They Couldn’t Disguise Support for Stop-Gap

Don Laffoon planned to wear a halo along with his black-caped Beelzebub costume to Stop-Gap theater’s Halloween Monster Mash last week. But, at the last minute, he decided to leave it at home.

“I guess my devilish side won out,” he said with a wicked wink. Laffoon, Stop-Gap’s co-founder and executive director, went table-hopping during dinner, shaking hands and thanking supporters, with his glittery red tail following behind him.

The dinner at the Ritz-Carlton was the innovative drama group’s 12th annual fund-raiser, a night Stop-Gap managing director (and co-founder) Victoria Bryan described as “the beginning of our lucky 13th year.”

Stop-Gap board of directors President Marcia Jager pronounced the week-before-Halloween benefit “the beginning of the holiday season.”

What? No arrows?

Black capes swished elsewhere in the crowd of 200, on the backs of erstwhile Zorros and Phantoms of the Opera. Then there was Ed Sapigao as an enigmatic Arab-esque gentleman who seemed to have lost his way to the Mideast peace conference. Sapigao’s dark sunglasses added to his mysterious aura (“I can’t see a thing with them on,” he admitted).

With all of the masks and feathered headdresses, “I can’t see” was the evening’s buzz phrase.

Sapigao’s boss, Tak Ishina--president of the Kowa Co.--was there to accept Stop-Gap’s 1991 Corporate Award for the support his real estate development company has given the group. The support has been primarily at the urging of his wife, Sandra, a longtime Stop-Gap supporter who’s been touting the cause since their first date, Ishina said.

The Ishinas came dressed as Robin Hood and Maid Marian, also her idea. “I had nothing to do with it,” he said.

“I just thought the Robin Hood theme was perfect for him, taking from the rich and giving to the poor,” she said.

Instead of arrows, Ishina carried plastic golf clubs in his quiver, on loan from his preschooler daughter. “She doesn’t hit the balls; she hits me with them instead,” he said.

An O.C. export

As guests cut into their dessert of swan profiterole in chocolate sauce, a group of Stop-Gap players took the stage to demonstrate what the group is all about, performing in “When No Means No,” a touring play about date rape.

“We took it out as a prevention play, but we’re getting a lot of intervention,” Laffoon said after the applause subsided. “At one school, a girl came up to us in the afternoon and said, ‘I took a lunch break and went home and told my mother about what happened to me, and she reacted the same as the mother in the play.’ ”

The group’s other traveling plays and workshops deal with such issues as substance abuse, ethnic diversity and racial prejudice, AIDS education, and self-esteem.

Stop-Gap was born in 1979 “right here in Orange County,” Laffoon said, and now its productions and drama therapy workshops extend as far as the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County. The $18,000 raised last Thursday will help the programs expand even further, Bryan said.