People and Events

“Objectionable” and “inappropriate” pretty well sum up USC Prof. Helen Horowitz’s view of the Trojan athletic department’s practice of having coeds escort football recruits on tours of the campus. She and others think male hosts should also be used.

“I don’t understand why football recruiting should be any different than any other type of recruiting,” says Horowitz, who is a professor of history as well as chairwoman of the Program for the Study of Women and Men in Society.

The student newspaper, the Daily Trojan, reported that the issue arose because of recent athletic department flyers announcing meetings for prospective hostesses.

Recruiting coordinator Jack Himebauch told the Trojan he didn’t see “anything wrong with having an attractive coed helping out the team. We don’t have girls in skimpy bikinis.”

Anyway, Himebauch noted, there already are a lot of USC football players around to play host to the recruits, so “why do you need more male association?”

By Thursday, Himebauch concluded that perhaps he hadn’t been “sensitive enough to appreciate some of the concerns of the campus community” and suggested that perhaps “the appropriate term might be ‘guide’ rather than ‘hostess.’ ”

Not only did two concrete canoes built by Cal State Northridge civil engineering students float, they made it the length of the campus pool and back--one paddled by four men and the other by four women.

There was not, CSN spokeswoman Ann Salisbury reports, a lot of student-type rah-rah at Thursday morning’s pool trial. “They did get into the ‘Go, Matadors!’ and throwing each other into the water a little bit,” says Salisbury, “but these are cerebral engineers, you have to remember. They were mostly discussing the displacement of water and the formula for construction.”

The two 17-foot canoes are made of Portland cement and some secret ingredients for the annual American Society of Civil Engineers student competition. They will race against canoes from other campuses on Saturday in Long Beach.

That event will finish with a destruction derby as the canoes bang into each other.

The fact that less than 100 tykes and pre-teenagers arrived with proud mothers to audition for the Los Angeles production of the New York stage hit “Les Miserables” was a little surprising to associate director Richard Jay-Alexander.

“Maybe if it had been for a Cosby or something else on television they were familiar with, more might have shown up,” said Jay-Alexander. “I don’t know if even the parents knew ‘Les Miserables.’ ”

It isn’t like that at New York tryouts, he said. They’re more attuned to the theater back there.

Jay-Alexander said many of the local kids who went to the First Methodist Church gym in Hollywood Wednesday to audition for the parts of Little Cosette and Gavroche had no idea what they were there for. (They certainly hadn’t read the classic Victor Hugo novel about poverty on which the show is based.) They spouted their TV commercial credits or sang “Tomorrow” from “Annie.”

One girl sang “Camptown Races.”

That didn’t quite do it.

“The biggest difference,” Jay-Alexander said, “was that these were all blond--some of them not naturally so. You get these healthy, aerobically fit, blond children . . . that doesn’t work for ‘Les Miserables’ at all.”

Jay-Alexander listened to them all sing, then picked out a couple of dozen to look at again today, when he will pick three girls to alternate as Little Cosette and two boys to do the same as Gavroche.

Previews of the show will begin May 21 at the Shubert Theatre. Opening night: June 1.

Dutch tourist Leo Koewe, who staged a one-day hunger strike at Los Angeles International Airport in January when his pet terrier-poodle Loekie disappeared from a TWA flight, was doing it again Thursday. He was in the fourth day of a new hunger strike at the Tom Bradley International Terminal.

He was doing more than mourning Loekie, who was killed when struck by a car after escaping from her travel cage during a St. Louis stopover. Koewe said he was also trying to call the attention of the public and airlines to a need for a more orderly pet-transit system.

“I can’t do anything for my dog,” Koewe said, “but I don’t want it to happen to others.”

The 50-year-old singer-composer from The Hague said his return trip here from Holland was paid for by actor Stacy Keach, who also lost his dog.