Two Events Share Hotel and Success

The longer-than-usual backup of cars and drivers on Harbor Drive Saturday, all waiting more or less patiently to fork over the $4 parking fee and enter the downtown Marriott, was explained by the presence of two major fund-raisers that, between them, attracted nearly 1,000 participants.

Given at opposite ends of the behemoth hostelry, the parties were utterly unalike in outward appearances, but shared success as a common theme.

“Opera Opulence,” sponsored by the La Jolla Guild of the San Diego Opera as a glittering tribute to one of the city’s healthiest performing-arts organizations, drew 400 guests to the hotel’s new Tower Ballroom.

At exactly the same moment the Opera cocktail hour was splashily getting under way with informal modeling of mens’ fur coats, about 500 youngsters, parents and civic leaders, all beneficiaries or supporters of the Alba 80 Society’s educational programs for Latino youths, began to assemble under the sky-high ceilings of the recently renamed Marriott Hall (the free-standing ballroom-convention center was called the Pavilion during the reign of the Inter-Continental hotel chain).

Young people who wandered shyly and wide-eyed through their first grown-up outing found themselves mingling with such leaders of the national Latino community as Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez and Rep. Albert Bustamante (D-Texas), the vice chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

The opera party featured several types of celebrities, chief among them top designer Geoffrey Beene, who was present first in spirit and later, during the fashion show sandwiched between cocktail hour and dinner-dance, in person for the showing of his complete and typically glamorous autumn collection.

The other celebrities also were men, a squad of La Jolla Guild husbands not only recruited to model Revillon furs, but instructed to look suave and dignified as they made the rounds of the room. All managed to pull it off, even though genteel perspiration dripped the while over stiff upper lips. Asked what it was like to wear a full-length ostrich and sheared lamb overcoat in mid-July, Charles May responded “warm,” a sensation agreed upon by fellow models Stanley Counts, Harry Schrader, Richard Sewall, Jack Morse, Jud Grosvenor, John Parrish, Bill Purves and Robert Tuggey.

One Opera leading man not present, general director Ian Campbell, was represented at the gala by his wife, Ann. “Oh, phooey on him!” she said, when asked for news of her husband, who was at that time traveling in the Soviet Union on Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s arts junket.

Event chairman Bette Counts presented the evening in a series of acts, each in its own room and each with its own mood. As a novelty, she offered the Beene show in a Paris-style, ramp show setting, and then led guests into an adjoining, grandly decorated ballroom for dinner and dancing. The contrast was nice, and made the show itself--which was to have included a retrospective of Beene’s 25 years in business, but did not--seem more theatrical and focused than is usual at conventional ballroom couture presentations.

Decor chiefs Dudie Ogden and Alice Larson gussied up the ballroom with a series of flats depicting the skylines of other cities that boast major opera companies, including New York, Sydney and Milan. The twinkling lights and silhouetted skyscrapers all formed a suitably spectacular background for a six-course dinner highlighted by veau Normande and white chocolate shells stuffed with minted mousse.

Headed Guest List

Opera President Esther Burnham headed a guest list that included Janie and John Pendleton, Barbara and Bill McColl, Ingrid and Joe Hibben, Lee and P. J. Maturo, Shirley and David Rubel, Elsie and Frank Weston, Harriet and Dick Levi, Eleanor and Al Mikkelsen, Ernie and John Peak, Kay and Donald Stone and Lilo and Glenn Miller.

At the Alba 80 scholarship awards banquet in Marriott Hall--now extravagantly decorated with framed photographs of other Marriott hotels, an undeniably inspired touch--the celebrities were in a sense many, since both the youths who will pursue higher education with Alba aid, and those who provide that aid, tend to regard one another with a good deal of respect.

All 43 of the young people granted college scholarships for the coming year were present, as were eight 1988 graduates who earned degrees ranging from bachelor of arts to PhD at such schools as Coleman College, San Diego State and Harvard. Present as a role model and as recipient of the National Hispanic Teacher of the Year award was Los Angeles high school mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante, on whose life in the classroom the popular film “Stand and Deliver” was based.

KFMB public affairs director Maria Velasquez served as master of ceremonies and oversaw the presentation of Outstanding Hispanic Teacher awards to San Diego-area teachers Beatrice Fernandez, Ernesto Sanz and Esperanza Salazar McGuigan. Also honored were William Virchis, a professor in the drama department at Southwestern College, and businessman Dan Torres, given the Alba 80 Society’s annual Community Award.

Alba 80 President Martha Contreras co-chaired the evening with Edward Oliva; the committee also included Desia Ritson, Emily Haack, Janet Mendez, Augie Bareno, Nancy Russian, Richard Castillo and Blanca Duarte.

CORONADO--Saturday was, in fact, quite the night for fund-raisers, to the point that it seemed that the community was responding to some restless and irresistible urge to party on behalf of deserving causes.

About 150 would-be attendees at Scripps Memorial Hospital-Chula Vista’s inaugural gala, “A Night of Magic,” failed to make the cut; the party sold out at 400 guests, the number that can be comfortably accommodated in the St. Tropez Ballroom of the new Le Meridien hotel.

The guest list was, however, top-heavy with principals from the three Scripps Memorial hospitals, including President Ames Early, Executive Vice President James Bowers and SMH-Chula Vista chief of staff Dr. Tom Martinez, who with his wife, Jackie, served as the gala’s co-chair.

A proposed, 10-bed neonatal nursery at the South Bay hospital benefited from the event; the sponsoring SMH-Chula Vista auxiliary has pledged itself to raise $250,000 of the nursery’s expected $550,000 cost. Raising this amount does indeed require a touch of magic, at the very least, which led the committee to import a half-dozen magicians to perform during both the cocktail hour and in the after-dinner floor show. After tomato terrine and broiled swordfish, comedian-magician Chuck Fayne introduced a new brand of magic act during a show that also featured more traditional performances.

The committee included hospital administrator Jeff Bills, Lane Campbell, Barbara Heineback, Joy Lanzetta, Trudy Umansky, Goldie Sidley, Sandy Schafer, Robert Merry and Vickie Miller.