Editor’s note: Our weekly Community Profiles feature strives to focus attention on some of the most interesting individuals in our midst and has profiled some of the area’s best and brightest this year. Some entertain the masses, others save the community. There are even those who just make the world a more beautiful, thought provoking place to live. Here are our choices for best profiles of the year that was 2007.

A WHALE OF A GUY

Conducting interviews and photo sessions with the ever so elusive Peter Wallerstein is no easy task.

An hour before a 9 a.m. scheduled interview with the Daily Press, this longtime animal lover had to cancel as he was called to an impromptu press conference at the Bird Center in San Pedro.

Wallerstein’s presence was requested to present footage of a rescue he conducted the day before on Santa Monica Beach of a pregnant sea lion suffering from domoic acid.

Caused by an algae bloom, domoic acid accumulates in fish at a high level and is eventually passed on to its predators, including sea lions. As a result of consuming the infected fish, sea lions often experience seizures as legions appear on their brain.

The victim lying on Santa Monica Beach on Tuesday was suffering similar neurological effects from the domoic acid.

Following the press conference, Wallerstein zooms back to his headquarters in an RV park on Dockweiler Beach, in time for a noon interview, but his ear close to a cell phone, which could ring at any time with another sea animal rescue call.

Averaging six to eight calls a day, such is the life for the founder of the Whale Rescue Team, which has saved thousands of marine mammals up and down the Santa Monica Bay over the past 22 years.

Born and raised in Norwalk, Conn., Wallerstein left his home immediately after high school, spending years soul searching as he traveled the world, living in a small log cabin in an isolated area of the mountains of New Hampshire, creating his own habitat in the islands of the West Indies and the Caribbean before packing his bags and heading out to California.

“I wanted to lead a meaningful life,” said Wallerstein, 55, of Playa del Rey. “I didn’t want to just settle for a job I would be bored with after 20 to 30 years and feel like I missed out on something in my life.”

If it’s one thing Wallerstein was certain, it was his love for nature, animals and respect for all life. He became an ethical vegetarian 30 years ago, which led to becoming a vegan 25 years ago.

One of his first friends in California would steer Wallerstein toward an area that would come to consume his life for the next two decades — marine life protection. It was the late 1970s and Wallerstein had just met Paul Watson, the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an organization advocating for marine life protection and conservation and demanding the shut down of illegal whaling.

Wallerstein was offered the position of the pacific director of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and spent the next few years at sea, confronting illegal whaling ships they would come across.

After a campaign in the Bering Sea, Wallerstein was at home watching a news program about whales drowning in fishing nets. Watching the newscast, Wallerstein automatically assumed the whales were dying in the Bering Sea.

“I was shocked that it was in our own neighborhood in Point Dume and Palos Verdes,” Wallerstein said. “There wasn’t a coordinated effort to go out and save them.”

From the newscast, the Whale Rescue Team was born.

— Melody Hanatani

MASTER OF PUPPETS

During his more than 14 years as a puppeteer, Steve Meltzer has worked on several commercials, appeared with his dummy Fred Mingo on Nickelodeon and “The Daily Show,” and worked on the cult classic “Team America: World Police” — the first feature film to use marionettes instead of real actors.

Meltzer and Mingo just recently made a cameo appearance in the upcoming film “The Great Buck Howard,” starring Tom Hanks and John Malkovich.

While appearing on television and on the big screen has been fun for Meltzer, who has a masters degree in fine arts from USC, his biggest thrill derives from operating the Santa Monica Puppetry Center over the last decade.

During that time, Meltzer has performed for countless children and their parents, opening their eyes to a world that is often overlooked and underappreciated in an age of computer graphics, hand-held video games and an ever-shortening attention span.

“I think we’re ready for grassroots, down-home theater,” said Meltzer, sitting with his dog Zeke, his dummy and the stage where he performs “Puppetolio!” and other marionette musicals. “My mission is expanding puppetry, but it is also just as much about showing people that we can gather in a room and sing songs without there being any religious or political agenda. It’s all just about having fun for all ages, taking people to this magical world that only exists in their imaginations.”

On the walls of his modest museum and theater, Meltzer has hung scores of marionettes, puppets and dummies from the earliest days of the art in what can only be described as an elaborate shrine that pays homage to the likeminded performers that preceded him.

Each artifact comes with a unique story of its origin and how Meltzer acquired it, starting with the first puppet he purchased for $5 at a Long Beach swap meet. It was a “spur-of-the-moment” decision — an impulse buy — but for some reason, when Meltzer saw the puppet, he knew he had to have it.

Meltzer, 53, was first introduced to the magic of puppetry as a boy growing up in New York City. Television was relatively young then, and stations were dominated by variety shows. Meltzer’s favorite was the “Paul Winchell-Jerry Mahoney Show” on NBC. A 30-minute variety show for adults and kids, it captured Meltzer’s attention and his imagination. He fell in love with the ventriloquist and his wooden dummy.

“The biggest thrill was to stay up late and watch his 7:30 (p.m.) broadcast,” Meltzer said. “He was unlike any other ventriloquist. He was innovative. His dummy didn’t just sit on his knee. It was just fantastic. I just remember thinking, ‘I know that guy’s not alive, but in a way, he was. It was my first dichotomy.”

Little did he know at the time, but Meltzer would eventually meet Winchell and become friends with the voice of Tigger on the “Winnie the Pooh” series. The two became so close that Winchell gave his last performance at the Puppetry Center before he died in 2005.

“It was such an honor to have him here,” Meltzer said of his idol. “It was something very special … one of the highlights.”

— Kevin Herrera



SCIENCE MEETS ART

Lita Albuquerque stepped off the C-17 Globemaster military transport plane and into blinding whiteness. Welcome to Antarctica.

“She was just ecstatic,” said Sophie Pegrum, a documentary filmmaker who accompanied the Santa Monica earth artist on her Antarctica art installation in December. “She was beaming with a smile across her face.”

Albuquerque inhaled a breath of frozen and unpolluted air under a clear blue sky. Her eyes gazed hundreds of miles into the distance across a brilliant expanse of snow that reflected the unblocked sun.

“Where we were was completely magical,” Albuquerque said. “It’s a very profound experience to be in that purity of landscape, in the middle of sea ice surrounded by mountain ranges.”

Albuquerque, a local artist whose Tunisian childhood inspired her to create art linking the earth and sky, flew to Antarctica for a month with a team of scientists and artists to install her “Stellar Axis” project.

The team arranged fiberglass spheres into a pattern that reflected the arrangement of stars in the winter solstice sky. The royal blue orbs ranged in size from 10 inches to four feet, their relative diameter corresponding to the brightness of the star they represented.

Albuquerque frequently collaborates with astronomers and scientists to give her art a fundamental and accurate architecture underneath, Pegrum said.

“What really impresses me about Lita is that she’s an artist but she’s really concerned about the scientific validity of her work,” said Dr. Simon Balm, an astronomy professor at Santa Monica College.

Balm accompanied the team to Antarctica as a scientific advisor to calculate the exact map coordinates for the spheres.

“It was absolutely amazing to see those abstract numbers turn into a thing of beauty, an artistic thing,” Balm said. “I don’t think I’d seen science in that light before. She made science accessible.”

The National Science Foundation funded the trip to Antarctica.

Albuquerque is heading to the Arctic Circle at the opposite end of the earth in July to assess locations and conditions for a second installation.

The idea is to install star patterns on both poles then imagine a shaft of light streaming through the earth’s axis.

As the planet moves, stars appear to spiral clockwise on the South Pole and counterclockwise on the North Pole. With this spinning, the shaft of light would take the form of a double helix — the shape of a DNA strand — which Albuquerque explained as yet another connection between humans and their universe.

Pegrum called Albuquerque inspirational to the extreme, but Albuquerque doesn’t always acknowledge how compelling her artwork is to others.

—Kristin Maye