Cake and Crafts at the Dump

Six-year-old Michael Wong-Sasso gives new meaning to the phrase “talkin’ trash.”

All he wanted to do Saturday while celebrating his upcoming seventh birthday was talk about garbage trucks, rubbish bins and recycling.

And unlike most kids who clamor to go to Chuck E. Cheese’s or Magic Mountain, Michael wanted to have his birthday party at a real dump. So parents Sophia Wong and Vito Sasso arranged for an afternoon of cake and crafts at Sunshine Canyon Landfill near their Granada Hills home.

“I want to be a garbage collector when I grow up,” Michael cheerfully tells everyone he meets. “I like the big trucks. I like putting trash where it belongs. I like making the world cleaner.”

Wong smiled indulgently Saturday as her son rolled toy dump trucks through a big pile of “clean” dirt that landfill operator Browning-Ferris Industries had set aside for the party-goers to romp in. About 40 friends and their parents attended.

“We don’t know where this interest in trash came from,” said Wong, who with her husband owns the Two Guys From Italy restaurants in the San Fernando Valley. “He’s been this way since he was 2.”

For safety and sanitary reasons, the party was held in a small valley on the landfill’s outskirts, away from bulldozers and out of range of odors. The party-goers were surrounded by scores of potted trees, which BFI uses to landscape Sunshine Canyon as portions become filled in.

The children had a session of fashioning flour-dough animals with the help of recycled materials such as cardboard and colored paper, and then scrambled about wildly on the dirt pile among toy backhoes and earthmovers.

Michael, whose birthday is Friday, described the different types of trash trucks -- side-loaders and front-loaders -- and talked enthusiastically on how recycling “is good for all the people in the world.”

His favorite pastimes include trailing trucks on their collection routes (in the company of his parents or sitter) and peering into trash cans. He said he wants to go to college so he can learn to drive a trash truck.

“Some people have said, ‘Why don’t you steer him in a different direction?’ ” his mother said. “My answer is this is his passion. Whatever his interest is, I support it.”

Piedad Velasquez of Northridge, who brought her 6-year-old daughter, Rebecca, agreed with that notion. “I think it’s great that they support Michael’s desire to be a trash hauler. We really need kids that think that way. Not everyone can grow up to be a nuclear scientist.”

Having a party at a dump is “definitely different,” said Northridge resident Scott Krause as he watched his son Trevor, 6, leaping off the dirt mound.

“It’s not like you’re saying, ‘Oh no, not another birthday at the landfill.’ I mean, how many times can you go to Chuck E. Cheese’s?”