MacArthur Park is draining in the dark...

MacArthur Park is draining in the dark . . . : And artist John Woods gets the leftovers.

Twice when the lake was emptied in the last two decades, Woods scurried about the bed, collecting treasures. And he’s assembled them into art pieces that form the display, “MacArthur Park Lost and Found,” currently on exhibit in the City Hall rotunda.

The kaleidoscopic show features hundreds of bottles of iridescent hues, a painting of the lake framed by multicolored marbles, more than 100 guns (including two of the squirt variety), thousands of coins, as well as various hotel keys, credit cards, dog tags and a registered newsboy badge from Syracuse, N.Y.

“This is the last display of its kind,” said Woods, a retired aerospace engineer. “The material in the lake is all gone. We’ve become a paper and plastic society. You won’t be able to find coins years from now because most of them are made of aluminum and they’ll dissolve.”

Woods’ collection used to be larger, but the guns he collected after the 1973 lake draining were taken by Los Angeles police.

“They investigated them to see if they were used in a crime,” he said. “Nothing was ever established that I heard of. But I never got the guns back. Same with the case of grenades I found.”

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Down but not out in Hollywood: Our mention of Joe Tuotti, the homeless man who brought along a play he had written to a free Thanksgiving meal at the Hard Rock Cafe, stunned director/producer Robert Soluri.

“It’s amazing that Joe Tuotti is on the streets,” Soluri said, pointing out that Tuotti wrote several plays, including one Broadway hit of the 1960s--”Big Time Buck White”--that starred Muhammad Ali, among others.

“Buck White,” a comedy/drama about the black experience, was described by one critic as a mixture of “menace, anger and laughter . . . with roughhouse ingenuity.”

Soluri, who is trying to contact Tuotti to talk about the new work, said it’s ironic that the playwright’s status would be in the news just as the movie “Malcolm X” hits the screens.

“This guy (Tuotti) was so far ahead of his time,” Soluri said.

Indeed, one character in “Big Time” was compared to Malcolm X. The other irony was that the play, developed through the aid of the Watts Writers’ Workshop, originally opened on the site of a building that had been torched in the L.A. riots--of 1965.

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Hoping for a spot on ‘Eyewitness Video’? As the California Highway Patrol and a tow truck were untangling two cars that crashed on the freeway, one of the drivers pulled out the latest automobile accessory--a video camera--to tape the scene.

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See no evil: A pop star walked into a posh San Fernando Valley gift shop the other day and bought 100 pairs of figurines as Christmas presents. Each pair consisted of monkeys--one wearing a drama mask, one wearing a comedy mask, both with their hands tied, as though in bondage.

By coincidence, the pop star is also the author of a rather kinky bestseller.

MiscelLAny:

As part of International Space Year, NASA recently honored filmmaker Steven Spielberg as well as E.T. for their efforts on behalf of space exploration. E.T. has also been featured in NASA’s “Love Your Planet” poster, even though he’s not from this one.