People and Events

You wash dirty cars, you sell homemade brownies, you baby-sit for whiny kids--and still you come up many bucks short for your class trip to Washington, D.C.

Relax; there’s a Ford in your future. Well, in your church.

When the bake sales and car washes weren’t enough to subsidize the Washington studies tour for 30 eighth-graders at St. Matthew’s parish school in Pacific Palisades, a few strings were tugged (between some parents and an aide to Gerald R. Ford), and on Thursday night there was the 38th President of the United States--almost as if Washington had come to them.

He was more expensive than “The Last Emperor” but cheaper than Springsteen: tickets were $15 for kids and $25 for adults, and there were 500 reservations.

The hourlong symposium at the adjacent parish church began with an address by Ford and moved to six questions posed by third- through eighth-grade students. Each class voted on the best queries from its ranks, and the winner from the third grade was: “When you were President, did you ever have nights you couldn’t sleep because you were worried?”

The subject was roses. The object was . . . subtlety.

Let its creator--the same woman who says she pioneered women’s video wrestling--describe it:

“It looks like a long-stemmed red rose . . . packaged up with silk baby’s breath--real pretty. It looks like a rose till you look at it closely--the petals are formed from Trojan condoms”--in American Beauty red.

Roselyn Royce of Valencia begins marketing her “Bed Rose” next week, a 1980s romance-meets-reality variant on the floral roulette mantra, “He loves me, he loves me not.”

The notion came to her in a dream, and after buying some condoms--”I didn’t even know they came in red”--she started assembling the rubber rosebud. “I started out, believe it or not, stapling them. Then I thought, ‘I can’t do that .’ ”

The “Bed Rose,” with its two-condom complement, will sell for about $9.95 mail order, $5.99 and up in specialty shops, bedded down in a florist’s box, wrapped in lacy paper with a red satin bow. “Playboy” is interested, she says. Florists and lingerie shops are interested.

“It’s meant to be a novelty item, but it can also be a safe sex item--a way of saying romantically one wants to be safe,” says Royce.

“A girl could give it to a guy, or a guy to a girl, or a guy to a guy in some cases, I guess.”

They fear that they shall never see

A tree--period.

Two dozen members of Earth First! brought Birnam Wood to the downtown Federal Building on Thursday, staging a graphic “slaughter” of fellow tree-costumed demonstrators to protest what they call the U.S. Forest Service’s destructive “clear cutting” of swaths of national forests, including ancient redwoods. It was one of several protests throughout the state on the 150th birthday of pioneering environmentalist and conservationist John Muir.

In one guerrilla theater playlet, “Smokey the Bear” belabored an Earth First!er, robed as a tree, with an ax. The “tree” then toppled, smeared in mock blood, to the sidewalk.

“A lot of people I think were rather disturbed,” acknowledges Gwydion Conway, one of the protesting trees. “Most people, when they think of the Forest Service, they think of Smokey the Bear and people taking care of our beautiful forest . . . we wanted to wipe away that myth. They’re just out there tearing up what little we have left of our public lands.”

Conway’s comment on the costuming: “Trees are alive, as much as an animal or human or anything else.” If passers-by “saw a human dressed as a tree, they could get the idea.”

It’s downtown Los Angeles, where parking your car can cost more for an hour than you earn in an hour.

Still--$25 for fast food?

Call it the Good Neighbor Policy. The fire-seared Central Library is right across the street, and the $25 tariff that nearly 300 people paid to attend opening night at the new Carl’s Jr. restaurant Thursday went for the “Save the Books” fund.

No famous stars showed up to eat Famous Stars, but the Zinfandel flowed like rain.