BOOK BUCKS: When financially strapped Orange County...

BOOK BUCKS: When financially strapped Orange County cut hours at several of its libraries to two days a week, some city councils found that cash opens doors. La Palma pays $60,000 to keep its county library branch going four days a week; Villa Park pays $23,000 for a smaller facility. Garden Grove picks up $93,000 annual rent for a pair of two-day-a-week branches. . . . In La Palma, a commission recommends a joint operating agency so cities with county libraries can help run them and “make the library stronger and less vulnerable,” says commissioner Larry Herman.

CRYSTAL PEWS: Phil Stevens, president of the Walking Shield American Indian Society, was at services at Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove when the Rev. Robert Schuller remarked that the 15-year-old pews would be replaced. Stevens saw opportunity. . . . On Saturday, 10 trucks from the Sioux Indian Nation will pull up to the church’s doors and haul the old pews to needy churches on reservations in North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.

CAKE & CHRISTIE: Everyone gets their just desserts at the New Community Center Theatre in Irvine. . . . Its upcoming series is “dessert theater”--coffee and sweets by candlelight during the play. At $15, it’s about half the cost of dinner theater. Director Ryan Kray and her board canceled desserts mid-season last year. But an onslaught of complaints brings them back with this year’s first play: Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Nile,” beginning Sept. 15. Says Kray: “Our audience has good taste.”

EXAMINING ELVIS: If you thought all that could be said about Elvis Presley has been said--well, this week there’s an academic look at the King. . . . Orange Coast College sociology professor Dorothy Leasman is in Oxford, Miss., for an international conference on Elvis. Says Leasman: “I’ve never heard anybody talk academically about how Elvis merged the black and white cultures, about his religion, about why he used drugs.”