Elvira’s Got the Look That’s In on Halloween

Once again the fantasies and fetishes of thousands of San Diegans are being acted out in costume shop dressing rooms across the city, offering a strange read-out on the collective state of mind of America’s Finest City.

These dispatches from the Halloween costume front:

Carmen Miranda is in, Playboy bunnies are out, and people are scouring the city for Gumby attire. Belly dancers are hot, and Cleopatras, too. But topping them all in popularity is curvaceous cult heroine Elvira, currently of Coors beer commercial fame.

A man telephoned from New Jersey looking for the makings of a Max Headroom, the TV humanoid from the heart of the video age. Others want straitjackets, Tidy Bowl costumes, a bald wig for a bald-headed bride. One store got a request for a fried egg.

“We don’t have any egg costumes,” the woman from Fun ‘n Folly Costume and Novelty answered dryly. “They’re hard to put together.”

Meanwhile, a Del Mar dental assistant is peddling Halloween teeth, made by taking a dentist’s mold of the client’s jaw and elaborating on it in acrylic. The new line includes tusks, vampire fangs, buck- and snaggle-teeth, and a full set of sharp, pointy chops.

Six months of dental assisting trade school in Sacramento and eight years in the field equipped Kathy Dunn for the job. But, of the new fang trade, Dunn says: “It’s just a sideline.”

Knows Her Vegetables

Karen Finley, the performance artist whose full-frontal assault on taboos like sex and violence have stirred up a maelstrom among aesthetes in New York City, turned up in the tame streets of San Diego last weekend for two performances at Sushi Gallery.

Her show--detailed elsewhere under the headline “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts”--sent more than a few in the audience fleeing for the fire door. But Finley, whose act included smearing canned food on herself, had nice things to say about San Diego.

Sure, she made a snide remark or two about Sea World. But she said San Diego came through with her most publicized prop, canned yams. In L.A., the canned yams only came bathed in water. But San Diego had the real thing, yams in yam juice.

Time to Walk Carefully

Beetling businessmen are dropping like flies downtown these days, slipping into the net of the San Diego Police Department. It’s yet another crackdown on that mortal sin, jaywalking.

On Monday, two bemused bystanders making a five-minute trek to lunch watched one cop snag two harried Yuppies darting across 5th Avenue, another collaring a woman and a man nearby, while two more officers idled menacingly outside Mrs. Fields’ cookie den.

Earlier, an officer was observed at 4th and Broadway nabbing two oblivious sailors wading out against the light. Then the light changed and a car nearly clipped a pedestrian. The officer reportedly growled at the irate pedestrian, “I can’t see everything !”

Bill Robinson, a police spokesman, attributed the rash of arrests to “a continuing crackdown.” He traced the crackdown to complaints from drivers and 30 pedestrian deaths on city streets this year.

Asked why pedestrians should be cracked down on when they’re the ones getting killed, Robinson paused. Then he insisted that drivers were being targeted too.

Sailing Event Is a Ball

A sprawling flotilla of yacht club ex-commodores from around the world congregates this weekend in San Diego for the investiture of a prominent local dermatologist as “commodore of commodores,” president of the International Order of the Blue Gavel.

Roughly 225 ex-commodores and their spouses from as far away as New Zealand and Canada are to rally Saturday night at Southwestern Yacht Club in Point Loma for the annual ball of the worldwide fraternal order, strictly for former commodores.

The wild weekend is also to include cocktail parties and luncheons, and Bloody Mary cocktail breakfasts. Saturday is devoted to the annual meeting of the more than 100 ex-commodores, who must attend decked out in navy blue blazers bedizened with yacht club patches.

“This is going to be the biggest conclave that the Blue Gavel ever had,” beamed Dr. Richard Disraeli, a San Diego dentist and southwestern region vice president of the order, named for commodores’ congratulatory gavel. To be installed as Blue Gavel president is Dr. Burton Jay, chief of dermatology for Kaiser Permanente Hospitals in San Diego.

Disraeli compares commodore-ing to being a corporate chairman of the board. His club, after all, has a $1-million budget. And what do ex-commodores talk about when they meet? Oh, dinner dances and dock space and membership fees and the good old days.

“It’s mostly social,” conceded Disraeli. It can take eight years to work your way up through yacht club hierarchy to achieve the position of commodore. Then you serve one year and its all over. “You don’t have any place to go anymore.”

So you go to San Diego!