People and Events

It began as just another of the nearly 2,000 routine interviews Eva Luz Aguilar has conducted with illegal aliens at the Downtown Legalization Project, where, as an administrative assistant, she has been processing amnesty applications.

Then things took a turn. A young woman told her, “I’ve been working under another name for the past year. I’ve been using the name of Eva Luz Aguilar.” She produced a handful of documents.

The real Eva Luz Aguilar stood up, aghast. There on the desk was her own Social Security card, bearing her number and signature. It had been in the wallet stolen at a laundromat four years before.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Aguilar said later. “Of all the millions of people in Los Angeles, how did she happen to come here, to my desk, to me?”

The other woman turned pale and explained that she had found the card in the street a year ago. She, like Aguilar, is 28. She, like Aguilar, was born in Mexico. But while Aguilar came to the United States as a child and is now a legal resident, the other woman came at the age of 20.

The latter--who asked Aguilar not to disclose her real name--said she had been working in a garment factory to support three children but had never filed an income tax return.

Aguilar finished processing her, suggesting that she obtain her own Social Security card and straighten herself out with other agencies. The two have become friends.

It’s the amnesty program, after all.

Soon, neither will identify herself as Eva Luz Aguilar. Aguilar recently married and is changing everything to read Eva Luz Webb .

A Huntington Beach bartender was chosen state champion drink mixer with something he calls “M’Adorable.” Jack Sherwood’s prize recipe:

One ounce of Midori melon liqueur, 3/4 ounce of creme de banana, ounce of Rose’s lime juice, 1 ounce of sweet and sour and a dash of Frothee.

(Too dry?)

Sherwood won $1,500 and the chance to compete in next month’s national mix-off in San Juan, P.R. If he wins there, he will represent the United States at the world championships in Mexico City in 1990. Which will give him time to smooth down the edges.

There are, it appears, a flock of them out there. Following reports here of a pet Amazon bird stolen from a Fontana man and another from a Van Nuys woman, the calls began coming in.

A Hancock Park woman reported one flying somewhere between Oxnard and Montecito. A Studio City woman spotted one outside her window and a North Hollywood woman said two of them had shown up in her back yard.

Another said she saw one in a San Pedro pet shop singing, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” one of the numbers performed by Billy, the parrot recently stolen from Jill Newman in Van Nuys.

Newman was interested, but said a lot of parrots do that one.

Meantime, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation said there are two long-existent parrot colonies on the loose here--one in Pasadena and the other in the Palos Verdes Peninsula area.

It took a while to clear the transition road from the westbound Pomona Freeway to the southbound San Gabriel River Freeway near the City of Industry after a couple of concrete blocks fell off a truck early Tuesday.

They weighed more than 5 tons apiece, the California Highway Patrol said.

The mistake three young men made, Long Beach police say, was burning rubber and screeching away at high speed when they just happened to come across a patrol car that had been involved in a minor accident at 3rd Street and Chestnut Avenue late Monday night.

That aroused the curiosity of other officers, who chased them down and took a look in their automobile. The cops reported finding a crudely made explosive device and a shotgun fashioned from pipe.

They arrested Gary George, 22, of Seal Beach; John Little, 19, of Anaheim, and Christopher Henry, age unreported, of Long Beach.