Museum Backers Party for Fun, Not Profit

The salty breeze helped. So did the postcard view of ocean and sky. But what separated the “Visionaries Go Caribbean” theme party from the balloons-and-table-favors kind of theme party was the Trinidad Steel Drum band’s after-dinner floor show.

Sixty couples paid $150 each to spend Saturday night in the expansive rooms and roomy back yard of Arla and D.V. Brown’s Laguna Beach home. For their money, guests got cocktails from an open bar, dinner from an elegant buffet--and gawking rights to a floor show that included fire-eating, limbo dancing and barefoot hopping on broken glass.

Are we having fun yet?

Picture This

The Visionaries, a support group for the Newport Harbor Art Museum, raises money for the museum’s building project through members’ $1,000 initiation fee and $500 yearly dues. The group’s annual theme party--this was its second--is for fun, not profit.

“This is our one time each year to just socialize and get to know each other better,” said Diana Sterling, who chaired the event. Since the Visionaries are all women, she said, “we want to include our husbands sometimes, too.

“We’re primarily an educational organization,” said Janet Corbin, president of the 150-member group. Since it formed two years ago, the club has organized classes, lectures and three arts-oriented trips--to Northern California, New York and Santa Fe.

Picture This, Too

The Browns’ spanking-new contemporary home--an art- and antique-filled mansion with cathedral ceilings and curved glass walls framing views of the sea--sits on a hill in Irvine Cove, just north of downtown Laguna.

Once past the guard gates, guests dropped their car keys with valets, rode a chauffeured golf cart up the steep driveway, grabbed mai tai cocktails at the door and settled in for a long night of mingling.

Colorfully clothed dinner tables, centered with tropical flowers, were set up on the swath of grass outside the Browns’ front door. Buffet selections, catered by Turnip Rose, included spinach salad, marinated vegetables, glazed chicken, roast pork, grilled salmon and seafood salad.

Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot

With a steel drum beat pulsing, three dancers boogied onto a parquet dance floor just as guests were helping themselves to coffee and banana praline flambe. For the next 30 minutes--during which one couple after another stood for a better view--the trio entertained with circus-like tricks of seeming self-torture--walking on nails, rolling across crushed glass, swallowing fire, arching under a flaming limbo pole.

“Ladies and gentlemen! We invite you to try the limbo dance!” announced the band’s lead singer, when the show was over. “Don’t be cowards! It’s limbo time!”

Wally Wolf and Leonard Zuckerman rose--or should we say lowered themselves?--to the occasion.

Who’s Who

Among guests were Marilyn and Tom Nielsen, Jeanne and David Tappan, Milli and Herb Wieseneck, Maria and Richard Crutcher, Kathryn and Cecil Wright, Ronnie and Byron Allumbaugh, and Nancy and Jim Baldwin, who hosted last year’s Polynesian-themed Visionaries shindig.