Let them eat cake, keep the bowl too
DISHING IT OUT (Claire Cote)
If you are going to spend money, it might as well be on something you like. For most people, cake would fall into that category. Dozens of Saddleback College students and faculty gathered in the Fine Arts quad last Wednesday for a chance to eat cake and, incidentally, acquire some nice ceramics.
Richard White’s ceramics class organized this event as a fundraiser for the completion of the Veteran’s Memorial being erected on campus next to the Administration and Governance building where students and faculty were invited to donate $10, pick any one bowl made by a various students, and, just as an added bonus, fill that bowl with strawberry shortcake.
“I took some of my advanced students up to the memorial and they were very excited about getting it finished,” said White, head of the Ceramics Department and one of the designers of the monument. “We used to do events like this for other projects or events, and thought it would be a good idea to resurrect it.”
Mona Litt, an advanced ceramics student, was the main coordinator of the event.
“I cannot take full credit for this,” she said. “I had cooperation from about 20 people in the class.”
The memorial, which is scheduled to be finished around the beginning of summer, will be officially dedicated on Veterans Day this coming November.
“It is very important for the college to honor the veterans who have protected our country,” Litt said.
This project has proven to be no small feat.
“So far we’ve used about 16 tons of clay. And we’ll probably use eight more before we’re through,” said the memorial’s production manager, Thalia Isen, 28, art.
Many of the ceramics students on campus are putting a great deal of time and effort into the project. Michael Milberg, 29, fine art, is one of those.
“We’ve taken a lot of ceramics classes here, and really wanted to get involved with the construction of the monument,” Milberg said of himself and his classmates. “And the school ended up hiring us, really for something we’d be doing anyway.”
Judging by the amount of people who attended, the fundraiser seemed a great success,; as any event that sends attendees away licking whipped cream off their lips should be. And Saddleback will only have to wait a few more months to reap the benefits of these students’ hard work.