People and Events

More than a week after the Sunset Strip tied itself in a knot over the sight of rock singer David Lee Roth scaling an eight-foot Styrofoam mountain atop the Tower Records building while several bikini-clad dancers and the USC marching band added to the confusion, West Hollywood officials moved to ease the legal fallout.

Tower, which was helping Warner Bros. Records promote the release of Roth’s new “Skyscraper” album, didn’t have a permit for the mountain. Anyway, said Marsha Sculatti of the West Hollywood Marketing Corp., a nonprofit group set up to polish the city’s image, roof signs are not permitted.

As of Friday, she reported, West Hollywood Planning Manager Howard Zelefsky was working out an arrangement to let the mountain stay on the roof for a month or so. In the meantime, the city was seeking reimbursement of about $1,000 for the cost of controlling the Jan. 21 crowd.

The bikini dancers had been--in Sculatti’s words--”ordered off the slopes.”

Warner Bros. Records PR man Bob Merlis said the dancers “got through part of the weekend, but then were brought down. We dispatched a St. Bernard with brandy around its neck to get them.”

Now that former Municipal Judge Stanley M. Weisberg has been promoted by Gov. George Deukmejian to the Superior Court bench, he’s on an even footing with his wife--judicially speaking, at least. Jacqueline L. Weisberg has been a Superior Court judge since 1979.

After Stanley Weisberg was sworn in Tuesday, the two became the first husband-wife jurists in the 108-year history of Los Angeles County Superior Court. She presides over a court in Santa Monica. He has been assigned to Juvenile Court.

Were there were problems when he was only a Municipal judge? “I have to admit it was a subject of some joking among our friends,” Stanley Weisberg said Friday. “I suppose now she can’t overrule my objections.”

The splintered remains of his Blue Moon Saloon having all but floated off to Tahiti when the recent storm pounded Redondo Beach, Don Poryes earlier this week turned for help to his old customers. Or new ones, for that matter.

Anyone willing to donate to his “Save the Moon” campaign, Poryes said, will be able after reconstruction to cash in his or her canceled check for food and drink in that amount. In other words: interest-free loans against future dinners.

By Friday, Poryes reported he had already received checks ranging up to $1,000, but could not say what they totaled. “With their help,” he said, “the Moon shall rise again.”

The Federal Aviation Administration says it’s looking into the matter. But Chuck Barnard, 60, sounds almost disappointed when he insists that nobody has yet been around to talk to him about his story that he carried a pistol through a security gate at Los Angeles International Airport and onto a PSA plane bound for Las Vegas three weeks ago.

It was all accidental, insists Barnard, a hospital food supervisor who told KABC-TV reporter Gene Gleeson about it last week. He claims he hid the gun in his bag because someone new was cleaning his house. Then he forgot about it. And when he got to his Las Vegas hotel room and opened the bag, “I nearly died.”

“It shouldn’t have happened,” Barnard says. “I should have been caught. I shouldn’t have done it.” Barnard said he was so shaken that he canceled his return flight and took a bus home.

PSA spokesman Bill Hastings says the airline doesn’t know that such a thing actually did happen, but that airline security people made a couple of attempts to contact Barnard before referring it to the FAA.

The Cultural Heritage Foundation of Southern California Inc. announces that William Jennings Bryan, “leading Democratic presidential hopeful,” will speak on Feb. 14 at Heritage Square alongside the Pasadena Freeway. He will repeat the speech hourly from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.--like most candidates.

The foundation noted that Bryan “is running against William McKinley, the governor of Ohio,” and said he will speak about “current issues of the day.”