NEIGHBORS : Passport to Color : Artist Leeann Lidz’s show features pieces inspired by faraway places. Putting the exhibit together had an itinerary all its own.

Artist update: Remember Leeann Lidz? She’s the Ventura artist who last fall completed a mural on the outside of the Westpark Community Center.

For that piece Lidz had to deal with the awkwardness of working at high altitudes aboard a ladder.

To display her latest work she had only to deal with Los Angeles traffic. It was a discomfort, but a mild one.

Lidz logged a total of about 10 hours driving time, to and from the USC Hillel Gallery, in preparation for the show.

Taking the coastal route and combining business with pleasure, however, eased the pain.

And the travel time paid off. Lidz has about 15 paintings on exhibit in the show titled “Color--Two Perspectives,” which she is sharing with fellow artist Michael Jacobs.

Some of her work has a tropical theme, some has a Jewish theme, but all of the pieces have plenty of color. Hence the name of the exhibit.

“Both of us paint with very bright colors,” Lidz said. “I lived in South America for some time and lived in Hawaii. I was influenced by that.”

Lidz also spent time on an Israeli kibbutz, which is where she got the idea for a painting in this show titled “Kibbutz Galilee.”

She originally did the piece as an illustration for a children’s story she wrote, about two children who go to Israel and have to follow a series of clues to find their parents.

Admit it. This scenario has a familiar ring to it: You’re in the midst of a telephone conversation with someone who has call-waiting and another call comes in that is deemed more important. So you’re dismissed.

It’s tough on you and it’s tough on the person who has to rate the value of the calls.

Well, Thousand Oaks resident Winifred Meiser thinks that she has a solution to the problem--a telephone-company recording that would let a caller know if the person being called is already on the line.

This, Meiser said, would not only cut down on those tough decisions, it would also save some money.

“Let’s say you and I are on the phone. You’re a local call, but it is really important,” she said. “While we’re talking, somebody calls me from Seattle, so the person from Seattle cuts in on call-waiting. I hate to put her on hold. If she’s on hold, it’s costing her money while you and I talk. If she had known I was on the phone she probably would have hung up and called me later.”

Meiser presented the idea at a trade show in Anaheim, and is talking with a representative of the Northern Telecommunications telephone company in Ontario, Canada.

The main hang-up these days is weeding through legal and procedural hassles.

Kristofer Young, a Ventura chiropractor, can sympathize with Meiser’s travails.

Getting an idea to the marketable-product stage can be very challenging, he said. “It can be awesome, completely overburdening to some people.”

Young wanted to develop a product that would enable people to display bumper stickers without actually sticking them to bumpers.

“I had a bumper sticker that I was dying to put on my car,” he said, “but I didn’t want to put it on the paint, and I didn’t want to have to peel it off, and that kind of hassle.”

Young decided to forgo putting a bumper sticker on his car until one day when he saw one--”I Love Chiropractic”--that he just had to have.

“I wanted desperately to put it on my car,” he said. So he came up with the idea of placing a bumper sticker holder on the car’s rear window for a no-muss, no-fuss display.

Alas, it’s already been done by a man in Portland.

“There is already a patent that covers my idea,” Young said. The Oregonian has sold 50,000 of the items, but is not satisfied with the results.

He may be willing to let Young work on the idea too.

Young is still interested, but he’s wary of putting in a lot of time on the product and then losing the rights to it.

“I don’t have time to design something that someone else is going to engulf,” he said.