In A Toast Story, the author talks about many different cafes in the San Fransico area that serve fancy toast. He visited one cafe called Trouble. After his visit, he decided to meet the owner, Giulietta Carrelli. She talked about how growing up she was raised in an immigrant family. Her father was a tailor from Italy and her mother was an ex-nun. This identifies her as Italian and someone who grew up in an immigrant family. After Carrelli talked to the author about the cafe and why it is the way it is she then made her way into talking about her life and how the cafe came to be. Carrelli talked about however since high school she has had schizoaffective disorder. This has caused her many ups and downs throughout her life. This plays a part in identity. She identifies as having this disorder because it affects who she is. She then began to talk about how she was homeless and jobless. These two things identify her too. She would get identified into two categorized, which are homeless and unemployed. As the article goes on talking about Trouble and Carrelli’s life, they pointed out many different things that identify her. As I was reading some quotes stuck out to me and explained why she set up her cafe as she did. Trouble is set up so that there is no seating and many of the customers gather outside of the storefront to enjoy their coffee and toast. She explained that she set this up as a “sociological experiment in engineering spontaneous communication between strangers”(paragraph 24). She wants her customers to communicate with each other even if they do not know each other. At her cafe, she sells coconuts to her customers. When I read this I was very interested to learn why this is. Later on, as I was reading she explained ” I did a study in New York and San Franciso, standing on the same street corner holding a sandwich, saying hello to people. no one would talk to me. But id I was standing on the same street corner and I was holding a coconut? People would engage”(Paragraph 24). This shows that when people are next to strangers they may not engage with them unless they are doing or have something that is unique.
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