Jokers Make the ‘Wallflower Syndrome’ a Laughing Matter

One might think that only the young feel shy and geeky when making initial overtures to the opposite sex. Not so, says Veronica Manning of Hollywood.

Singles over 50 often suffer the same “wallflower syndrome.” Manning thinks she has the solution.

Founder of Laugh Lovers’ Singles for the 49+ set, Manning hopes--believes--she’s stumbled onto the ice-breaker of the ‘80s (or, for that matter, the 80s).

An ebullient woman “in my 50s,” Manning proposes monthly meetings on Sunday afternoons (ideally with restaurants donating space and food) at which each single arrives with a joke or funny story printed on a card.

They divide into smaller groups, vote on the best joke, which is entered as a finalist. Gag gifts for the best. Guest speaker, preferably funny. Then “mingling, tingling, whatever happens. . . . “

“Smaller groups are non-threatening,” says Manning. “The jokes are a way to get people to interact. Other singles groups I know, they cling to the wall like flypaper.”

First meeting (call (213) 388-8155) will be next Sunday at Arriba restaurant on Pico. If it works, “I plan to do it on a national scale, then international. I’ll conquer the world with belly laughs.”

As if to demonstrate, Manning tells the one about Mrs. O’Connor and the Father Confessor . . . “The idea has to work,” Manning says.

“I mean, how can you get through the day, let alone a life, without a few laughs?”

Here’s How You Can Put a Cork on Your Pesky 246-TCA Problem

The wine steward pours a little sample. You sip. Ptui! You send the bottle back, and probably order another from a different vintner. “Wrong,” says wine maven Jerry Mead. “Chances are, what you have is a ‘corky’ bottle, which has nothing to do with the wine or the winery.”

Mead, of Redwood City, suggests that as much as 5% of cork-finished wines are victims of corks afflicted by a chemical compound called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole--246-TCA to its friends. (Most corks, incidentally, are imported from Portugal, where they’re working on the problem.)

Wine, in contact with the bad cork, tastes and smells “dank, musty, moldy.”

The tendency, Mead says, is to “blame the flaw on bad cooperage or moldy fruit. Up to now, even expert, professional tasters often have been fooled.”

Up to now? “Now,” says Mead (publisher of the Wine Trader, “sort of the Pennysaver of wine newsletters”), “we’ve had Scott Labs in San Rafael isolate 246-TCA. We sell samples at cost ($2). It’s in a concentration of one part per million.

“Put two or three drops into a control wine, let it sit for a couple of minutes. Now sniff a clean glass, then sniff the control glass. (Ptui!) That’s all it needs, a sniff. You won’t ever, ever have a problem identifying a ‘corky’ wine again. I swear it.”

Artist Puts Blind in Touch With Colors

To a blind person, what is red? Or green or yellow or black? Is it possible for the blind to see colors?

To Pia Pizzo and her wards, feeling is believing. “I am convinced the blind see colors through their emotions,” says Pizzo, a world-renowned “tactile” artist whose works have graced nearly 30 one-woman shows.

At the Nature Center of the El Dorado East Regional Park in Long Beach, Pizzo, a tiny, Palermo-born whirlwind, currently is instructing both sighted and visually impaired classes in her specialty: “paintings” and “books” that are equally pleasing to the touch as to the eye--if not more so.

Under the tutelage of the California Arts Council’s artist-in-residence, the blind children are constructing a seven-foot, walk-through environment--”From the Woods to the Books”--which will depict the four seasons and the colors/feelings they evoke. Each session begins with an outdoor walk “for hearing, smelling and collecting.” The young artists then transfer their impressions to the “page”: leafless branches and “a white feeling” for winter; a nest with eggs, glue “raindrops” for spring, etc. Inside the “book” will be appropriate smells and sounds.

“When you talk to blind children about colors, they’re not at all frustrated,” Pizzo says. “On the contrary, it makes them very, very happy. Colors are part of our innate intelligence, our emotions, whether we ‘see’ them or not.