Marathon: They’ll Be Dancing in the Streets

Vytautas Cekanauskas, for one, does not understand all the fuss about Sunday’s second running of the Los Angeles Marathon.

“So they pass by . . . and that’s it,” said Cekanauskas, Lithuania’s honorary consul to Los Angeles, with puzzlement in his voice. “You look at their heels and they’re gone.”

He will find some disagreement among the more than 1 million people who are expected to spend the day cheering the passage of 36,000 heels on a circuitous, 26-miles-plus route along the streets of Los Angeles.

From exuberant running aficionados to the city’s formal diplomatic corps, the onlookers will also partake of Sunday’s other event--the street party for which the presence of 18,000 runners is a mere asterisk.

In Hollywood, scores of postal workers will feast on menudo; at the Civic Center, a bunch of usually strait-laced deputy district attorneys will cavort to the tunes of a polka band; in the Wilshire District, American Indian drummers will vie for attention with Israeli dancers, and the diplomatic corps will gather for a marathon-watching buffet brunch at Perino’s.

In Hancock Park, the Junior League will cast off its social conscience in favor of a little street action; in Echo Park, hundreds will proudly wear their “I Echo Park” buttons; in the Pico-Crenshaw area thousands will take in a jazz festival--and donate to a food drive on the side.

A spontaneous city celebration it is not.

Marathon organizers, in planning the course, intentionally decided to run it through the city’s diverse ethnic neighborhoods. Accordingly, the race will wend through Little Tokyo, Chinatown and Koreatown, mostly Latino Echo Park, predominantly Anglo Hancock Park and largely black sections of mid-Los Angeles.

Last year, at the first running of the City of Los Angeles Marathon, community groups sponsored entertainment along the route that attracted spectators, enthralled runners and showed off the neighborhoods.

“It all succeeded, and we decided to expand (this year),” said Becky Buchanan, the marathon’s director of community relations. “It just grew by word of mouth.”

This year, the street party will revolve around more than a dozen formal “entertainment centers” set up sporadically along the route. Thirty-five high school bands will be brought in to spark the crowds. Organizers of some of the route’s 26 runners’ water stations have been planning additional entertainment for months.

“We’re sitting next to American Indians and before them are the Baltic states (residents from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania),” said Stephen Wise, who is organizing an Israeli music-and-dance center on Wilshire Boulevard. “It’s certainly an accumulation of cultures.”

In some areas, organizers frankly admit, there will be a serious side to the celebration.

The Spring Street Assn., a business group dedicated to revitalizing the run-down area just south of the Civic Center, volunteered to staff a water station in the hope that spectators would see Spring Street “in a positive light,” association member Joan Bennett said.

“It’ll help people be a lot more aware of the businesses there,” Bennett said. “People there work real hard and are proud of the buildings. . . . Something like this can help.”

For any benefit they receive, Bennett and her fellow volunteers will pay a price--by the race’s start, they will have been on duty for hours, filling 23,000 cups of water for thirsty runners to drink or toss on themselves.

“It’s such a huge undertaking!” she said, laughing. “I don’t know anything about the race. I’m not a runner. . . . The biggest thing I do is walk to work every day!”

At City Hall, several hundred members of the district attorney’s staff, and their families, will gather for a simpler cause: to have fun.

While the Spring Street group is new to the marathon, the district attorney staffers are old hands, so much so that they will appear this year in specially designed, silver-gray marathon sweat shirts and carrying their pompons. About 100 will work a water station on Main Street, and a few hundred others will gather nearby to cheer on 17 co-workers who are running the race.

Once the runners pass, the spectators can focus their attention on an eight-piece polka band playing “music suitable for dancing in the street,” according to Jerri Patchett, the office’s assistant public affairs director, who is organizing the effort.

Patchett’s planning started early.

“We started thinking about it when we were (spectators) on the course last year,” she said. “We were standing there saying, ‘We have to be more of a part of this--next year we’ll host a water station.’ The following Monday I called the marathon and said, ‘Sign us up.’ ”

Returning to man a water station for a second year are workers from the Hollywood post office--who got involved last year so they could douse a co-worker who planned to run the race. The co-worker, injured, bowed out of the race, but the volunteers had enough fun that they made plans to come back Sunday. The postal workers plan a menudo breakfast before the race and a family picnic at Ferndale Park afterwards.

“It’s a once-a-year thing to show people we think we’re a part of the community,” said station manager Agustin Castro.

Also seeking to establish itself as part of Los Angeles is the American Indian community, which plans a traditional powwow on Wilshire Boulevard near Crenshaw Boulevard. Organizers hope to draw many of the more than 40,000 American Indians who live in the Los Angeles area--and hope to educate non-Indians to the native American culture.

“Our whole reason for being involved with the marathon is that we want to bring recognition to American Indians--that there’s more than alcoholism and unemployment in the urban areas,” organizer Kathy Pena said. “By doing this, we let people in general know.”

Perhaps the loudest greeting for marathon runners--and spectators as well--will be in Chinatown, where organizers have gathered thousands of firecrackers for a traditional Chinese celebration. The marathon comes at the close of Chinatown’s New Year festivities--and accordingly, since this is the Year of the Hare, spectators will compete for space with young Chinese-Americans costumed as rabbits.

Chinatown marathon organizer Chi Kin Mui expects 40,000 people to crowd into the area to watch dancers, musicians--and runners.

“I’m looking forward to it with enthusiasm,” Mui said, “and a little tired body.”