Souvenir Sellers Display Their Own Creativity : Tourism: The thousands who travel to see Christo’s umbrellas find that they can buy everything from lithographs to needlepoint tissue holders.

The promising market created by thousands of tourists drawn by Christo’s umbrellas project attracted scores of eager souvenir vendors to the usually deserted side roads in the Tejon Pass area during the three-day weekend.

The sleepy streets of Gorman, Lebec, Frazier Park and Grapevine blossomed into a middle American version of the Venice boardwalk. Souvenir-hunters were faced with what was probably the world’s largest array of umbrella-emblazoned objects, ranging from practical key chains to fanciful kazoos.

Among the most expensive remembrances of the 18-mile art show lining Interstate 5 were a silk scarf hand-painted with gilt umbrellas offered for $100 through the nonprofit Umbrella Coalition of Bakersfield and a pair of signed Christo umbrella lithographs--sort of a blueprint for the project--priced at $300.

Yet some of the best souvenirs were free. Christo information offices in Gorman and Lebec gave away swatches of the yellow and blue umbrella fabric and a comprehensive map and history of the project’s installations in California and Japan.

The Lebec post office provided free postmarks featuring the image of an umbrella.

“We can postmark anything as long as it has a stamp on it,” said postal spokeswoman Joanne Rowles, who was among those working the booth outside the post office. “We’ve postmarked Christo workers’ helmets, we’ve done T-shirts and programs, we’ve even done people.”

At a meeting of the Kern County Board of Trade several weeks before the exhibit’s opening, USA Project Director Tom Golden was asked how many T-shirt designs he thought that the exhibit would inspire.

“My guess is 1,760--one for every umbrella,” Golden replied.

Although Golden was joking, T-shirts did dominate the souvenir scene, with at least 25 different designs being displayed over the weekend.

One read, “I Saw It on the Grapevine,” another pictured a field of 50 tiny umbrellas, and yet another featured a cow drinking lemonade in the shade of an umbrella and read “Lifestyles of the Ranch and Famous.” Prices ranged from $10 to $15.

There were wares with no apparent umbrella connection: needlepoint Kleenex boxes shaped like high-top tennis shoes, Desert Storm commemorative coins and larger-than-life-size fiberglass animals displayed on a flatbed truck outside the Okie Girl restaurant in Lebec, priced at $595 and up.

“I can deliver them for free,” said John Webb of Phelan, near Victorville.

Webb said he wasn’t sure how many animals he had sold since the project’s opening Wednesday, but he recalled that a football player nicknamed “Bear” wanted the giant fiberglass brown bear for his bedroom and a nursery school wanted several smaller farm animals for its sandbox.

Marketing of umbrella souvenirs presented particular challenges because of the exhibit’s spread-out nature. To meet that challenge, T-shirts were being sold from front yards and from the beds of pickup trucks. Young entrepreneurs on bicycles slung scores of umbrella water bottles over their shoulders and pedaled along the hot, congested byroads.

Across Lebec Road from the post office, the Frazier Park schools were throwing in free ice water with every $2 water bottle sale.

In general, Lebec had the most unique souvenirs, but it also competed with Gorman for the tackiest.

In Lebec, there were hand-tinted black-and-white photographs taken by Piru photographer Bob Powe on the exhibit’s opening day, priced at $25, and $20 stained glass sun catchers of gold umbrellas against Van Gogh blue skies to hang in windows.

“I taught my father how to make the sun catchers two weeks ago,” Lebec resident Militsa Brennan said. “So he’s busy making them while I’m busy selling them.”

Upstairs at the Okie Girl restaurant, Keith Van Dam of Bakersfield was selling $14 coffee mugs with a photograph of the customer standing in front of an umbrella backdrop.

The backdrop was painted before the umbrella opening, like most of the other artwork available around the project. It also had a small “For Sale” sign taped onto one corner, but no price tag.

“It’ll go to the highest bidder,” Van Dam said.

In Gorman, Mikki Rensing of Simi Valley was selling beverage coolers and visors made of wet-suit fabric, each featuring a simple umbrella drawing, for $3 and $5, respectively.

An umbrella souvenir book filled with coupons for such things as $1 off any purchase at a local lumber store was not selling well. In fact, Kathy Jens of Frazier Park confided: “We haven’t sold one yet.”

But black T-shirts were in great demand, especially at the southern end of the project, closest to Los Angeles, where one vendor said he had run out of black by 8 a.m. Sunday.

“We’re UPS-ing them in from all over the country,” said Don Bleak, who was selling for the Frazier Park Boosters from a booth in Gorman.

Bleak had a few white T-shirts left on which umbrellas was misspelled with an apostrophe, as “Umbrella’s.”

“The worst part is those are being sold for the Frazier Park school board,” Bleak said. “It was only the first set that were wrong but, you know, people seem to like those better.”