(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, I'm Matt Guilhem, and this is "You Oughta Know".

The YMCA is making sure safety in the water is top priority at every age.

- We teach approximately 35,000 kids a year to swim here.

- We head to Rittenhouse Square to check out Sandbox Virtual Reality.

(monster roaring) Plus celebrating a local art collector's legacy to preserve black art.

Welcome to "You Oughta Know".

I'm Matt Guilhem filling in for Shirley Min, who's on vacation.

Now I'm usually on the radio, meaning I can get away with looking a little rough around the edges, but since this is TV, the team at "You Oughta Know" said I needed to clean up a little.

(casual upbeat music) - Hi.

- Hey.

- Welcome to Blokes Barbershop.

- Wow, this is a lot more than a barbershop.

We're in Old City, and you know, this block, it's changed over the years.

You've been here for 10 years.

Talk about what it was like when you got here, and the fact that you offer an oasis for gents, essentially, is what I've come to learn about this place.

- When we first opened, it was all ladies boutiques, ladies hairdressing, salons, and there were absolutely no men's places at all, nothing.

And so when we opened up with all the cuff links, and all the accessories that Jill had brought in, it was great for guys to just walk in.

It was like, oh, brilliant.

I can get my hair cut, I can buy cuff links, I can buy a handkerchief, I can buy ties, I can buy bowties, flap caps, and they were buying socks.

- You've got a lot of training in terms of like formal, proper training in London to become a barber, and in the hairdressing arts.

- [Duke] When I was very young, I went to work at a place called Vidal Sassoon, who was very famous in the 60s, 70s, 80s.

- [Matt] While you talk about the musical instruments all in the shop, there's several guitars, there's a great mid-century jukebox.

What's the story with that?

- The jukebox is a 1962 Seeburg.

It was the last year that they had these see-through fronts, so that you can see the singles playing inside, and it was the first year that they'd ever done a stereo.

- You offer a lot of services here.

You do haircuts and shaves and all that.

I'm gonna be getting a shave today.

- Yeah.

- But are there any differences in terms of like, there are multiple ways to do it.

There's English, there's Turkish, there's American.

Are they that radically different?

- Both the British and the Turkish way of shaving, you go with the grain of the hair.

The American Licensing Board do this thing where you've got to shave in a certain manner, you shave down, and then you'll shave across.

It's like 14 moves of the shave.

Like with your own hair, it grows down through the sides.

This part goes back, and then there's a crown here, which you would have to chip around.

So you're going round with the grain of the hair, the way the hair's growing, you will go with it, and that way, you're not going against it, so you don't pluck it.

You don't pull the hair out.

If you pluck them, you'll get spotting, little tiny dots of blood.

People think that they've cut themselves if not.

- All right, well, I'm ready.

Let's lather me up.

Let's go.

- Okay.

(casual upbeat music) This is a shave oil.

That feel okay?

- Uh, yeah.

(machine whirring) (razor buzzing) Well, I look, smell, and feel like a million bucks.

This is great.

I mean, I'm usually like, keep some stubble, but yeah, this is fantastically smooth.

- Okay.

- Oh.

Well, this is how we end a good shave.

(glasses clink) Cheers.

- Cheers.

- What a relaxing experience, and who doesn't love little day drinking?

Now I am sure that is not gonna be my last trip to Blokes for a little style touch-up.

Now, our next few stories are about preserving history.

We're staying in Old City as we take a look at the Revolutionary City Exhibit at the American Philosophical Society.

(exciting music) (birds chirping) - Our mission at the American Philosophical Society is promoting useful knowledge, and one of the ways we do that is we connect with teachers, K-12 students, but also with the general public providing opportunities to learn about the history of our country.

- We're right near Independence Hall, so we're lucky to be able to welcome visitors from all over, certainly the country, but really the world, who are here to learn more about American history.

The APS was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin under the auspices of promoting useful knowledge, and we sort of continue that mission forward today in a number of different ways.

So one is through our research library, which is extremely active.

We also host a lot of fellowships and award grants.

We also have a museum, and that museum is actually located in our most historic building, which was built in 1789, and it is directly adjacent to Independence Hall.

So that's where we do yearly thematic exhibitions that usually draw from collection strengths.

So our current exhibition is Philadelphia: the Revolutionary City, and it's meant to explore daily lives, lived experiences of people living through this extraordinary period of change, revolutionary change, in fact.

And I think what people will find as they move through the exhibition is that while there was awareness of all of this change occurring in and around and with them, they were also just living their lives.

So there's a lot to relate to.

(rousing music) We have an open collection, which means that it's possible to borrow objects from the APS.

We lend regularly, and we also borrow from other local and regional institutions.

So in the current exhibition, it's really fun to see an object say from Wyck House and Garden up in Germantown that actually has a relationship to a document that lives here in our collection, because we are the repository of the family archives, and it's really exciting to unite these objects and stories.

So something that's new, I think, for a lot of people is that Thomas Jefferson, of course the president of the United States, was also not just a member, but president of the American Philosophical Society.

And in fact, those two periods overlapped.

Jefferson is, of course, instrumental and key author in the Declaration of Independence, so it's really exciting for us as we gear up for the 250th anniversary of that incredible document, to be thinking about the ways we might convene conversations and new research.

- To kick off our exhibition, we had our APS Family Fun Day.

We had a day full of fun activities here in the Jefferson Garden.

We're hosting Revolutionary Saturdays that will help people engage directly with the materials and the collections.

Also, in connection with this exhibition, we will be hosting tours of some of the houses of our historic partners.

We'll also be concluding our activities with a day long Transcribe-a-thon, So inviting community members to come and help us transcribe some of the 18th century documents that are all handwritten, and make these documents more accessible to the public.

- As a part of exhibition related events, we recently had a conversation where I spoke with local author and American historian, Aaron Sullivan, about the impact of the British occupation of Philadelphia, an incredibly fraught and also impactful period of the war, specifically for Philadelphia and this region.

We are free and open to the public.

Our exhibitions open in April of every year and run through the end of the year.

We wanna encourage more students to connect with us, and to use our resources for student projects, and for teachers, for classroom activities and materials.

If you've got a school trip coming to visit Independence Hall, to the Constitution Center, stop by and see us as well.

We can do a tour of our exhibition, some hands-on activities, and have a good time - Now to Yesterday's Dreams Are Real, the latest exhibit at the Michener Museum, (soft piano music) - [Syd] I was aware of his presence in the community of black artists in Philadelphia.

- [Barbara] Lewis was someone who would come and visit and talk about the work.

- [Berrisford] What Lewis taught me was that collecting is more than accruing objects.

The most important part about collecting is advocacy.

So Lewis taught by example, that collecting art preserves the narrative of our people, which, in fact, is American art, because these narratives are by people who were born and raised in America, but that we as a culture had specific ways of speaking about our experiences.

- I met Lewis Moore soon after I started here at the Michener Art Museum.

We had just opened an exhibition of work by Syd Carpenter, who's also featured in this exhibition, and he came to the opening day and invited me to come and visit him at his home, and to see his collection.

Because of that, I was able to learn more about the art in our region, and how diverse the art in our region is, and make sure that the Michener was reflecting that in its collecting and exhibition practices.

We're really thrilled and honored to have several pieces by Barbara Bullock here in Yesterday's Dreams Are Real.

Barbara was beloved by Lewis, and her work was beloved by Lewis.

Every time I would visit, her work really drew my eye, and as you can see, it's vibrant, it's full of life, it's full of color, and we're really just honored to have this work on display here.

- The work is called Water Spirit, and it was created after I had a journey to Africa.

I really had made a decision that I wanted to talk about my experiences in a different way.

- Oh my gosh, and these over here, these etchings, which aren't as powerful right away, but they're so important, again, because of the narrative of the show, and the narrative of our country, which is African-American artists going abroad, so they could be thought of as American artists, not just Negro artists.

Lewis being the descendant of arguably in some circles the greatest 20th century African-American painter, certainly the most influential, Henry Ossawa Tanner, his great great uncle.

And Tanner did an entire body of work, which was prompted by a racial bias as the first African-American to go to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

- He was a young man at school, noticed that there was no acknowledgement of black artists in the texts and in the materials that he was studying, and took it upon himself to curate a show of black artists.

He was looking for himself, and he wasn't there.

I was silenced when I walked into the space, and I had to move very, very slowly just to feel the space before I even engaged in individual objects.

When I walked into this exhibition, I was moved.

I've been following your work.

That's an important sentence for someone to say to an artist.

I've been following your work.

Now that means even as you're going through whatever you're going through and making what you're making, someone was noticing it.

- You see it framed and hanging, and a part of many other artists that I greatly admire.

I've been doing it for so many years, you know, really my life - Being a part of Lewis' collection in and of itself is an honor, but it also says that I need to pay it forward.

With Lewis, it was always, this is what I'm doing.

What are you going to do?

- Everything you see from me and from everyone else in this exhibition is because that individual was having a conversation with themselves about something they felt was intensely important.

And the result of that conversation is the art.

(soft music) (bright music) - Summer is pool season, and it's time to get serious about your kids' water safety and ability to swim.

The YMCA is ready to get the little ones ready to stay safe this summer.

- [Aimee] The YMCA has been teaching swim lessons since the early 1900s.

(bright music) (water splashing) Here at the Greater Philadelphia Y, we follow the YMCA, the USA Swim Lesson curriculum.

We teach approximately 35,000 kids a year to swim here, just within our association.

- Whoa!

- We offer swim lessons for kids starting at six months of age, all the way up through adults.

We also offer swim teams, stroke and turn clinics, parent child swim lessons, to get kids comfortable in and around the water from a young age.

It's really important that kids learn to swim at a young age.

As you get older, you tend to get more fearful of the water, whether it's learned behavior from a parent who maybe has that fear, or it could be something that happened to you as a young child.

So we really encourage families to bring their kids in when they're younger, and get them used to being in the water, teach them the basic swim skills that they need to be safe in and around pools and other bodies of water.

We teach the kids to jump in, push off the bottom, and then reach back to the wall, so that if they were to fall in, and they can't necessarily swim, they know that they can touch the bottom, push themselves up, get their head above water, take a breath, and then grab back for the wall.

You also teach them how to roll from front to back or back to front.

And the reason for that would be when they're on their back, they're able to take in more air than obviously if they were on their belly.

And so if they fell in, and were struggling on their stomach, they learned the skills to be able to roll over onto their backs, their faces out of the water, and they can take a breath.

We teach them how to bob.

Again, so it's for breath control.

So holding your breath, going under water, blowing bubbles, coming up, taking a breath, going under the water, blowing bubbles.

We teach them how to start with paddle.

That's the the beginner of like a front crawl.

In our earliest swim lessons, we also teach back float because again, that's really important.

And then as they progress through our stages, we start to bring in some of the other strokes.

And that would be for our little guys, for our preschool and for our youth lessons.

It is important to practice pool safety even at home.

Most families have small pools for their little kids in their backyard.

Accidents can occur in very little water.

So whether they're in the tub, whether they're in a backyard pool, whether they're in one of those little splash thingies, if there's water, there's a chance that a kid can fall face first into the water and not be able to breathe.

Oh, you know, if you practice with your young kids, dumping water over their heads, have them blow bubbles in the tub, have them lay on their backs and get comfortable with having their ears in the water.

That's usually one thing that kids do not like, water in the eyes and water in the ears.

So if you can start that young, start that at home, once they come here and once they get in our pools, that's one barrier that we've already overcome.

So the YMCA is very community-friendly, community-focused.

Our programs are open to the community as well as members of our facility.

- Swimming is a great summer activity, and so is dancing.

WHYY's, Peter Crimmins tells us about a program that's helping teens in Chester stay productive during the hot months.

(bright upbeat music) - That's the Maci Lago Universe.

They're in media performing for Delco Gives days.

The troupe was started over 10 years ago by Danny Garland and Nashay Cottman because they know this literally saves lives.

- I was a troubled kid growing up, and then I had a outlet similar to what we do.

It just really helped me do a 360 over the years.

And I'm actually excited to be able to give that back to our youth in the city of Chester.

- Danisha Ingram, Maci Lago Universe, is gonna show me a move.

- Start with your hands together.

- Oh yeah, like that.

- Open, go out, go in.

Go out, go back.

Yes!

Good job, good job!

- Okay!

- Maci Lago has helped me personally, mentally, physically, in every way possible.

It's just very loving.

We do so many different things.

So you're learning what you can do.

More things, new things.

♪ You, you, you know the story ♪ ♪ You know the story ♪ ♪ You tell the whole wide world ♪ ♪ This Maci Lago territory ♪ ♪ Let me hear it ♪ ♪ You, you, you know the story ♪ ♪ You know the story ♪ ♪ You tell the whole wide world ♪ ♪ This Maci Lago territory ♪ - The really profound impact that Maci Lago has was really driven home for Danny and Nashay when they lost their rehearsal space for a few months, they had to pause the program and that's when things went off the rails.

- So once your routine is broken, or your habits is broken, you start doing other things that you're not familiar with.

A lot of times, that brings trouble.

We were homeless, we didn't have nowhere to rehearse or anything like that.

So we took a little break.

I think it was a period of about three months.

I had two kids get expelled, one kid got shot, another kid end up pregnant.

It just let us know how important our program was to our city.

- Now we're off to Rittenhouse Square to step into the future with an immersive experience at Sandbox VR.

(soft tense music) - Hi, how you doing today?

- Good.

- Welcome to Sandbox VR.

Do you have a booking with us already?

- We do.

- Awesome.

Alright.

Sandbox VR started in 2017, and we are the newest location.

With a virtual reality experience, you are in an empty room with no set dressing at all, where all the immersion takes place electronically.

(players yelping) - Behind you!

(gunshots firing) - [Kenny] As guests arrive, we get them outfitted in all of their gear.

What that looks like is first you get these limb trackers that are applied to your wrists and on your ankles.

So that captures the full range of motion of your body throughout the experience.

You also get outfitted with a haptic feedback vest.

What this does is it vibrates in response to different things that happen in your experience.

Like for example, if you're hunting zombies and one happens to swipe at you, you'll feel that vibration on you for a really truly immersive experience.

You also receive a headset and a microphone.

So that helps you hear the soundtrack and all the sound effects of the experience, while also being able to communicate with your teammates un this virtual world.

The way that our tracking technology works is your body really is the controller.

So the way that you move in the experience is how your body is actually moving in real life.

You don't have to be a gamer to really get the most out of it.

We have nine different experiences to choose from.

- [Announcer] Welcome!

(monster roaring) (players yelping) (dramatic music) - Where are they?

(character roaring) (all shouting) - It's a little bit of something for everyone.

Play is really important for all ages, not just kids.

I think that science of play is really important for all ages to, you know, unpack your inquisitive, curious mind, and just let loose a little bit.

I think that's not just for kids.

I think all ages really kind of need that unwinding and playtime.

As it sparks your curiosity, it also just kind of helps you bond with your friends and family by just trying something new and engaging.

- In this week's Flicks, Patrick Stoner talks to the stars of "Deep Cover" about how no improvising was needed in this action comedy about improvisational actors.

(doorbell rings) - [Speaker 1] How's it going with the comedy?

Someone said that you're teaching?

- [Kat] Improv is all about being in the moment.

(car horn blaring) - I want proper work.

I'm an actor, I can be anything.

- [Speaker 2] You're from the Cotswolds.

You're not Al Pacino.

(phone beeps) (audience applauding) - Thank you so much.

- [Patrick] "Deep Cover" is an action comedy starring Orlando Bloom and Bryce Dallas Howard, the daughter of Ron Howard, and Nick Mohammed, most famous for "Ted Lasso".

I talked with Nick and Bryce, but first, I had to mention to her that her famous father introduced us.

- Hello, how are you?

It's so wonderful to see you.

- Hello.

- The reason I think Bryce did that nice thing, Nick, is that her father once pulled me aside at the Four Seasons Hotel and said, "I want you to meet my daughter.

You're gonna see a lot of her lately, but I just thought the two of you ought to meet."

And I was very flattered that he bothered to do that.

- Aw.

- I was very flattered that- - That's nice.

- Getting to meet you and, no, wonderful.

And we've had so many wonderful interviews over the years.

- Oh, that's nice.

- Well, this is a very funny film, and it involves people who are supposed to be improvising along the way.

So let me get the obvious question out of the way first.

Did you also get to improvise in the film about improvising?

- Yes, and we didn't really need to very much.

There was- - All right, good script.

- Yeah, great script.

We really, you know, it was sort of like, God, how can we best this?

And yet it was a really playful environment.

The writers were present.

- [Patrick] Nick, for example, your character's not supposed to be all that good at improvisation.

- No, I mean, he very much stumbles into these classes run by Kat, Bryce's character, and yeah, he's just at a crossroads in his life.

He has an office job, works in IT support, or whatever.

So yeah, you know, he very quickly becomes out of his depth.

- Do the Brits work differently when you're working under their Aegis?

- The rules shooting over in the UK are different than shooting in the US.

- I was wondering, yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so there is a different pace, there's a different energy.

You don't stop for lunch.

You have a tea break.

Like I said, very civilized.

(Patrick chuckles) - Also necessary.

That actually is a very intelligent thing to do when your blood sugar goes down.

- (laughing) Yes, yes.

- I don't know why we haven't figured that out in America yet.

Nick, that's why you look so healthy.

(Nick laughing) - Oh yeah.

- You can see, she's just, she's tired, malnourished.

- Yeah, just losing it, yeah.

(both laugh) - Yeah.

Thank you both very much.

I appreciate you giving us your time.

- Thank you.

I love your backdrop by the way.

- Yes.

- Thank you very much.

PBS, you know, books.

- Very civilized.

(Bryce laughing) - And that's our show.

Shirley will be back next week.

You can find me on the radio.

Have a good night.

(bright upbeat music)