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Eventually Ravaei, who grew up in Iran, tried to assure me it wasn't my fault. "It's L.A. When you approach people, they're thinking, What does he want?" he said. "I've been here long enough where I'm kind of like that. It's a shame." I knew, however, that Ravaei was a very good man. Not because he accepted my call to help people but because he's willing to touch strangers' feet.
In desperation, Ravaei and I decided to go to Crumbs and pay for people's cupcakes. Shana Weber, a mom visiting from Madison, Wis., with her husband and two kids, accepted our offer and said we indeed improved her attitude about our town. "L.A. gets a bad rap," she said. To explain our pastry largesse, I told her about the violent teenage bash mobs, which, I realized, more than erased all the positive public relations work the cupcakes had done.
Did Ravaei and I solve the problem of disenfranchised people feeling so hopeless after the Zimmerman verdict that they felt they had to go to Hollywood and take whatever they could by force? No. But we prevented a very attractive family from Wisconsin from paying for cupcakes. We also took a lot of photos of foreigners standing in front of Muhammad Ali's star. When people look at those photos, they'll think about all those people coming together: black, white and Iranian podiatrist. And just maybe, they'll write about that at the bottom of the photo when they post it on Facebook. That might not change the world, but there's no way I'm asking people to meet up in person again.