People and Events

Bryn Bridenthal Housman admits she really didn’t much like being doused with beer and ice water by two members of the heavy metal rock band Poison. “I’d like to pull down their pants at high noon on Main Street,” she says. “They’re thinking this is all cute and adorable. They think they can just go around assaulting women and get away with it.”

The incident took place at a party after a concert by Motley Crue and Whitesnake at the Forum last month.

Housman, 42, publicist for Geffen Records and thus for the rival band Guns N’ Roses, has filed a $1.1-million lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against lead singer Bret Michaels and guitarist Bobby Dall. She is also pressing for battery charges, which according to the Inglewood city attorney’s office will be lodged against the pair as soon as Housman signs a formal complaint.

Neither Michaels nor Dall, both in their 20s, has had any comment. Their own publicist said the beer-and-ice-water shower was merely “a sign of friendship.”

Housman says the run-in was the apparent result of a magazine article in which a member of Guns N’ Roses said Poison was made up of “posers” who represent “everything bad about rock ‘n’ roll.”

A $100-per-ticket benefit preview of Paris designer Christian Lacroix’s spring collection drew a few protesters to 20th Century Fox. Members of animal welfare groups were not happy about Lacroix’s use of fur in some of his creations and what they claimed was a glamorization of bullfighting in the line.

“There’s no difference in the eyes of the law between bullfighting and dogfighting and child pornography,” said protester Tina Brackenbush. “If a dress designer were into child pornography, would everyone want to go into that?”

Martin Fischer, vice president of Saks Fifth Avenue, which sponsored the black-tie event, said bullfighting is merely part of the provincial flavor of the designer’s native Arles region in southern France.

As for the fur, Fischer said, “We sell furs at Saks Fifth Avenue, and that’s a fact of life.”

At the benefit, there were flamenco dancers, but no bullfighters.

A “Search for Shelter” design competition, sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects to come up with some imaginative ideas to house the homeless, produced some, all right, from Southern California architecture students:

- Padded concrete pipes

- Shipping containers

- “Homeless tubes” financed through advertisements painted on the outside.

- Cabins made of old telephone poles.

As for her shipping-container plan, Melissa Eldridge of the Southern California Institute of Architecture noted that they could be put together to form larger structures. “My idea,” she said, “would be to brighten up by putting flags of different countries in front of each one.”

Caltech Assistant Prof. Erik Antonsson already is preparing the final exam for Mechanical Engineering 72A. Once again, part of it will be a little unusual.

Last year, each student was handed a paper bag filled with “junk” and told to build a rubber-band-powered machine capable of climbing a hill.

This semester’s bags will contain such items as O-rings, Plexiglass, Masonite, aluminum, screws, pulleys and assorted hardware--but each will also hold two small electric motors. The assignment: To construct a tug-of-war machine.

The machines will battle in a series of duels, trying to pull each other through a box of tiny plastic pellets.

Antonsson, 33, who last year won a Presidential Young Investigator award giving him $25,000 annually for five years to conduct research, says his students get plenty of theory and analysis in other classes. When they get out in the world, he points out, they will have to know how to “design and build things.”