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Baseball fans suffering withdrawal pains during the...

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<i> From staff and wire reports</i>

Baseball fans suffering withdrawal pains during the break in the World Series can always visit Los Angeles’ Museum of Neon Art and view a work of art commemorating one of the sport’s strangest moments.

“Watch Out, Vince!” is a kinetic sculpture by Dave Quick that re-enacts a 1985 incident in which a motorized tarpaulin machine ran over St. Louis outfielder Vince Coleman on the field before a game. Coleman suffered an injured leg and missed the playoffs.

Part of the “Motion Motion” exhibit at the museum, the sculpture’s tiny tarp rolls across a diamond under miniature baseball lights toward its inevitable destination while an instrumental version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” plays and a voice cries, “Watch out, Vince!”

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The work appeared once before at MONA, which, ironically in Coleman’s case, is on Traction Avenue. While he has since recovered to become one of the best base stealers in the sport, Coleman has never visited, “Watch Out, Vince!”

“We sent him an announcement (via the team) to catch his interest a while back,” said MONA’s curator Mary Carter, “but I guess the memory’s still kind of painful.”

Inflation index:

“Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me,” taxi dancer Doris Day sang in the film “Love Me or Leave Me.” Now, in “The Baker Boys,” Michelle Pfeiffer has revived the Prohibition-era classic by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers.

What is the rate for taxi dancers these days?

Well, at Danceland, a music hall on Figueroa Street, it costs 35 cents per minute to spin around the floor with one of the employees. That’s about a dollar a dance for most tunes, which averages out to an inflation rate of around 18% per year over the last half-century.

Of course, if you wanted to waltz with your temporary honey to the 30-minute rendition of “Truckin’,” by the Grateful Dead, Lorenz Hart’s dramatic closing lyric would have to be revised to:

“Come on, big boy--10 bucks a dance.”

Some local radio personalities receive their training at the Columbia School of Broadcasting, others at the California Highway Patrol.

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CHP Officer Jill Angel, who delivers traffic bulletins on the airwaves during the week, now moonlights--or daylights--as a weekend disc jockey on radio station KODJ-FM (93.1).

“I always have a lot of interaction with the deejays on my traffic reports and I guess Kurt Kelly (the station’s program director) liked my personality,” said Angel, 32.

While Angel emphasizes that “I’m still a police officer first,” she said she enjoys spinning oldies on her two shows.

And she doesn’t have to give traffic advisories.

An ad parody for a “Zsa Zsa’s Greatest Hits” album ran on radio station KPWR-FM (106) and featured a chanteuse with a Hungarian accent belting out a reggae variation of an old Eric Clapton hit. “I slapped the sheriff,” she crooned, “but I swear it was in self-defense, dahlink.”

But TriCoast International is putting out a real-life 60-minute video, “The People vs. Zsa Zsa Gabor,” that covers her ordeal from the jury selection stage to her sentencing.

Highlights include Gabor throwing a tantrum one day and leaving the courtroom while the judge asks her attorney to restrain her. “You also see her sketching a lot,” said TriCoast spokesman Jay Lebow.

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The $9.95 video will appeal to “people who read the National Enquirer,” and, Lebow added with a straight face, to lawyers “who have an interest in how the court system is exploited.”

Now that the judge has instructed Zsa Zsa to go jail shopping, the question is: Will she choose Sybil Brand Institute or some other county jail? And, by the way, should TriCoast come out with a sequel, what will the title be:

“Zsa Zsa Behind Bars!” “No Mink Coats in Cellblock Seven,” or “Cool Hand Zsa Zsa?”

Or, considering Zsa Zsa’s famous temper, could it be . . .

“Escape from Sybil Brand?”

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