Throwbacks to the FutureThe Monkees, the rock...

Throwbacks to the Future

The Monkees, the rock band that sprang full-blown from the brow of a 1960s TV sitcom, have returned. Three of the group’s four original performers are back, like 20-year locusts, buzzing America on a three-month tour, including a gig at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego this month. Davy Jones (the poor-girl’s Paul McCartney), Mickey Dolenz (once water boy to Bimbo the Elephant on TV’s “Circus Boy”) and Peter Tork (the zany blond) are playing for a second and equally spontaneous generation of aficionettes, who have been lured by new reruns of the Monkees’ show. As the modern equation goes, anyone on TV must be doing something right. The fourth singing simian, Michael Nesmith, was too busy to join them. “I never heard of them before,” shrilled an 18-year-old in New Jersey, “but they’re great.” Oh Darwin, Darwin, you were wrong.

Emboldened Golden Years

Fifty years ago, San Franciscans Walter and Alcinda Weber read about a nudist colony opening in the Santa Cruz Mountains, so they hopped into their car and joined the in-the-buff set. This summer, the couple celebrated a golden anniversary of birthday suiting--half a century as original members of the Lupin Naturist Club. For years, their garbed acquaintances puzzled over “how we came back with such great tans,” says the sturdy Walter. “I’ve never been able to see any excuse for clothing. You were born with the best swimwear you’ll ever have.” Everybody into the pool.

Double-Dip Indemnity

So irreplaceable is John Harrison at his fantasy job--the official taster for Dreyer’s ice cream--that the Oakland company has insured his taste buds for a cool quarter-million dollars. Scion of an ice cream family, Harrison, a 44-year-old man with a third-grader’s dream career, traveled the world’s ice cream ingredient markets as a buyer before landing at Dreyer’s. There, after a breakfast of tepid coffee, he goes right to work, tasting all day, cleansing his palate with crackers. Like a wine taster, “you start with the whites--vanilla and French vanilla--in the morning, and work your way down to the heavy ones: Bordeaux, chocolate fudge, blueberry cheesecake,” looking for “those fine notes, the top notes” in the vanilla range, and baritone richness in the denser flavors. Harrison coddles his precious buds, eschewing jalapeno and garlic, and jogs off each day’s weighty burden. The judge of all Dreyer’s ingredients, he has also invented two-score exotic flavors, such as Amaretto fudge. Yet personally, he’s an unspoiled purist: “My favorite flavor is vanilla.”

No Pie in This Sky

Faster than stir-fry . . . able to leap over Hostess Twinkies without a second glance . . . it’s “Supperman.” The kids’ play, written by Mimi Seton, stars the Science Museum Players in four shows a week at the Aerospace Museum Building in Exposition Park. Clark Shirley is a mild-mannered medical nutritionist who meets pudgy Lois at the Cardiac Cafe as she fries up a passel of lardburgers. Clark strips to his “Supperman” togs in time to save Lois from being smothered in a tub of fat. Seton, who grew up on an organic farm in the Adirondacks, said this mini-play fits with her notion of “using theater to educate kids.”