People and Events

In office, he may have presided over 11-digit budget deficits, but Ronald Reagan, Private Citizen, is watching his pennies.

A delivery truck pulled up Thursday to the Century City skyscraper that will soon house the Rectangular Office of the 40th president.

Unloaded by workers who had passed Secret Service scrutiny were boxes containing all the office necessities a former President and actor could want. An observer counted three TVs (American-made) and three VCRs, one microwave, one coffee maker, one phone and one cassette recorder--Japanese. And all of them were bought at Adray’s, a chain discount store.

Earlier this week, this space introduced Photon, the happy zappy little “spokescharacter” for the L.A. Beautiful campaign to bring an end to potholes, litter, graffiti and other city detritus.

But there is another Photon . . . a nationally franchised game of high-tech laser tag for adults--controlled combat in a murky maze with dry-ice fog, bunkers and eerie music for a cathartic round of hunt-and-be-hunted. There is a Photon arena in Orange County.

“I’ve played the game,” said a realtor who called to reveal the existence of Photon One. And “shocked at the crime rate and violence” here, the realtor “thought what a stupid symbol . . . for beautification.”

Maybe that other Photon is really the evil twin Skippy, and L.A.’s Photon is going to create a kinder, gentler city.

After 27 years, they have struck the colors on Rodeo Drive.

The yellow-and-white-striped Giorgio Beverly Hills awnings that filled the tourists’ home movies, even when they couldn’t afford to fill their shopping bags, are gone.

Avon bought the Giorgio fragrance and its appurtenances, so Fred Hayman furled the Giorgio stripes Thursday and hoisted gold-and-red awnings, his new colors, in their place.

He bought the place 27 years ago from then-partner George Grant, who used the name Giorgio to sell Italian knit clothes. Grant could not have foreseen what he wrought. Wherever he is, said a store spokeswoman, he is “probably saying, ‘What did I sell?’ ”

The good news: The city Bureau of Sanitation issued a press release, on recycled paper, announcing proudly that they had received about 3,000 old Christmas trees in its new recycling program.

The bad news: The L.A. Times alone received seven copies of the release.

He hadn’t paid his rent, and thus he had been locked out of his Glendale apartment. That’s the way it works. But he had to get back inside, the tenant insisted to the apartment manager.

The fracas got so loud that someone called the cops, and inside the apartment in question, in two suitcases and a box, the cops found $521,248, neatly bundled.

Even in Glendale there’s something out of kilter about a guy with half-a-million dollars who doesn’t pay his rent. To Glendale police, it looked like “major drug dealings.” They took charge of the loot and arrested the ex-tenant, Benjamin Kardeni Bustillo, 38, a native of Colombia.

Bustillo was booked for possession of a small amount of cocaine and marijuana--as well as an unpaid traffic ticket.

The cash went into the “federal asset forfeiture system through U.S. Customs.”

The landlord is still apparently out his rent money.