How to Be a Joiner

Welcome to the Los Angeles Breakfast Club

Hey! If you open this newsletter all the time, if it makes you think, if you share it with friends — consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Your subscriptions help keep the paywalls off interviews like this one — and get you access to the Weekly Threads, Things I Read & Loved, and the knowledge that you’re supporting the stuff that adds value to your life.

And if you’re already a Paid Subscriber: You’re the Best. Make sure you check out yesterday’s Comfort Watch Thread…..plus last Friday’s Senescence Planning. We’ll also be doing Winter Culture Study Classifieds soon (see last year’s); watch this space.

---

Also: This week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast addresses all of your excellent and provocative questions about the weird world of kids toys — and we got the brilliant

Youngna Park

to come be the cohost. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts if you want to know why all the toys are beige, why it feels like kids’ toys don’t last as long anymore, WTF is up with all these subscription crates, and/or just hear me talk about yard sale My Little Ponies.

For the past six months, I’ve been spending between six to eight hours a week interviewing people about their efforts to make community and sustainable friendship where they are. Halfway through the process, I wrote about some of my observations, but I want to re-emphasize: every time I finish one of these interviews, I feel awesome. Like, here are people making it happen, on large and small scales, regardless of where they are in life. Some people are doing fun, messy co-parenting; some people are figuring out the sustaining joy of intergenerational friendship.

I’ll write about this at length in the book, but it remains wild to me that I haven’t had a single person ghost on a planned conversation. But it kinda makes sense. Who doesn’t want to talk about their beloved friends? Their enthusiasm for prioritizing friendship is contagious, and I want to share it with a much larger audience.

So: over the next few months, I’m going to extend a few of the conversations I thought would be particularly useful to Culture Study Readers. And today, that conversation is with Bri Richard, who’s navigated herself from deep Hollywood-industry burnout to becoming the secretary of the Los Angeles Breakfast Club.

In the conversation below, she’ll introduce you to how the Los Angeles Breakfast Club — which started as a way for Douglas Fairbanks and his crew to hang out after riding horses — has transformed into a inter-generational conglomeration of interested and interesting weirdos (a term I use with deep, knowing affection, obviously).

I’ve talked with dozens of people about their local groups, but I wanted to highlight the LABC because of its history, which underlines the ways in which past generations have understood the need for regular, secular, ritual and connection…..but also, what a success story! No matter where you live, the old bones of community are there — sometimes they just need someone to enliven them (and, as you’ll see, figure out how an organization can remain faithful to its roots, while also embracing the present).

If you’re in the Los Angeles area and this vibe seems like yours, I hope you consider checking it out — and if you’re not, I hope you think about what organizations in your area might actually be a fit. It might seem a little weird, or scary, or awkward….at least at first. But what if it also feels like home?

The Breakfast Club has GREAT placemats. Here’s one from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s (read more here)

We’ll get into the details of the Los Angeles Breakfast Club shortly, but I want to start with a much broader question: how does showing up for something that has nothing to do with work — and with people across generations, from so many different walks of life — add to your life? How does it change the rhythm of your week?

There’s something that I hear a lot of first time guests say: “I’ve found my people.” I think what they mean by that is The Los Angeles Breakfast Club is a place where you can’t help but feel like you belong almost immediately. And how could you not, when there’s a friendly Early Bird Greeter at the front door giving you a cheery “Good Morning, Ham!” (we use a lot of breakfast-themed language), and your belly is full from a meal shared with a multi-generational table full of people who are genuinely happy to be there.

The current placemat and coffee mug

This is a place where if you show up — not just physically, but by participating — you belong. You are treated like a beloved friend the moment you walk in for the first time. I think it’s important to recognize how rare and precious a thing that is today, especially in the U.S. and outside of organized religion, which has its limitations.

What that does to the rhythm of my week — look, for my entire life I didn’t think I was a routine or ritual person because I was raised Catholic and Sunday mass was, frankly, painfully boring for me. After a few weeks at the LABC, something shifted for me. But there is great comfort in the predictability of tradition and ritual — I just hadn’t found rituals that meant something to me until then. Breakfast Club traditions are silly, goofy, punny, campy, and often just not that serious. The only thing we take seriously is our guiding principle of friendship. Is that corny? Hell yeah. We are goofy as fuck and we love it. But it’s also incredibly earnest, because once you are immersed in this space where everyone treats you like a friend, it’s magnetic. So I guess I’m a routine person now? At least on Wednesdays.

Okay let’s talk about the basics. When was the Los Angeles Breakfast Club founded and why? What parts of that founding DNA endure, and which parts have atrophied with time? If someone asks you what the club does, how do you answer?

The LABC started in 1925 with a group of industry bigwigs (likely all white men) who liked to ride their horses before work and began gathering for breakfast after their ride. This origin is why we still have a lot of equestrian-related imagery and language in our branding and rituals.

What began as essentially an equestrian-themed industry networking group almost a century ago (we celebrate our centennial next year!) is now a lot more inclusive, but it’s not necessarily anti-networking – it just happens in a more genuine way than your standard modern networking event because it’s not the focus or purpose.

Obsessed with everything about this (visit the Club’s IG here)

I think what keeps the Club still relevant today is the ability to balance history and tradition with evolving culturally. Women couldn’t become regular members until 1981 — we’d had female honorary members before then like Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson, but those were exceptions. Some traditions, like exclusionary practices, should not be honored and upheld.

The Club has also always identified as “non-political, non-religious, non-sectarian” — and yet until fairly recently, there was a Chaplain-led segment of the weekly programming. This has since been transformed into our “Adventurer in Friendship” segment, where a member shares a brief personal insight to our shared human nature and journeys in friendship — often in relation to the day’s topic.

So, here’s my typical elevator pitch for what The Los Angeles Breakfast Club is (with the caveat that you really do just have to experience it to really get it): We’re a nearly 100-year old organization that meets every Wednesday for breakfast and a presentation, with a new speaker and topic every week!

And the longer version:

We’re an almost 100-year old organization that meets on Wednesday mornings for a buffet breakfast and a presentation from a new guest speaker every week. Before the presentation, we sing some songs and have light group calisthenics (think: touching your toes), a reading of our traditional Cryptogram, and a handshake line (“also known as the “Grand Salute”).

The speakers and topics range from Disney Imagineers (recently, Terry Hardin) and Legends (Bob Gurr, earlier this year) to classic cinema (we have had a TCM host three years in a row coinciding with the TCM fest that typically happens every April in LA) to comedians (we had both Paul Scheer and Melissa Villaseñor this year) to iconic LA food brands (See’s Candy, In N Out).

Another example of a recent LABC event (that I would personally absolutely attend)

When I first interviewed you, we talked a little about how the club was essentially on life support. How did it come back to life, how did you find it, and how are you trying to make it sustainable for the century to come?

This was before my time, but the Club had a handful of very lean years with membership numbers in the low double digits – actually I think it got down to single digits at one point (we are currently creeping up to 200!). Former Club President Lily Holleman discovered the Club in 2013 and made it her mission to bring it back to life. She spread the word personally by inviting friends, and by bringing the Club into the digital age by creating an online presence — and it worked.

I was introduced to the Club during its slow rise by a close friend and fellow current Board Member, who had been trying to get me to come for at least a year. I didn’t actually make it in until I finally quit my corporate tech media job in 2022, but once I did, I was hooked; I haven’t missed a meeting aside from when I’m out of town or sick. And as a freelancer now, I get to just say “I’m not available until 9:30am on Wednesdays,” which is a very different attitude I have now from my workaholic/burnout days.

Our number one priority in making the LABC sustainable for the future is forging a long term agreement with the City of Los Angeles and the Recreation and Parks Department. We meet in Friendship Auditorium in Griffith Park, which was named as a nod to the Club’s tagline “The Shrine of Friendship.” It was built with Club funds and donated to the City of Los Angeles, with a dedication ceremony taking place on November 3, 1965.

Our initial 50-year building license expired in 2015 and we’ve been operating on interim agreements since. We are really hoping to eventually have an agreement in place long enough to ensure the Club can keep meeting in this building — which wouldn’t exist without the Club! Hopefully, even if membership dwindles again, even just a flicker can keep it alive long enough to grow again. Without the meeting place, we just don’t know what the Club would look like; it’s our home, even if it isn’t technically ours.

I’d love to hear a little about how rituals show up — and why they matter, even when they’re ostensibly silly.

Wow, I LOVE this question! Pretty much everything we do is silly and the unseriousness is exactly what drew me into the Club in the first place. I mentioned a lot of our rituals earlier when talking about the programming, but I’d love to share a few other fun ones.

We have a group within the club called the Roosters and they sit at a designated table and perform some light “heckling” of the MC, Chairperson of the Day and Adventurer in Friendship. It’s usually a punny question related to the day’s presentation topic. So, for example, if the presentation is about See’s Candies, they might say something like “If the Roosters were candy, would they be a little chewy or just plain nutty?,” and each person that gets heckled is expected to give a witty response to shut the Roosters up. It’s so lighthearted and in good fun that sometimes presenters ask why they didn’t get a heckle.

Another thing, and I have no idea where it comes from — whenever anyone says “New York City,” everyone yells out “NEW YORK CITY?!?,” kind of like “how dare you bring up that other city?” (Our Club Historian informs me it maybe comes from this 1993 commercial) Again, all in good fun. (AHP note: As soon as I read this, I thought oh, of course, the Pace commercial)

These things that are small, seem insignificant, or as you said, ostensibly silly — they do matter.

Something that has stayed with me my entire life comes from my favorite children’s book, Miss Rumphius. The titular character is an adventurous woman who, as a child, tells her grandfather that when she grows up she will travel the world to see and experience many wonders like he did — and she does. But his response is always that she must also do something to make the world a more beautiful place. As she grows older, this notion stays in the back of her mind. Ultimately her “something” is spreading lupine seeds throughout the town she’s settled in, which over time continue to spread farther and wider, long after she initially planted them.

Putting aside the outdated and problematic colonialist undertones of the book, the lesson I took from this story is that what we put into the world will spread and multiply. It’s not hard to find examples of how negativity, bigotry, hatred, etc can spread and multiply. The reverse, though?

Say someone new comes to Breakfast Club and because of the general atmosphere that all these tiny silly little things produce, they feel a sense of belonging and they leave feeling light and positive, and they get into their car and they’re feeling generous and they let someone out in front of them. And that person happened to be running a little late and their anxiety lessens a little from the small act of friendliness and maybe they feel a little bit of that positivity passed onto them so when they get to their office and they buy their coworker a coffee, and then… you get the idea.

That’s how little, seemingly insignificant rituals matter. For me, these tiny things add up to create a tone that has a positive effect on my mood, which in turn strengthens my resilience against annoyances or any form of external negative energy. In short, I just leave in a good mood and I have a better day because of how I spend those two hours every Wednesday. It feels a little like resetting the dial in terms of what I can handle in the rest of my life, and in turn, I hopefully pass some of that onto others that come into my orbit.

They really do serve breakfast at the breakfast club!!!

Because I feel like people are wondering: can you describe a typical member?

I went to an event with a non-Club friend a couple months ago, and ran into a fellow member and my friend said “wow, what are the chances?” and I laughed, because the answer is “the chances are pretty good!” I’ll run into Club members at events anywhere throughout the city, because we’re joiners and attenders and appreciators. We are a quirky bunch – and not in a Zooey Deschanel adorkable or hipster kind of way – we’re just a bunch of genuine, enthusiastic culture-lovers.

We’ve come a long way from an elite group of studio execs. We’ve got writers, producers, actors, designers, musicians. But we also have nurses, teachers, puppeteers, journalists, physical and massage therapists, and at least one architect…

We have members in their late teens/early twenties, at least one member in their 90s, and members representing every generation in between. What we have in common is a genuine enthusiasm, our love of culture, and our shared core values of friendship, preservationism, a locally-minded perspective, and a deep caring for one another

If someone wants to get involved in an organization like the Breakfast Club but keeps talking themselves out of it — it’s too early, I’ll feel awkward, I don’t have time — how would you reframe it?

I get that it can be intimidating and social anxiety-inducing to show up to something new. It’s sometimes hard for me to remember, but I absolutely was once like that too! And the truth is, there is no easy way around it – you have to just show up over and over until it stops being scary. But I PROMISE, it will! Bring a friend the first few times if it helps, or tell yourself you can leave after an hour if you still feel uncomfortable. Whatever it takes to just get you there, because it’s like exposure therapy and will keep getting easier.

And really, what do you have to lose? Yeah, you might feel a little awkward the first few times – but on the other side is a wealth of benefits: connection, belonging, purpose, community. These things are worth a little bit of courage, if you ask me. There’s nothing that can replace the warm fuzzy feeling of walking into a room to be greeted by name by friendly faces that are delighted to see you, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your job. Nothing will make you feel more like a whole person instead of just a consumer, and it’s an addicting feeling!. ●

---

You can find out a lot more about the Los Angeles Breakfast Club here — and if you have specific questions, you can email info@labreakfastclub.com or ask in the comments (Bri is a longtime Culture Study subscriber!).

And make sure to follow LABC on Instagram, if you want more of this sort of ephemera and a great model of how to merge the rich past and equally rich present.

Even more about Bri: Brianne "Bri" Richard was born and grew up in Massachusetts and moved to California in 2010, after earning a Bachelor’s in Communications from Quinnipiac University. She has worked for the Television Academy, Amazon Studios, and now as an independent consultant in the entertainment awards space, specializing in Emmy Awards. When not consulting, Bri enjoys traveling, reading, crafting and mending, pop culture, and learning new skills. She is mom to two cats named Scout and Tallulah, who surprisingly are *not* named after Bruce Willis and Demi Moore's children. Bri has been a member of The Los Angeles Breakfast Club since 2022 and serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors.

---