisades living room of Lion Feuchtwanger, one of the richest of the exiles, and the dining room of his Santa Monica counterpart, the actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel.
(Greta Garbo and Salka Viertel in California, 1930)
Feuchtwanger and Viertel hosted much of Filmland’s aristocracy in the 1940s.
The show concentrates on Jews and other anti-Nazis from Germany and Austria, but fails to note that among those it mentions, Peter Lorre was from what is now Slovakia; while "Casablanca" director Michael Curtiz and screen composer Miklos Rosza were from Hungary.
Berger’s exhibit doesn’t spare the negative. She notes that during the prewar years, most of Hollywood’s Jewish leadership condoned a de facto ban on any negative mention of Hitler. She closes her survey in 1950. That’s when national and local Red-baiting scares drove many of those who had sought refuge from Hitler away from America — even global literary titans like author Thomas Mann. The Hollywood that represented a new freedom from oppression was over.
It’s not altogether a happy story, but it’s still a deeply inspiring one, which we can dive into at will via Netflix and TCM.
Light & Noir: Exiles and Émigrés in Hollywood, 1933–1950, is at the Skirball Cultural Center through March 1, 2015
Mayor Eric Garcetti wants diagonal crosswalks—but do you?
This week, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced his intention for Los Angeles to embrace a new style of crosswalk: diagonal crosswalks, also known as "pedestrian scramble" crosswalks. All car traffic stops while pedestrians move freely about the crosswalk. You might've already seen them in Old Town Pasadena, across Colorado Boulevard on Raymond and DeLacey. Off-Ramp's Alana Rinicella asked pedestrians for their thoughts on the initiative.