Block Party

Always on the lookout for anything that melds literary arts with calorie burning, our eye was drawn to a flyer touting “Writing Aerobics.”

Speedtyping to cardiovascular fitness? A new way to cut flabbiness from copy? Fat chance. These are workshops for motivating the blocked pen-pusher.

Presented by writing group leaders Judith Burns and Ramon Angeloni, participants are put through four hours of creative exercises, including pairing off with other dysfunctional scribes to write dialogue or picking a word out of a hat and writing for 15 minutes about it.

“It’s not structured as a critical group,” said Burns. “It kind of lets your imagination go. It’s done to get the creative juices flowing.”

And although the flyer implied that the perennial problem of many writers--laziness--might be dealt with, Burns said that wasn’t the case: “For 25 bucks, what do you want--miracles?”

Hey, Hey, It’s a Monkee!

We knew there would be lots of excitement last week when former Monkee Davey Jones appeared as himself in “The Real Live Brady Bunch” at the Westwood Playhouse. (Let’s see, Davey Jones playing himself, re-creating the role he played as himself on the TV version of “The Brady Bunch”--that’s like so Zen, you know?) But we weren’t prepared for all-out pandemonium when Jones appeared on stage. When the spotlight shone on his preternaturally cherubic face, the audience jumped to its feet, nearly stopping the show. And some of those people weren’t just your ordinary ‘70s teen idol fans; some were members of the Monkees fan club.

Yes, there is a Monkees fan club, a 2,000-member group headquartered in Trenton, N. J., where Maggie McManus reigns as president. “We sent out postcards to our members in Los Angeles to let them know he was appearing in the play,” she explained. “We publish the Monkee Business Fanzine four times a year, and have a monthly hot line so people can find out about the dates of their appearances. This is the way our members can network, so they can find out where the guys are going to be. That’s a big problem, especially when they’re performing solo.”

Essentials

WHAT YOU NEED TO MANEUVER THE L.A. SCENE: The boom in high-tech communications tools has given us cellular phones, car faxes, picture phones and answering machines that don’t even include a machine. Still, it seems to be that the more phone gadgets someone has, the less likely he or she is to return a phone call. It’s truly the ultimate power trip.