Saturday on my way home from playing tennis, I stopped for coffee at a Starbucks not far from Florence and Normandie, a flashpoint for the 1992 L.A. Riots. This Starbucks did not exist when the Rodney King verdict lit up the city exactly 20 years ago that day.
For all I knew, the Food4Less supermarket in the shopping center where the Starbucks sat had been the same one where four young black men from Inglewood had shot part of the underground L.A. Riots video we’d watched together a couple of years after the whole mess had gone down. I remember us laughing at the looters who were too slow getting out of the supermarket because they were trying to steal too many frozen turkeys or whatever, and had been the ones to get busted when the cops arrived. Stupid looters. All over the soundtrack of their video, you could hear the guys who shot it expressing a kind of awe at the fire and mayhem that was everywhere they pointed their camera. They sounded half-scared, half giddy, like they were experiencing their first sex, or something. They drove the streets and shot the video undercover, three of them ducking down so the cops would think it was just one kid in the car trying to get home and not four of them time-skipping into the future, to the day we’d all be laughing at their pre-YouTube clips of Looter Fails and L.A.’s Dumbest Criminals.
On Saturday at the Starbucks, at about one in the afternoon, an African American man, maybe a dozen years older than me, was putting cream and sugar in his coffee at the same time I was.
“Coffee tastes different in the middle of the day,” he said, emptying three packs of raw sugar into his drink. “I wonder why that is,” he said.
“Coffee tastes best in the morning when it’s doing its job and waking us up,” I said.
“That’s the truth. When I was little, the grown ups would be having their coffee in the morning, at four AM! and you’d wake up to that smell. Four AM they’d be sittin’ in the kitchen having their coffee, and the smell of it would be the thing that woke you up.”
“And then a little later, you’d smell the bacon,” I added.
“You would. We had good bacon back where I grew up.”
“Where was this?”
“Down in Louisiana, near Shreveport”
“Good bacon in Shreveport.”
“Oh yeah we had good bacon.”
“You had chicory in your coffee.”
The man ignored what I said about the chicory. He was still smelling the bacon. “Four AM, you’d smell the coffee, and then you’d smell the bacon fryin’. Folks got up early back then.”
“I grew up on a farm,” I said. “You’d go to work when the sun came up, and quit when it went down.”
“They didn’t have TV to watch at night. So they would sit and talk for a little while after supper, or listen to the radio, and then they’d go to bed. Where was your farm?” he asked.
“Indiana.”
“They got good bacon back there.”
“Oh yeah.”
We finished mixing the cream and sugar in our coffees. Wished each other a good day. Went our separate ways.
It was no big scene. The conversation could have happened to anybody, anywhere in L.A., or just about any other city in the U.S., for that matter, on Saturday. And I think that’s the point. Our ability to make connections that put something good into play is everywhere, all around us, with everyone we meet, and every part of the environment with which we interact.
That man initiated a scene by making a declarative statement that indicated who he was: A Discriminating Drinker of Coffee. We yes-anded one another with the smells of coffee and bacon in the morning, and painted the scene with adults huddled in kitchens in the dark of the morning, and children asleep in their beds. We established the who/what/where. We edited cleanly. It was a nice, tight, 90-second scene.
20 years ago, that man and I could not have had that conversation. And maybe that’s the point, too. We have come a long way from the Rodney King verdict, and Shreveport and Indiana. We are all in the business of waking up and creating the days, the weeks, the lifetimes that lie ahead. We still have a long way to go. We can only do it one scene at a time. By sharing stories. Smelling the coffee. Appreciating the bacon.
Enjoy your week!
Rob McNamara
I take improv classes when I can, always from top-flight teachers. It helps me keep my edge by putting my performance under scrutiny and review that’s much more intense than what you or I experience in a workplace environment. And it keeps me in a learning mode. You’ve probably never heard the name of my current teacher, 
In hierarchical organizations, leadership moves primarily from the top down. That’s its sole direction. In this model, the CEO is automatically the leader in every scene that doesn’t involve the Board of Directors. The people who report to the CEO are the leaders in every scene that does not involve the CEO or the Board etc. etc. etc. until you get to the janitor, who is the leader of the broom. Every scene has a pecking order, and the pecking order has been decided before the scene begins.