The Repair Café is back, on a mission against ‘trashing everything’

A hub for a traveling, motley group of do-it-yourselfers is back after a pandemic hiatus. This weekend they were in Pasadena practicing what they preach: re-using and recycling amid a 'throw-away' culture.

Give them your tired jeans, your poor busted lamp, your worn, broken umbrella. The tinkers, tailors and fixers at the Repair Café will try to patch them all.

Back after a pandemic pause, the monthly event took over the space of the nonprofit Remainders Creative Reuse in Pasadena Saturday to demonstrate what sustainable living can look like. A Really, Really Free Market set up shop on one floor, while the upper floor buzzed with the Repair Café itself.

Started 12 years ago by locals who belonged to the environmental community action group Transition Pasadena, the volunteer-run monthly meet-up is inspired by a movement that started in the Netherlands. Its mission: repair anything that would otherwise end up in a landfill.

Sculptor Greg Marquez, 85, of Altadena, heads up “The Sharpies” knife-sharpening crew with Judith Mack, 67, a retired Caltech staffer from Eagle Rock, and Tom Brady, 72, a retired recycling coordinator from Pasadena.

“It’s a philosophy in a lot of respects, isn’t it, reducing, reusing, recycling?” Brady said. “You can’t go through life trashing everything.”

Marquez is one of the original founders of the Repair Café.

“When I first heard about it, I said, ‘What a funny name. Do we drink coffee?”

They do. It’s freshly roasted and served by Michael Holland of Altadena, an archivist and records manager for the city of Los Angeles. His wife Anne Bannon is a murder mystery writer who is part of the café’s sewing circle.

“If I want to scare my wife, I’ll walk around with a screwdriver in my hand, I can’t fix anything,” Holland said.

But he sure can make a good cup of coffee.

“This is family. This is community,” Holland said. “You know when you find your tribe and everything starts to make sense. These are people we’ve learned to love.”

Marquez said everybody needs community whether they realize it or not.

“We wanted to do something for the community and what we discovered is we were doing something for the individual too,” he said. “Whether it’s repairing or just having a chat, they want to get together.”

Attracting fixers of all trades, the movement hopes to slowly shift a throwaway culture. It has a roster of about 200 volunteers with a core group of about 40.

Piano teacher David Cutter of Pasadena performed his Rachmaninoff repertoire at the event. He said volunteers are creative, community-oriented, concerned about the future and all willing to help.

“There’s this great diversity and range of ideas here,” he said.

The knowledge base among the fixers is impressive. Thaine Allison of Pasadena is a former Peace Corps volunteer and retired actor, poet and economist. Sheryl Powsner of Pasadena is a visual artist who sews and can also assess the quality of soil and compost. Mike O’Brien of Venice worked on the operating system for the first of Apple’s Mac computers. (“I also serve as a mannequin for my wife Jennifer,” who sews.)

Pasadena Vice Mayor Felicia Williams is a former café guest turned volunteer. She repaired a tear on a big, brown teddy bear and also mended the pant hem of a Pasadena paramedic.

“It’s important to be here and do the work,” she said. “And I like that this brings people together.”

Retired teacher Bya Berger of Sierra Madre got a necklace repaired at the repair café five years ago.

“I came back and sat beside a woman who helped a homeless man who needed a button for his shirt, and she did it with such care and respect. I was sold. I said, ‘I want to do this all the time,’” Berger said.

First-time volunteer Evan Franz, 32, of Highland Park, said his girlfriend Claire Beaumont, 34, inspired him to pitch in. Both are good at sewing and they try to reuse things instead of buying things new.

“I adjusted the hem on yoga pants, and repaired the sleeve of a down jacket,” Franz said. “I love that (the volunteers) are here on their own time, and they’re just passionate about doing this, there’s no ulterior motive.”

Jem Powell, a psychologist from North Hollywood, got a knife sharpened and also donated items to the free market.

“I think all of us should be fixing and reusing stuff we already have,” she said.

Longtime helper Ginko Lee of Pasadena used her local experience to start a repair café in Taiwan.

“Sometimes I look around in amazement at all this,” she said. “The idea is simple: we think everyone has something to offer, and we can help each other.”

The next Repair Café is set from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, May 20, at Glendale Central Library, 222 E. Harvard St. For more information, visit repair-café-pasadena.org.