While some of us have been snoozing through the stormy and windy winter, at Avalon Library, we’ve been working hard to provide some excellent and fun services for you!
About a month ago, we were pleased to receive a generous donation of Torqua yearbooks from Avalon School. With perhaps just a year or two gap, we now have an almost complete collection of the years from 1965 to the present. It’s great to see how interested some of our local kids are to look through the yearbooks—some to see their friends, some to see photos of their parents when they were their age. The yearbooks are also a really useful resource for our visitors in town to do research on their families when their relatives lived in town. Our sincere thanks to Avalon school for the yearbooks and we invite you to come on in and take a look at them!
Also coming up this month, on Thursday, Feb. 16, we’re excited to host a performance by Baila! Baila! This will be a bilingual, English and Spanish, event with songs, stories, and fun for all ages. There will be singing! There will be dancing! It’s an event for kids, particularly age 3 to 12, but everyone, particularly families, will be welcome. Our thanks to our Friends of Avalon Library for kindly sponsoring these programs!
Avalon Library is also pleased to welcome back beloved Island Historian Chuck Liddell, who has agreed to reprise his popular “Everything You Need to Know About Catalina But Was Afraid to Ask” twice monthly talks about local history and culture. Perfect for locals as well as day visitors, attendees should arrive armed with questions about Catalina, which Chuck will be happy to answer, along with details that you may not even realize you were wondering about. Chuck will be joining us at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 14 and 28!
On Feb. 22, we’ll be bringing back visiting artist Emily Lam to conduct a brief class on creating Chinese calligraphy. She’ll teach us how to draw around 25 Chinese words, using pictographs and radicals. Emmy is a brilliant and entertaining instructor, and her classes are always engrossing. This is an opportunity to do something different on the Island! Here’s hoping she’ll teach us how to write “Avalon Casino” in Mandarin!
We’ll be continuing twice weekly crafts, usually on Tuesdays and Fridays, as supplies last, as well, including creating pop up Valentine’s Day cards on Feb. 14. And we’ll have our Black History Month celebration in which we’ll be painting self-portraits in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat. That’ll be at 4 pm on Tuesday, Feb. 21. And we offer our Smarty Pants Storytime on Saturday mornings at 11 a.m., especially for kids age 2 to 5. Let’s learn school readiness skills while hearing stories, songs, and having fun. And Mr. Paul quacks like a duck while singing the traditional favorite, “Five Little Ducks.” Really, that shouldn’t be missed.
Paul Birchall is the community library manager for Avalon Library of the Los Angeles Public Library system. Email him at pbirchall@library.lacounty.gov.
