Mad Science Supply and Surplus: new pop-up shop

Mad Science Supply and Surplus: new pop-up shop

The merchandise says it all. At the new Mad Science Supply & Surplus pop-up shop at Assemble in Garfield, you can buy make-your-own-monster kits, stuffed kittens with detachable heads (mix and match ’em!), Emergency Eureka, “I [brain] PGH” buttons, magnets, and t-shirts, Terror-ariums, Perpspectacles, Skulls N’ At, Thought Bubbles, Robot Intestines and Nut Cases.

But the new shop is also part of a slightly more serious endeavor, The Literary Arts Boom (or The LAB), a pilot project created by Paula Levin for kids 6-18, which aims to show that writing is both a creative and a practical pursuit. All of its projects — including the store — combine fun and literacy training.

In November, for instance, 5th and 6th graders at the LAB will be participating in National Novel Writing Month, adapted as an after-school activity. “Next week we will be setting our word-count goals … and we’ll have a celebration on Nov. 30,” says Levin — after which the kids’ efforts will be published later as chapbooks. The LAB also recently started Tuesday drop-in homework help from 3 to 6 p.m.  — snacks included — that offers homework mentors and games. Its Thursday workshops are just concluding a series on comics. One week, the kids played Frieze, for which some of them struck a pose to be drawn, while others had to figure out a narrative that went with it. For Portrait, they drew people and their alter egos, signified by a change in facial expressions or props, then imagined in writing a meeting between the two.

The Mad Science store, Levin says, “is a really cool opportunity to enhance the space, draw people in and down the line have artists involved — have them doing portraits and storefront [art] to display the quirky, mad scientist aspect of it.”

MAYA Design created many pieces for the shop, and the grand opening was itself a typical LAB lesson, including letting kids “Einsteinify” themselves by making mustaches, eyebrows and safety goggles out of felt and paper. Levin hopes the store will be open once a week, maybe during Assembly’s Saturday Crafternoons. It will definitely be accessible for the December and January Unblurreds, she says.

“Even when we’re not open, folks can see it” when they’re in Assemble, she notes — and that’s a good thing. It’s all about “connecting people to the program who might not find out about the program.”

Writer: Marty Levine