People and Events
To any affronted English-lit majors doing their Christmas shopping downtown: They say they wrote it that way on purpose. Really.
A billboard that went up over the weekend in front of the Seventh Market Place mall seeks to entice shoppers with the message: “This Year Shop Far From The Maddening Crowd.”
When English poet Thomas Gray penned that line in the 18th Century, it was “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” And then, more than 100 years later, English writer Thomas Hardy used it to entitle his bucolic novel “Far From the Madding Crowd”-- madding meaning frenzied or raving, a pretty fair characterization of holiday shopping.
But David Miller, of the plaza’s marketing firm, contends the misquote “was actually intentional, actually a play on the words.”
If that weren’t puzzlement enough, since when is downtown LA far from any crowd? Unless you believe East Coast detractors who say that no place can be considered a downtown that doesn’t have a deli every three blocks.
It’s true, Miller insists: “We’re not as crowded as other shopping areas of LA.”
Madding or maddening, the crowds that began gathering well before Sunday’s two-hour Hollywood Christmas Parade generated so much garbage that it reportedly took eight hours to clean it all up, and that was sans any help from elves. That the chore took so long did not come as a revelation to Los Angeles street maintenance Supt. Gary Whittington, who observed laconically, “It usually does.”
You win some, you win some.
The last time Harold Sorkazian had an argument with his wife at the Las Vegas Hilton, he dropped some dough in a slot machine and won $250,000. As Sorkazian tells it, he had lost it all within 11 months, $1 or so at a time.
This time, on Monday, a little more than two years later, the Panorama City auto body mechanic joked that he was again arguing with his wife before they even checked into their Hilton hotel room. So he started playing two $1 slot machines, and 10 minutes and $26 later, four “7s” dropped into place. In Las Vegas math, that means $2,138,350 for the Syrian native.
“I was not shocked that I won again. I had a feeling that I would hit the big one someday,” said the 46-year-old Sorkazian.
“I’m going to retire and come here every weekend.”
They got 15%, they gave 100%.
The staff at the beachy Malibu Inn bar and grill had been kicking in their tips to buy about 200 10-inch pizzas to send to the homeless at Santa Monica’s Sunlight Mission. On Monday, general manager Wally Ouellet, a cook and a volunteer bartender, assembled mounds and mounds of grated cheese, sliced mushrooms, diced onions and chopped green peppers into pizza and carted them off to the mission for cooking.
“It’s good for the homeless,” said Ouellet, “and also good for our staff, for the feeling of the staff.”
And although a few pizzas were adorned with pepperoni, the mission operators--probably still facing leftover turkey--”did ask us to hold more to the vegetable toppings,” allowed Ouellet, “because they’ve been getting a lot of meat lately.”
Tammy Faye Bakker’s celestial-blue Mercedes-Benz convertible has been born again. The 1984 automobile, which once shuttled the PTL Club’s singing evangelist around Palm Springs, was put on the block over the Thanksgiving weekend by a North Hollywood auto auction house. After a winning bid of $43,000, the new owner promptly hung her rosary from the rear-view mirror, “to give it a fresh blessing,” said a spokeswoman for the auctioneer.
William Yacobozzi of Newport Beach bought the 380 SL model on an impulse for his wife, Gabrielle, in what was described as a brisk but “reverent” bidding atmosphere. For their $43,000, the Yacobozzis got the low-mileage coupe, a copy of Playboy magazine featuring a Q-and-A with former church secretary Jessica Hahn, and a tape of one of Jim Bakker’s sermons, all cued up in the cassette player.
