Tea-Goers Make Off With the BW Silver

It seems the menus and silverware were out the door long before the last shoppers left the now-closed Bullocks Wilshire.

The store’s fifth-floor Tea Room, the scene of countless high-society soirees, was down to 10 menus and forced to use plastic cutlery in the store’s final days.

“Any silver with BW on it disappeared,” said one employee. “It was obviously going into handbags and suit pockets.”

Menus disappeared as well. While that could be made up with photocopies, silverware doesn’t Xerox so well.

If there’s a bright side to this, it’s that somewhere someone is stirring a cup of tea with a souvenir that is keeping alive the memory of what was L.A.’s greatest store.

But Not Fit for Oscar

Since there is now “the director’s cut” in filmmaking, it’s only natural the art should evolve to “the tailor’s cut.”

Both the clothes and the guests will be starring in scenes from “Lawrence of Arabia” shown on video screens at the Beverly Hills Emporio Armani benefit for the Pediatric AIDS Foundation in early May.

Selected party-goers will be dressed in the Italian designer’s spring collection and filmed, then, through the use of “blue screen” editing techniques, superimposed into scenes from David Lean’s epic. This is somewhat like the “Casablanca” Coca-Cola commercials, but with slightly more subliminal advertising.

The 30-second epics will later run on monitors in the store’s window--which probably won’t qualify anyone for Oscar consideration.

Doubles All Around

This might be a sign of the continuing recession, comparison shopping taken to extreme or the female equivalent of soldiers getting tattoos together: The waitress staff of a high-profile West L. A. eatery recently traveled en masse to Phoenix for what is colloquially known as a “boob job.”

“Their spirits have been notably lifted as well,” reported a fellow employee.