MORE ALARMED: When the local Red Cross...

MORE ALARMED: When the local Red Cross chapter asked Santa Ana firefighters which area of the city needed smoke detectors most, they quickly pointed to the low-income Flower Park neighborhood. So that’s where the Red Cross, with some corporate help, will install 200 smoke detectors today. And their survey shows residents there are eager for the help. . . . “A working smoke detector cuts the risk of dying in a home fire by near half,” says the Fire Department’s Karl Feierabend. “They provide critical extra seconds to escape.”

WOODEN SOLDIER: Today’s Wooden Classic at The Pond of Anaheim is more than just a couple of college basketball games (C1). It honors legendary UCLA coach John Wooden. . . . Orange Coast College math professor Alan Sawyer well remembers Wooden’s first team in 1947, when he came up with a league winner. Sawyer played on that team. “He was a marvelous coach, and a wonderful man,” Sawyer says. “His impact on the sport may never be fully realized.” . . . The match-up (also on TV): No. 2 Villanova vs. Purdue, then UCLA vs. Maryland.

HER SHOW NOW: After riding shotgun for a decade, Diane Challis Davy, above, is enjoying her turn in the driver’s seat as the Pageant of the Masters’ new director. The former assistant director says she will create two scenes she had long imagined on the pageant stage: a recreation of New York’s civic sculpture--including the Prometheus Fountain at Rockefeller Center--and “Nighthawks,” Edward Hopper’s famous diner scene. . . . She notes: “It’s fascinating to actually be able to choose the pieces of art to be in the program.”

NAKED ART: The pageant’s next production--July 7 to Aug. 31--also will include 145 cast members, the largest number in many years, Challis Davy says. Another pageant change: more “nudes” than ever. . . . The nine male and female “nudes” will wear only “sort of a G-string affair,” she says. “It’s sort of our answer to the fig leaf.”

TONIGHT: Cal State Fullerton’s dinner and concert by the University Singers at 6:30, in the UC Pavilion, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. (714) 773-3511.