UCLA Will Be Skirting the Issue of Celtic Pride

If you see dozens of men clad in plaid skirts running around UCLA, it’s not frat house high jinks.

It could be Irishmen getting ready for Celticfest 1994, a celebration of Celtic culture that will bring together skirted bagpipers in traditional dress--Irish step dancers, Highland dancers in tartans and others--for a festival believed to be the first of its kind in Los Angeles County.

The event is scheduled for this weekend at Sunset Intramural Field near the corner of Sunset and Westwood boulevards.

“Putting all this Celtic culture on display is really a beautiful thing,” said Allyn Anderson, vice president of the Southern California Irish Fair Foundation, the primary sponsor of the event.

And if you’re hungry, forget about sun-dried tomatoes, and make way for some good old Celtic cholesterol.

Promoters urge people to try the “tasty and delicious Celtic foods--bangers, meat pies, Irish sausages and Cornish pasties.”

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IS BEVERLY HILLS BURNING?: This is the city known for oh-so-chic dinner parties and diamond-studded celebs roaming ritzy Rodeo Drive, but we would like to point out a couple of recent incidents that may help counter assumptions that Beverly Hills is free from serious, if not frightening, incidents.

This from the files of the Beverly Hills cops:

Things seemed to be going OK at a dominoes game at a party the other week.

That is, until a player pulled a semiautomatic handgun from his waistband and fired at his opponent in a dispute over the score of the game.

It didn’t end there.

The opponent was not injured; the gunman was.

Party-goers chased him outside and pummeled him, leaving him with a fractured skull and crushed larynx.

Beverly Hills police say they will probably arrest the gunman, who is in fair condition at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, when he is well enough to be booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

And then consider the case of the armed robber who recently went to the trouble not only to break into a home, but also to herd its occupants into a bedroom, forcing a teen-age boy out of a bathtub in the process.

The bandit’s take? $6.

That was all the money the four people in the house had on them, police said. (In Beverly Hills?) Nobody was injured, and the robbery took all of five minutes, police said.

So, we wonder, where is Axel Foley when you need him.