People and Events

Take that, Ed (How Am I Doin’?) Koch.

Mayor Tom Bradley was on his way to work Tuesday--to a symposium with the King of Sweden, no less--when his Olds 98 passed a quartet of kids lingering at the corner of Wilton and Wilshire. They were not waiting for a bus.

Looks like those kids are going to spray-paint that wall, His Honor remarked to his LAPD driver, Detective Larry Kounalis.

From his rear-view mirror, Kounalis saw they were doing just that.

(Oh, the temerity of it: It was only one week since the mayor had proposed a $250,000 anti-graffiti program.)

Turn the car around, said His Honor; let’s go back.

There were the teen-agers, in flagrante graffiti . Kounalis sprang out, ordered them to halt. One dropped his spray can and ran off. The other three were rooted to the pavement, as first the man with a badge, and then another man--a very tall one in dark glasses and a double-breasted blue blazer--came up.

Finally, one of the kids remarked, “Wow, you’re Tom Bradley, aren’t you?”

That’s right, he replied, in his impressive I-am-the-great-and-powerful-Oz baritone. Tom Bradley, the mayor, and I don’t want to see you kids spray-painting walls in the city of Los Angeles ever again.

Yessir, yessir, the three quaking high school students responded. And with a lecture and a warning, the mayor let them go.

“I think,” said a Bradley aide, “they’re not going to be going to a paint store for any new spray cans soon.”

The trouble in River City has temporarily taken up residence in Pasadena--trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pox.

A minor rampage of chicken pox recently felled several cast members of a high school production of “The Music Man,” including its stars, Marian the Librarian and Prof. Harold Hill.

So Pasadena High School’s own music man--Scott Hedgecock, the producer and vocal director--has laid on extra rehearsals, canceled next weekend’s three shows and wedged a matinee into the following weekend’s schedule.

First his leading lady fell ill, then his professor. Hedgecock contemplated “borrowing” Mater Dei High School’s leading man (“Calling to say, do you have a spare Harold Hill?”) as that school had just staged “The Music Man” a week or so before.

But when other cast members were stricken, says Hedgecock, “it was getting ridiculous. It was getting to be like, who’s on first?”

The show will go on. It’s just late, like the Wells Fargo wagon with the band instruments.

“We’ve gotten our share of bad jokes,” Hedgecock sighed. “One person said . . . you were supposed to be working on per fecting, not in fecting.”

There’s at least one place in town where the burger puts the bite on you .

“Money” magazine has ranked the services at the nation’s 20 busiest airports, and while Los Angeles International, the nation’s third-busiest airport, won high marks for its bargain airport bus service rates, a burger and a cola costs more at LAX than at any of the other airports--$6.45, by the magazine’s reckoning.

Overall, LAX rated 10th for passenger amenities. But, noted an airport spokeswoman, nearly three-fourths of travelers at LAX are coming in or flying out--not awaiting connections that keep people in airports a long time.

Besides, she added, “is somebody going to say, ‘Well, I guess I won’t go to Denver (airport) because the food’s expensive?’ ”