He’s no Maury Wills when it comes...

He’s no Maury Wills when it comes to stealing second: A neighbor of ours, who was attending a Dodger game on Beach Towel Night, set out for the concession stand after he was handed his souvenir. Then it occurred to him that a friend who lives in the East might also like one. So he stashed his Dodger towel with a companion and went back to get another. (What would be the harm?)

“I circled around near the turnstiles and walked back,” he related. “As soon as I got the second towel, I heard a voice on a walkie-talkie say, ‘We have a two-time toweler here--he went back through the line.’ I don’t know if the guy was watching from somewhere above or what. But he must have had his eye on me the whole time. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and a guard grabbed the towel.”

Outta there!

*

Drumming up business?”Fight Crime: Shoot Back,” said a bumper sticker seen Downtown on a van--a bail bond company’s van.

You’ve been warned, all you two-time towelers out there.

*

Have they any wool?Yes sir, yes sir: A few days after we mentioned a sighting of a woman walking her two pet llamas in Pacific Palisades, we heard from Burns Lee, who photographed two neighbors and their llamas miles away in Mt. Washington.

What was that old Ogden Nash ditty about a one-L lama being a priest, a two-L lama being a beast and a three-L lama being a conflagration? Well, he wrote it in the era when the phrase “three-alarmer” was commonly used for fires.

*

The sweepers get swept: Some volunteers from the Creative Artists Agency were cleaning the beach near Playa del Rey for L.A. Works, a public action center founded by actor Richard Dreyfuss. Suddenly a group of people wearing suits and sporting earpieces showed up and asked them to leave. The suited folks were Secret Service agents, clearing the area under the path of President Clinton’s departing flight.

*

Back to the Valley: In asserting that the San Fernando Valley has been largely bypassed in L.A. crime fiction, we forgot one description of Chatsworth in a murder novel by Murray Sinclair:

“This area used to double for desert prairies in many of the old Hollywood Westerns. When I was little, I’d watched so many lousy cowboy pictures on the late show and the weekend matinees, I almost had a feeling that I knew the place without having been there before. L.A. had always been that way with me.”

Odd, in a way, that this novel would have skipped our mind, inasmuch as it’s titled: “Only in L.A.”

miscelLAny:

Ah, life in Beverly Hills. Outside a children’s clothing store on Santa Monica Boulevard, Denise Kostbar saw a sign that said: “Free Gianni Versace T-Shirt With Every $500 Purchase.”