Lakewood habits: Lakewood High, nationally known for...
Lakewood habits: Lakewood High, nationally known for the busy sex lives of its Spur Posse boys, held an open house and variety show the other night. The first act featured girls who twirled flags while singing tunes from the Whoopie Goldberg movie “Sister Act.” They were dressed as nuns.
X marks the point of departure: Our mention of L.A.’s lack of an official city ditty prompted Marielle Smith of Silver Lake to nominate “Los Angeles,” recorded by the punk band X a few years ago. “The chorus,” she notes, is: ‘She had to get out/ Get out/ Get out/ Get out’--an appropriate anthem for all who fled to Seattle.”
The grass is always greener, incorporated: On the subject of resettling, for every restless Angeleno, there seems to be a friendly out-of-stater ready to assist the process.
For a price, of course.
This flee-the-cottage industry holds its social event of the season May 8 at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena--the Greener Pastures Expo/Find Your Personal Eden Conference. It costs a neighborly $75 per ticket ($135 per couple).
The consultants will dispense such idyllic visions of country living as the following, which appeared in the Greener Pastures Gazette:
A small-town auto mechanic “probably won’t rip you off for hundreds or thousands in unnecessary repairs because he has a local reputation to uphold (in L.A., mechanics often don’t know where their customers even come from).”
The gazette, by the way, is published in Nevada, where most of the bandits are one-armed.
Know your suburbs: Sun Valley, so named by the Chamber of Commerce in 1948, includes a region that was once called Roberts and, later, Roscoe. And therein lies a tale.
Roberts was the site of a robbery of a Southern Pacific train, which “led to the place being identified as Roscoe,” according to the book, “The San Fernando Valley, Then and Now.” “There are conflicting stories as to whether Roscoe was the name of the robber, the engineer of the train or a brakeman who lived nearby.”
Or the brakeman’s dog.
The Pulitzer Prize for goof-offs: Humorist Art Buchwald, who’ll deliver the May 7 commencement address at USC, is the sponsor of an unusual scholarship for journalism students there.
Buchwald specifies that the winner must be “anti-Establishment, contemptuous of the scholarship and willing to bite the hand that feeds him.”
One winner, Greg Spring, spent the $2,000 award on expenses while following the Grateful Dead from concert to concert.
miscelLAny:
The first anniversary of you know what just passed. That’s right, as photographer Doug Churchill points out, April 29, 1992, was the day Johnny Carson Park was dedicated in Burbank (see photo). Funny, but the event had slipped our mind.