She won me over with the “emotional support chickens” thing.
My friend Susan Kaufman was telling me about a yarn store in Inglewood where a multiracial, multigenerational crowd gathers twice a week to get together and knit. The shop owner has created DIY knitting kits for chubby chickens with quirky names like Barack Obama, Hennifer Lopez and Paulina Poultryskova.
Opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
When you hug one of the chickens, Susan assured me, you will forget, at least for a moment, that a convicted felon, racist and con man could take back the White House in November.
“It sounds weird, but they really work,” said Susan, a therapist who knows about emotional support.
When she first invited me to join her at the Knitting Tree, President Biden had not yet announced he was dropping out of the presidential race. Vice President Kamala Harris had not yet risen to national prominence, and former President Trump was campaigning as if he had already won.
I needed some bird therapy.
But when I walked into Knitting Tree a few weeks later, the bleak political landscape had changed dramatically, and so had the mood inside the store, said store owner Annette Corsino.
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1. Chris Parker of Los Angeles works his needles with yarn to create a sweater at Knitting Tree LA. 2. Shop owner Annette Corsino works on a “BRAT” hat that makes a political statement. 3. Emotional support chickens line the shelves.
“Before this, the mood was pretty grim,” said Corsino, 62, whose lavender locks and plethora of tattoos herald the rise of a more modern generation of knitters. “But people feel a lot better now. They smile more. There is hope.”
I hugged Barack Obama to my chest. It felt good, very good.
Corsino nodded in approval. “Our motto is: 'Life is hard. We all need a chicken to make it better.'”
The Knitting Tree is located in a low-rise, dingy office park, between a car rental and a golf clothing store on Manchester Boulevard. From the outside it looks very dull.
Walking into the shop, though, is like stepping into a Technicolor Oz. Bright spools of thread line the walls, and therapy chickens perch on high shelves. Walter and Carmen, Corsino’s wire-haired dachshunds, roam around. Carmen barks at everyone; Walter climbs into customers’ laps and rests his long nose on the huge wooden table that is the heart of the shop. The table is where the knitters and crocheters—young, middle-aged, older, black, white, Asian, and Latina—work, talk, and laugh. And sometimes cry. Two of the knitters are caring for their sick husbands.
This place looked like a multiracial version of a traditional black barbershop.
“Not really,” said Jacqueline Camacho, 70, who worked for 46 years as an airline customer service agent at LAX. “It’s more of a family thing.” Camacho lives in Valencia and comes to Inglewood as often as she can.
“More like ‘Cheers,’” added Ana Petrova, 83, who fled Hungary after the 1956 revolution was crushed by the Soviet army and ended up in Venice, where she and her husband, Peter, ran a business on Lincoln Boulevard, selling and repairing British cars.
“In the barbershop,” Camacho said, “they just gossip and gossip, and we don’t do that here.”
“Everyone knows your name,” Petrova said. “And sometimes we drink.” (During Wednesday night potlucks, mostly, but sometimes on Sundays, too. I saw a bottle of champagne on the nearby food table.)
Camacho asked Petrova what to do with a stitch that had fallen out while knitting a sweater.
Politically themed creations at Knitting Tree LA.
(Robin Abcarian/Los Angeles Times)
“Where is it?” Petrova asked.
“Under the armpit,” Camacho replied.
“Live with it.”
Later, I heard Petrova give a piece of knitting advice that could apply to almost any challenge in life: “The slower you go, the faster you'll finish.”
Toward the front of the store, a class was working on a felt bag with the blue-and-white “Greek key” design familiar to anyone who has ever bought a cup of coffee in Manhattan.
“It’s fun to be interested in Greek mythology,” said knitting teacher Theresa Havton, a mother of four grown children, including triplets. I assumed her only child was the firstborn. “It wouldn’t have happened any other way,” said Havton, a former computer engineer whose husband is a spinal cord surgeon practicing in New York.
“We have a team of experts here,” Corsino told me. “We have doctors, lawyers, nurses, scientists and many engineers. During the strike, there were a lot of people from the film industry. I never see anyone outside here. This is my social life.”
At the big table, Anjeanette Bumatai, 54, was working on a blanket. She wore a blue baseball cap pulled down over her forehead and a T-shirt that read “Babes Ride Out.” Bumatai owns an insurance agency, rides a Harley and had just returned from a women’s biker gathering in Deadwood, South Dakota. During her two weeks on the road, she said, she traveled through Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming.
“I was in Trump country,” he told me. “It’s amazing how much people worship him. It’s a cult of personality. I’d talk to someone and ask, ‘What has he done for you?’ They couldn’t name anything. As a person of color, I think most black people don’t care.”
It sounded suspiciously like “childless cat lady,” the infamous insult hurled at Harris, a stepmother of two, by Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
“I guess so,” she said, laughing. “I guess my husband’s children don’t matter.”
Corsino, who has sold more than 3,000 emotional support chicken kits ($39.50 each) and 25,000 chicken patterns, told me she's working on a new pattern, based on a popular Harris campaign meme inspired by British pop star Charli XCX.
The hat, which borrows the shape of the famous pink beanie that became popular during the Women's March against Trump in January 2017, will be lime green. Black letters will spell out the word “BRAT.”
