Boyz ‘N the White House: Twenty months...

Boyz ‘N the White House: Twenty months ago, two members of L.A. street gangs were invited to President Clinton’s inauguration, a gesture that hasn’t been forgotten by some Los Angeles police. On a wall inside the LAPD’s Newton Station in South-Central, a list of the most active gangs in the area includes a fictitious entry at No. 6:

“Clinton Gangster Crips.”

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A bureaucrat who should stay after school: “As I have taken an early retirement,” writes former high school teacher Andrew DiConti, “I did so with the thought of adding time to those ‘Golden Years.’ ”

You can imagine his disappointment, then, over the note he received from the El Monte Union High School District, which began with a warning of several personal disasters.

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Clearing Floogie’s name: Lloyd Peyton of L.A. and several others take issue with the reader who theorized that the name in the 1940s song, “Flat-Foot Floogie with the Floy-Floy,” was slang for prostitute.

“I have in front of me ‘The American Thesaurus of Slang’ and the entry for prostitute shows no floogie among the over 150 entries,” he wrote. “She (the reader) may mistakenly have been referring to floosie and its several variations, floosy , floozey , flossy and fluzie .”

Peyton adds: “That was my era and, in that innocent time, no one would have thought to use such a term in an upbeat nonsense song.”

OK, we’ll take his word for it. But if Floogie wasn’t a street-walker, how did her feet get flat?

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List of the day: Several longtime eateries in the L.A. area began with different names (and, in some cases, offered different services). A few examples:

* Denny’s Restaurant (Danny’s Donuts, Lakewood, 1953)

* Bob’s Big Boy (Bob’s Pantry, Glendale, 1936)

* Little Joe’s (Italian-American Grocery Co., Downtown L.A., 1910)

* Joe Jost’s (Joe Jost’s Barber Shop, Long Beach, 1924)

* Carl’s Jr. (The Blimp, South-Central L.A., 1941)

* Taix (Les Freres Taix, Downtown L.A., 1927)

* Baja Sharkeez (Buffalo Chips, Santa Monica, 1964)

* Johnie’s Coffee Shop (Romeo’s Times Square, Wilshire Boulevard, 1952)

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Their first fight: Barry Stone, Jens Peermann and Patricia Rivera all phoned to say it could be a confrontational honeymoon inside that auto whose for-sale ad we published Wednesday. You may recall it was the car whose accessories included “fiance available.” Anyway, they point out that the ad says the car also comes with “duel air.”

miscelLAny:

Ortho Mattress Co., two radio stations and the makers of the new comedy, “Camp Nowhere,” are sponsoring a bed race down Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills on Saturday from 10 a.m. until noon. The vehicles, twin-sized beds on four wheels, will be supplied by the mattress company. The public is welcome. Is Ortho’s participation an indication that the movie will put viewers to sleep?