Lifestyle
Remember the art of window displays? This one will keep you lingering in a vibrant L.A. picnic scene
This story is part of Image’s March Outside issue, a celebration of the Los Angeles outdoors and the many lives to be lived under its unencumbered sky.
In a feat of luck that surprises both visitors and me alike, I live in one of those coveted, mysterious and oxymoronic L.A. neighborhoods: a walkable one. Truthfully (I feel almost guilty saying so), it’s more than walkable; my neighborhood is seemingly oriented around pedestrians rather than just accommodating of them. The main street that intercepts the end of my block is tree-lined and buzzing, with generous sidewalks, gleaming (and respected) crosswalks, and wide windowscapes just begging to be strolled and observed. And yet, it’s rare to find a storefront that compels me to pause and look, as so few display anything other than exactly what is on the racks inside.
For her window display at the new Toast store in West Hollywood, artist Kyna Payawal wanted to entice pedestrians to stay and linger. Her installation evokes what is perhaps the quintessential Angeleno celebration of spring: a shared picnic. Colorful ceramic fruits, vegetables and flowers mingle on a table covered with myriad serving vessels, all handbuilt in Payawal’s studio, which looks out into her abundant kitchen garden. There are odes to farmers market beans, Payawal’s favorite spring vegetable (the pea), and the woven baskets of her Filipino homeland. And of course there is a piñata, in the shape of a sun and studded with local dried pinto beans, to represent the most joyful of picnic activities. The name of Toast’s new collection, “A Shared Table,” was the catalyst behind Payawal’s picnic, and she was inspired by the brand’s indigo and tomato colorways and their relaxed, organic silhouettes. The tablescape is also a quintessential expression of Padma, Payawal’s art practice, which focuses on nourishing conversations and community through food, ceramic and textile craft collaborations.
With the rapturous cacophony this scene brings to mind, it is surprising to learn that Payawal created all of her pieces in silence. Listening to music rushes her work because she is tempted to sculpt or sew or cook to the beat. Instead, she tunes into the work itself. “There’s a real slowness in food and ceramics,” she says. The time it takes for food to grow and clay to dry requires that Payawal pay attention to her craft. “The attention then becomes this form of care and devotion for the work itself, for the land, and then for the people who touch it.” It is the gift of this slowness and attention that she wishes to impart to anyone who passes by the Toast window and accepts her invitation to share a picnic blanket.
I grew up in the Philippines and moved to Los Angeles about 16 years ago. Being Filipina American really shapes my relationship to food and to gathering and care. Growing up in the Philippines, when you enter someone’s home, their first question is, “kumain ka na ba?” Have you eaten? That’s just core to my existence and my DNA. Sharing and offering food has always been that love language that stayed with me. I went to the market daily with our yaya, and we would make fresh, home-cooked meals every single day. And I grew up in a large extended family, eating kamayan feasts together with our hands. We’d often visit our family farm, where my extended family raised pigs, ducks, chickens and whatnot. Experiencing that life cycle of knowing where my food comes from and watching my uncles do the butchering and then eating it the same day through slow roasting was really impactful for me as a kid.
When I got to L.A., I discovered the rich diversity in cuisines and cultures — Mexican, Latino, Persian, Armenian, Korean. I also started cooking for myself and was lucky to be surrounded by a big group of friends who cooked meals together. That was really formative and evolved my world. And the farmers markets here are crazy! We’re so blessed to have everything grow in abundance. The seasonal aspect of food was nailed down for me in L.A. Sure, stuff is always available, but when you go to the farmers market weekly, you then get to know, OK, peas are really in season for spring and tomatoes for summer.
I moved to this house during the pandemic, when people picked up their slow hobbies. Mine was gardening and it really stuck. Food is one of the most direct ways we can have an impact on the climate crisis. If we change, on a larger systemic level, the way we grow, distribute and decompose food, then we’ll be in a much better place. Gardening just made sense for me to learn how to grow food and eat it sustainably.
And then, of course, I love serving food and sharing food. I seeded the idea of creating Padma to gather people around to address food insecurity and sustainability. Padma was about bringing these kinds of conversations together in a nourishing space — like over a beautiful meal — to invite care and participation. Now I’m interested in how those same questions of sustainability live in everyday rituals like sharing food, making objects slowly and gathering in ways that restore connection.
Spring is my favorite season. I love it. It’s that season where you’re outdoors and paying attention to the native landscape, to the blooming and the fruiting of everything. You can smell it’s spring. And going out to picnic and just slowing down and getting lost in time with people outside is the best thing. For this Toast display, I was inspired to create a sculptural picnic scene inspired by the outdoor gathering cultures of L.A. and the idea of having a shared blanket. The picnic is one of the most accessible ways we come together across different cultures and share the beauty and magnificence of springtime blooming.
I opted for smaller pieces in the installation. They’re abundant — they fill the scene to get people to pause and pay attention to all the different aspects of the pieces. The colors are inspired by what grows in spring in L.A. The yellows are like the palo verde trees that bloom brightly in the streets. The reds are like the red poppies that wrap around hillsides. The textiles are all dyed with botanical dyes.
The teapot piece has pea tendril decor, which alludes to my favorite spring garden vegetable. The fruit cup and slices are a picnic staple from a Mexican fruit cart. The loquats are from the trees that bloom abundantly right now. The lily is one of the first flowers to bloom in spring. And then there are the vibrant lemons of L.A.
I wove the basket from my neighbor’s tree bark. It alludes to Filipino woven bilao — the big, circular ones with all sorts of fiesta food. I put some scarlet runner beans from the Hollywood Farmers Market over it to symbolize the gathering cultures of Native American tribes. In spring, they celebrate abundance, and my version of the bilao is a kind of offering to that.
The piñata was a collaboration with a family-run piñata house. It’s actually called the Piñata House, and I designed the sun sculpture, and then collaborated with them on making it. I added some beans over it, too. The piñata functions as a focal point into the scene as a whole, and alludes to one of the biggest gathering cultures in L.A., a very joyous scene of celebration. My hope is that it draws people in and invites them to slow down to look at the pieces, and then inspires them to say, “Oh, let’s have a picnic ourselves!”
Steven Patrick Lynch made Madison Ashley Greco laugh when he walked up to the counter at Anderson’s Frozen Custard in Tonawanda, N.Y., where she worked as a cashier, in January 2019.
“What would you recommend: the roast beef or the lemon ice?,” Lynch asked her, knowing he would order both.
“Well, one’s a dinner, and one’s a dessert,” she responded.
She already thought he was cute when he walked into the ice cream shop, but when he started ordering, his humor won her over. After Lynch paid with his credit card, she took notice of his name at the bottom of the receipt.
Greco went home after work that night and couldn’t stop thinking about him. She managed to find his X account and followed him. A few minutes later, he sent her a message: “Wow, I’m impressed.”
They had their first date five days later at the local shopping mall, walking around and people watching. “By the time we knew it, we were lapping around the mall for three or four hours,” Greco said. Two months later, he asked her to be his girlfriend.
At the time, Lynch, now 32, was about a year sober, and Greco, now 26, was supportive of his journey.
“Instead of going to the bar and getting a beer, I would just go to Anderson’s and get a custard,” he said. “It was awesome seeing my girl and visiting her at work.”
They soon discover an unexpected connection. They both had grown up watching wrestling with their siblings, and they even realized that they had been at the same World Wrestling Entertainment “Armageddon” event in Buffalo in 2008, when he was 14 and she was 9. But both had drifted away from the sport for years.
They rediscovered their love for wrestling, and in March 2020, they went to their first WWE event together. It was one of their last public outings before the Covid-19 pandemic. By June, they had moved into an apartment together in Buffalo.
“Being home and having so much more free time, we picked up where we left off as kids with watching weekly,” Lynch said. “Every Monday night was ‘Raw,’ Friday night was ‘SmackDown.’ Now, Tuesday, they have ‘NXT.’”
They also rewatched old events they were nostalgic about and got into wrestling reality TV shows, like “Total Divas,” “Total Bellas” and “Miz & Mrs.”
They love the theatrics of WWE.
Lynch, who graduated from Niagara University with a bachelor’s degree in sports management, always loved sports. Greco, an independent house cleaner, has always been a reality TV fan. “It’s kind of a meshing of the two together,” Lynch said of their interests. (He now cares for his grandparents full time. They had invited him to move into their home when he became sober.)
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
At the 50th birthday celebration of Greco’s mother in Rincon, Puerto Rico, in October 2024, Lynch, who had said he couldn’t be there because of work, surprised her on the last day of the trip with a pear-shaped diamond ring by Neil Lane, the jewelry designer for “The Bachelor,” a show she loves.
Shortly after the proposal, in January 2025, Lynch was diagnosed with a bladder cyst and underwent surgery to remove it in April. He was out of work for four months. “I had enough to pay all our bills and make ends meet, but definitely not enough to pay what most people are paying for weddings these days,” said Lynch, adding that they otherwise “definitely would have started saving for a wedding and making plans a lot sooner.”
But that turned out to be “a minor setback for a major comeback,” he said.
The “major comeback” came on April 16, when they were married in Las Vegas by Michael Mizanin, better known as The Miz and Greco’s favorite wrestler.
After spotting a post on X about getting married during WrestleMania, the annual professional wrestling event, Greco applied. About two hours after she submitted an application on a Thursday, she received a phone call explaining that they were selected to be married the following Thursday. They immediately began scrambling to book flights.
The ceremony, organized by ESPN and WWE, was held in a wrestling ring set up at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, where 16 friends and relatives cheered as The Miz led the ceremony. Kalin Ivanov, an ordained minister at the chapel, signed the marriage license.
After the ceremony, the couple had an impromptu celebration at In-N-Out Burger before hopping from casino to casino, Lynch wearing a WWE belt the entire time. Greco had proposed back to him with the belt in January 2025. “He deserved his special moment, too, because he blew me away with our engagement,” she said.
Lynch fully embraced the excitement of the moment. “I just felt like a million bucks everywhere we went,” he said. “I thought, ‘I am the WWE champion.’ I had my belt on. I had my dream girl on my arm. And we just got married.”
For her 6th birthday party in January, Amy Tzagournis’ daughter Hazel wanted special guests: the characters from “KPop Demon Hunters.” Six months prior, while Tzagournis was out of town, her daughter and 4-year-old son had become obsessed.
“I came back and all of a sudden they knew every word to the songs,” she says with disbelief. “I was like, ‘Where did this come from?’ It was literally out of nowhere.”
Parker Apel, 7, pretends to close the VIP entrance for entertainer Simon Mendoza, who is dressed in the style of a Saja Boy from “KPop Demon Hunters.”
So Tzagournis, of Redondo Beach, hired Funky Divas & Dudes, one of the many characters-for-hire companies in the Los Angeles area that had started to offer “KPop Demon Hunters”-inspired performers. At her birthday party, Hazel and her friends danced to songs from the movie, including “Golden” and “Soda Pop,” alongside the entertainers.
“We’ve pretty much been doing nothing but ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ parties,” Dana Marie Lazzareschi, one of the co-owners of Funky Divas & Dudes, says. “Every party we’re doing has been ‘KPop.’ It’s insane. We’ve had one party that was Broadway-themed and another that was tropical-themed, but other than that, it’s all been ‘KPop’ every single weekend. Sometimes we have five ‘KPop’ parties in one day.”
Released last June, “KPop Demon Hunters” is a bona fide global sensation, a status that not even Netflix, its distributor, anticipated. By August, when Tzagournis’ daughter first saw it at a friend’s house, the movie about three glamorous K-pop stars doubling as brave warriors to defeat nefarious demons had become Netflix’s most-watched movie ever. And in March, the musical picked up two Academy Awards, one for best animated feature and another for best original song for “Golden,” an empowering anthem turned chart-topping hit.
Nearly half of all of the birthday parties Tzagournis has taken her kids to in the last six months featured some “KPop Demon Hunters” element, whether just the theme or performers (for her daughter’s party, she hired all three demon hunters and a Saja Boy). The parties are so frequent that parents are even sharing decorations to reduce costs, she says.
The party included Saja Boys-themed party favor bags and “VIP” passes for guests.
“One of my daughter’s good friends had a party two weeks before hers and we basically recycled all the ‘KPop’ decorations for her,” Tzagournis says, laughing. “We used theirs and then I passed them off to another mom. These ‘KPop’ decorations for the birthday party got recycled at least two or three times.”
Operating since 2002, Funky Divas & Dudes, like most of these party businesses, offers princesses, superheroes and other pop culture-inspired characters. For a long time, Elsa, the Snow Queen from Disney’s “Frozen” franchise, ruled over little girls’ parties. “We joke that it’s a generational thing, every 10 years a girl with a braid shows up and takes over every kid’s birthday party playlist. There was Elsa back in the day, and now there’s Rumi,” Lazzareschi says, referring to the main heroine in “KPop Demon Hunters.”
The displacement of “Frozen” was also evident to Tzagournis. “The year before, when my daughter was almost 5, everyone was dressed up like Elsa. There were like five Elsas in her class at Halloween,” she recalls. “And this past year, more than 50% of the girls around her age were one of the ‘KPop’ characters.”
Aside from party entertainment, Funky Divas & Dudes also hosts extracurricular dance classes at L.A.-area schools, including the one Tzagournis’ daughter attends. Lazzareschi realized the popularity of the movie when children started requesting “Golden” and other songs from the soundtrack during dance classes. While “Frozen,” she thinks, was geared toward younger audiences, “KPop Demon Hunters” has a broader appeal. “It’s very attractive to all ages, not just the little kindergartners and first graders, but all the way up to third, fourth, fifth graders,” Lazzareschi says. “There are just so many different aspects, like the martial arts, and kids just love that stuff, boys and girls.”
Companies like Funky Dudes & Divas had to quickly meet the demand for the “KPop” characters at L.A. kids’ parties, sourcing costumes from Halloween stores or online retailers. On top of the three demon hunters (Rumi, Mira and Zoey), Lazzareschi also offers male performers resembling the Saja Boys (the rival group in the film) that teach kids breakdancing.
“The whole dance element made it even better than just hanging out with characters,” says Tzagournis.
Madelynn Wheater, 7, left, and Parker Apel, 7, center, show off their best moves in the dance circle.
The “KPop Demon Hunters” theme continued onto the plates and cake at Parker Apel’s party.
For Katherine Diaz of Torrance, the “KPop Demon Hunters” craze has been a welcome lifeboat. Diaz manages her 18-year-old daughter Kiara Asiel and several other teenage girls who perform at birthday parties. Diaz’s operation caters to Latino customers as Asiel (an aspiring dancer who plays Rumi) offers bilingual shows. In the wake of the immigration raids last summer, many of their potential patrons refrained from hosting celebrations, dampening their business. Over the last few months, though, demand for the “KPop” characters has generated new opportunities.
“It has been a boom. We have people in our area calling us saying they wanted our ‘KPop’ show because my daughter speaks Spanish,” Diaz says in Spanish.
In addition to birthday parties, Diaz’s team was recently hired to appear at several McDonald’s restaurants around Los Angeles, where hundreds of children and their parents lined up to take photos. In December, the city of Gardena invited them to perform for the community at a Christmas event.
“They specifically requested the ‘KPop’ girls. We said, ‘But it’s Christmas?!’ and they replied, ‘Yes, but kids are dying to see Huntrix [the phonetic name of the musical group in the movie].’ My girls went dressed in their ‘KPop’ outfits, but I made sure to put little Christmas hats on them.”
To avoid legal repercussions, some of these businesses might offer generic versions of popular characters. In 2017, Disney sued a New York company offering “Star Wars” and “Frozen” character knockoffs at birthday parties, but voluntarily dismissed the case a year later after a judge axed most of its trademark claims. The amount of these companies, not only in L.A. but around the world, might also present “practical difficulties” for copyright holders to take action, says Mark Lee, a partner at corporate law firm Rimon PC who has taught entertainment law at USC.
“To give you an example, I had a client who co-wrote a very famous song,” Lee says. “1.2 million people posted that song on YouTube without authorization. You can send what’s called a DMCA Takedown notice, which is like a cease-and-desist letter to YouTube, but you have to do it 1.2 million times.”
At the same time, these small businesses are helping keep the characters popular.
Eliana Fraser, dressed in a Rumi costume, paints 6-year-old Ariya Taylor’s face at a party for Parker Apel, right.
Both Lazzareschi and Diaz have more “KPop Demon Hunters”-inspired events coming up, but Tzagournis believes the peak of the fad has already passed — at least for now. “I feel like this might be very short-lived, which would differ from ‘Frozen’ and the Disney movies,” Tzagournis says. “The kids are kind of over the ‘KPop’ thing now, but the sequels are probably going to reel them back in.”
A new “KPop Demon Hunters” movie is already in the works.
Sometimes, when the mood strikes or the outfit is right, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez’s mother will offer to loan her a very special diamond-encrusted peace sign necklace.
Rodriguez, who stars in the new Broadway revival of “The Rocky Horror Show,” wore the necklace when she found out she was nominated for an Emmy in 2021 for her role in “Pose.” (Rodriguez was the first openly trans woman to be nominated for a lead acting category; in 2022, she became the first trans actress to win a Golden Globe.)
In an interview that has been edited and condensed, Rodriguez dives deeper into the hand-me-down-and-around peace sign and talks about her loved ones who have imbued it with their magic.
Tell me about your necklace.
It’s this peace sign that my mother lends to me. She always wants her pieces back, but she lets me wear them a good amount.
I’m not married yet, but you know that tradition of something old, something new? That’s what I feel when I get it. It just feels like she’s handing over, crazy enough, a legacy and a lineage. The people that gave it to her were people that were really monumental in her life. My Aunt Nita, she was this rambunctious, spirited energy. God bless her, she passed away from cancer, but she still kept her juice. And my uncle, I had such a close relationship with him. He was a Capricorn, which makes it all the better because we’re Capricorns together.
What kind of events might prompt your mom to loan you the necklace?
When I’m going out for a show, or when I’m going for a big event, or when we’re traveling. She usually gives it to me for monumental moments in my life.
Is the necklace always with you, even if you’re not wearing it?
I don’t leave it alone. Usually it’s with me, and I’m always just checking it. Touch, for me, is a big thing. It’s a very spiritual and magical thing for me. Feeling it makes me know that there is some strength there. But if it’s gone, I feel like there’s kind of a separation. The only way I feel better is if it’s in my mom’s hands or if it’s in her possession again, honestly, because I know that it’s in a safe space and that energy is being harnessed in the right way.
Are there other people it’s connected to in your life?
I think my grandmother, more than anything, because my grandmother passed away in Covid, and my mom always wore it in that time. My Aunt Kim because she had it in the time when we were doing “Pose,” and my Aunt Kim passed away. My Aunt Debbie, too, who passed away from cancer.
Those are the people who are imbued in it, latched onto it, or a piece of their spirit.
Do you think about passing the peace sign necklace down someday?
Well, one, I feel like it would have to be a coming-of-age gift. I’d have to watch them grow and say, “You’ve gotten your stripes of growth, you’ve done a great job, and this is a really important piece to a lot of us.” If I had a daughter or a son, I’d probably give it to one of them, and more likely my daughter because, you know: mama, daughter, little baby girl. Or one of my nieces, and I have one in my mind already. I would probably give it to her, and I would just let her know that this is a piece of jewelry that has been handed down by very powerful women, and women who have instilled a lot of strength in me.
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