Odds & Ends Around the Valley

Family of Hyphenates

Kathryn Holcomb--Kitty to friends--is an actress probably best remembered for playing Bruce Boxleitner’s sister on the ‘70s ABC television show “How the West Was Won.”

She married Boxleitner and settled down to raising their boys--Sam, now 11, and Lee, 6--in Hidden Hills, where she stayed even after she and the actor divorced.

British stage actor Ian Ogilvy--who replaced Roger Moore as Simon Templar in the CBS revival of the NBC television show “The Saint” and who has become the man in Kitty’s life--has been encouraging her to return to acting now that the boys are getting older.

“When I realized there was a theater right in my community, it seemed like such a good opportunity,” she said. She decided not to let it pass.

She is starring in and co-producing “Run for Your Wife,” a British farce transplanted to New York about a cabdriver with one wife in the Bronx and another in Yonkers.

Ogilvy is directing the Hidden Hills Theater production. The show continues weekends through June 21 at the Equity-waiver theater, which books the 97-seat house through Theatix in Hollywood. Reservations are needed to get through the Hidden Hills gate.

Once that production is over, Holcomb is going to produce and star in another, with Ogilvy co-starring and co-producing, and her sons taking supporting roles.

Offstage, Ogilvy and Holcomb plan to be married at their Hidden Hills home June 28, with Sam and Lee giving their mother away. Boxleitner is expected to make a guest appearance to wish the couple well.

Something Extra

When North Hollywood financial consultant Marlene Abronson married Northridge computer consultant Mark Widawer in May at the Calamigos Ranch in Malibu Canyon, it was a traditional formal wedding for 260 guests, which these days costs in the neighborhood of $20,000.

But at these nuptials, you could see where the money went. The couple, who met through a personal ad in the Jewish Journal, knew just how they wanted to set the tone.

Once the ceremony was completed, instead of the usual recessional music, the couple danced down the aisle to James Brown’s “I Feel Good.”

Then, instead of becoming crippled from standing for hours in high-heeled satin pumps, the bride put on tennis shoes designed by her sister with seed pearls, beads and satin laces--the better to dance the afternoon and evening away.

The couple hired the usual professional cameraman and videographer, then put a loaded camera at every reception table so that guests could add their perspectives to the event.

Instead of party favors, the couple gave donations to charities such as the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Assn., the United Jewish Fund and AIDS Project-Los Angeles, each with special significance to the guest. A donor note was tucked into each place-seating envelope.

As an example, the bride said the American Heart Assn. donation had special significance to her family since her father had died of a heart attack two years before.

Sad Earth News

Every month for three years, Dale Rae has told his wife to give it up. Her habit has cost him almost $300,000, put a strain on his environmental products business and caused him to take out a second mortgage on their Agoura house.

Until now, Judy Rae knew that she was safe in her addiction because her husband was a co-dependent and actually encouraged her.

The addiction was, and is, called the Earth News, an ecological magazine. What began as a seed of an idea that branched out quickly may now die from lack of financial nurturing.

“It all started a couple of years ago when we realized that the condition that Dale has is made worse by the bad air quality,” she said, adding that his illness, Kartagener’s syndrome, which attacks the immune system, has caused him to have pneumonia 30 times.

Judy Rae, hearing that planting trees would help clean the air, put out a newsletter telling people in the San Fernando Valley and surrounding areas about different tree-planting programs.

The next thing she knew, she was publishing a four-color magazine that covered a variety of ecological issues. The magazine costs the Raes about $30,000 an issue to print and mail.

Although at times she has gotten sponsors and other money, and now accepts Earth-friendly advertising, she says she needs a corporate sponsor or she will have to quit.

“Sometimes I am able to pay our editor, Adam Rogers, so he can pay his rent,” she said, “and sometimes I’m not.”

For Rogers to attend the Rio de Janeiro ecological conference now underway, she got an advertising trade with Varig Airlines for his plane ticket, and her mother gave her $2,000 for expenses.

“That’s the way we have done things,” Rae said. “It’s always out of our pocket or by sheer luck.”

She says it would be easy to say the magazine is too much trouble, too expensive, too time-consuming, too draining on everyone in the family, because for her that is the reality. But that’s not all of it.

The idea of the publication was, and is, that each individual can make a contribution to an ecological turnaround, and she thought that the magazine was hers.

“We mail out about 25,000 issues, and we have exposure in all the Vons stores, courtesy of the Apartment Guild publication that gives us free rack space,” Rae said. “In the two years we have been in business, we have gotten a lot of encouragement and become acquainted with a lot of people who are friendly to our publication--people like Kenny Loggins, Ed Begley, Tippi Hedren, Lindsay Wagner and Dennis Weaver.”

She’d like to help save the Earth, but she’s got to save her magazine first.

Overheard

“It looks like they’re bringing them here by the busload from Bel-Air and Beverly Hills.”

--Woman to a friend while looking at the Nancy Reagan look-alikes packed into the lunchtime dining room at the Bistro Garden at Coldwater