Party Soars Thanks to Air Hangar

Bye-bye, ballrooms, bye-bye.

Or, as party planner Pamela Paul said: “My first thought was, ‘I can’t sit in another banquet room with another plate of rubber chicken.’ ”

Her second thought was . . . airplane hangar !

“I pictured an airplane hangar with all these people dressed in black tie,” said the chairwoman of Sunday’s American Cancer Society benefit. “I didn’t have a theme or anything, just that image.”

Standing in the early evening sunshine outside Tallmantz Aviation Hangar at John Wayne Airport, Paul watched the first wave of guests step through a gate in the hangar’s chain-link fence and walk the strip of red carpet leading to the cavernous beige building.

And the silk-suited, 7 months’ pregnant Paul had to smile: The chairwoman and her 40 committee members had managed to turn her rather odd vision into a charming party scene.

Dubbed--somewhat irrelevantly--”The Spirit of St. Louis,” the $50-per-person benefit drew more than 600 guests and raised estimated net proceeds of $70,000, according to Donna Blue, president of the South Coast Cancer League, a division of the Orange County chapter of the American Cancer Society.

The huge metal box that served as a party house was filled with columns of black and silver balloons, rows of white-clothed tables and the booming beat of a cut-above dance band, the Wayne Foster Orchestra.

With rising aircraft rumbling just outside the open hangar doors, guests sampled buffet offerings from 20 restaurants, chose among more than 100 varieties of wine and bid on silent auction items.

First out on the no-frills cement dance floor were Harold and Ardiste Ladin. She headed the effort to round up 99 auction donations, including four seats at a Lakers game right behind star-fan Jack Nicholson and a guest shot as an extra on NBC series “The Golden Girls.” (“I wanted to get things you can’t buy,” Ladin explained.)

Among the guests were Robert Stephan and Janet Norris, who work in the restaurant industry and said they came to the party “mostly for the food,” according to Stephan.

Noshing chicken tikka masala (chicken with yogurt and herbs), a traditional Indian dish served by Gandhi restaurant, Stephan pronounced the sampling “surprisingly good” and said that in Northern California, where he sometimes works as a consultant, “they think down here people go for the (restaurant) decor, not the food.

“Wrong,” he added.

Right.