Night Leaves Levine Too Tired to Schmooze

Any guest who thought James Levine would sweep into a private Center Club gala for a long visit was disappointed last week.

The conductor of the Met Opera Orchestra in New York spent only a few minutes at the gala celebrating his premiere performance in Segerstrom Hall.

But it was still Levine’s night. This was the man who has led one of the world’s finest orchestras for 24 seasons. Having him just pop in would have to be coup enough.

It was too bad the revered maestro was unable to spend time with the guests--supporters of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Opera Pacific and the Orange County Philharmonic Society--who had paid $175 each for the chance to sup and schmooze with him following the concert.

To be fair, the performance, including intermission, was two hours long. And Levine had flown to Orange County from San Francisco that day. Plus, he had a concert the following night.

“He’s tired,” explained a member of his entourage.

The only people who got to rhapsodize with Levine about his first night in Segerstrom Hall were Henry and Renee Segerstrom, center director Tom Tomlinson and Barbara Glabman, co-chairwoman with Laila Conlin and Richard Reinsch of the gala that raked in $100,000.

Overheard: “Wonderful acoustics,” said Levine, chatting with Henry Segerstrom as photographers crowded around them.

Later, Segerstrom would say that Levine spoke of the hall in glowing terms.

“He told me he was going to tell his New York friends that they’ve got to come out here and play,” Segerstrom said. “I told him that when we designed the center, we wanted it to be like a musical instrument. He said that was exactly what it was.”

Several rooms of the posh club were used for the crush of party-goers, mostly the who’s who of Orange County arts society: Marilyn and Tom Nielsen, Mark Johnson, Joan Beall, Pat and Marvin Weiss, Dee and Larry Higby, Edward and Helen Shanbrom, Tricia Nichols, and Tom and Joyce Tucker.

Festivities began with guests celebrating with champagne toasts. And when they weren’t oohing and aahing over the concert--a program devoted to music of Richard Strauss--they were helping themselves to an array of culinary goodies spread on serpentine buffet tables.

The event marked the first time the three arts groups have combined forces to sponsor a benefit.

“We got along great!” said Glabman, who represented the center on the gala committee. (Conlin worked on behalf of Opera Pacific, and Reinsch represented the Philharmonic.)

“Now, we’re talking about doing some more things together in the future,” Glabman said.

Stay tuned.

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Safety first: Guests at the monthly meeting of Roundtable West at the Balboa Bay Club got a mini-course in self-protection last Thursday. Paxton Quigley stood before a mostly female crowd and taught them “not to be an easy target.”

“Especially when you travel this summer, it’s important to protect yourself,” said Quigley, author of “Armed and Female” and “Not an Easy Target.”

“When you stay in a hotel, try to stay near the elevator,” she advised. “Those long corridors have nobody in them. In Vegas, for example, you can walk miles to get to your room. You become a target. Somebody opens a door, and you’re gone.

“And if something like that were to happen,” she added, “don’t scream. Yell ‘Fire!’ It brings people out of their rooms and scares the assailant away.”

Quigley also advised guests to pack red pepper spray--”legal in California,” she said--or a stun gun, though they are not her favorite means of protection, because the assailant has to be very close for them to be effective. Mini-batons and personal alarms can also be useful.

She packs a handgun.

“I had a friend who was attacked in her own home at night,” she said. “I never liked guns. But I decided then and there that I would learn to use one. I don’t want to be a victim.”

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At the same meeting, author Carolyn See had guests spellbound with her frank talk about addiction.

“If my family, one of the oldest in the country, had a coat of arms,” said the author of “Dreaming,” it would portray “a bottle of Hill & Hill blend, a bottle of moderately good Scotch and a mason jar of my mother’s salad dressing on an insanely clean sink.

“Every morning when I was a girl, I would wander out to the kitchen and see the salad dressing disappearing at a moderate rate of speed,” she said. “But there would be a new bottle of Hill & Hill and Scotch, with Mom drinking the blend and Dad drinking the Scotch.

“Our family was riddled with drugs, drink, depression and divorce. You can’t really get ahead, as it were.”

See’s wry and brave memoir talks about family life as it really is. In her book, she says of the wild life: “It’s ruined us, but it’s helped to save us too. It’s given us our stories . . . made us who we are.”

And there’s more of it in the American Dream than “we’re ever, ever going to be able to acknowledge or admit.”