Back-seat drivers, they weren’t: KROQ disc jockeys...

Back-seat drivers, they weren’t: KROQ disc jockeys Kevin and Bean supply an associate named Michael the Maintenance Man for drivers who want to qualify for the car-pool lane. But the other day they received a phone call from a woman who needed help too late.

She said she’d been ticketed in a car-pool lane even though she had two persons in the back seat. The only problem is they were dead persons, and she was driving a hearse.

“She was mad,” said Bean. “She was on her way to the funeral home and she was behind schedule.”

The unidentified hearse driver drew the sympathy of Beverly Hills lawyer Scott Zolke, who said he has agreed to represent her on a pro bono basis.

Zolke pointed out that “dead persons have certain rights. On your driver’s license, if you haven’t acknowledged that you’re an organ donor, no one can take a kidney when you die. Besides, I come from Chicago, where corpses sometimes vote.”

He said the ambiguity of the word person in the car-pool law “provides me with a shot, albeit a long one.”

Of course, counting the corpses as persons could cause other complications. After all, Zolke pointed out, the officer could have cited the driver “for the two in the back not wearing seat belts.”

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Grown-ups, don’t try this: Tri-Service, a weekly publication of jury verdicts, published the results of a trial that grew out of an unusual accident. It occurred when a production company hosted a group of commercial copywriters at an animal reserve in the Antelope Valley.

The fallen copywriter collected $99,250. One of the key points, said his attorney, Stanley Rutiz, was the testimony of experts that they had not heard of people “being allowed to stand up on an elephant.”

Still, though the victim won a judgment, no one knows whether he’ll ever be free of Dumbo phobia.

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Fido ate the wedding gown?One of the booths at Sunday’s Festival of Brides at the Beverly Hilton Hotel will advertise a new product: Weddingsurance ($129).

Offered by Fireman’s Fund, the standard policy pays up to $3,000 for the cancellation of a wedding “due to reasons beyond your control,” such as an injury to the bride or groom, damage to the site of the wedding or “damage to wedding attire within five days” of the event.

Spokesman John Kozero cited one disaster that was covered--the case of a 5-year-old boy who thought his big sister’s wedding dress was too dull and “so, he got his finger-paints out of his toy chest and fixed it up for her.”

The policy will also pay up to $1,500 for the cost of reassembling the wedding party if the photographs are damaged or lost. “That covers the transportation costs, hotel costs, re-renting of the costumes,” Kozero said.

The policy does not, however, cover the “professional liability of any vendor, such as a caterer or band that doesn’t show up.” Nor is one other reason for cancellation covered.

“We can’t underwrite love,” Kozero said.

miscelLAny:

One of the items at “A People at War,” a World War II exhibit at the federal building in West L.A., is President George Bush’s handwritten letter on his 18th birthday in which he applied for a naval aviator commission.