‘Pagliacci’ Opens the Fall Social Season

The fall social season will be launched Sept. 4 when the Los Angeles Music Center Opera opens the season with Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” with Placido Domingo, Veronica Villarroel and Juan Pons in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Mary Hayley and Selim K. Zilkha are chairs of the black-tie dining and dancing gala on the Music Center Plaza. It follows the performance.

Barbara Piasecka Johnson is honorary chairwoman.

Also supporting the gala will be Kelly and Robert Day, United Airlines, Fayez Sarofim and Zilkha.

Luminaries on the committee include Karim Amiryani, Lila and Roy Ash, Tamara Asseyev, Hannah Carter, Alice and Joseph Coulombe, Barbara and Marvin Davis, Lenore and Bernard Greenberg, Carol and Warner Henry, Jennie and Edmund Kaufman, Mary Marshall, Margie and Jerry Perenchio, Richard C. Seaver, Rose Tarlow, Flora Thornton and Gary Wilson.

*

Garden Supper: A garden supper at the Brentwood home of Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan will inaugurate the UCLA Humanities Consortium on Sept. 8.

College of Letters and Science Provost Brian P. Copenhaver, Dean of Humanities Pauline Yu and the UCLA Humanities Executive Council will host the affair. Wallis Annenberg, Gil and Sukey Garcetti and Andrew Galef will be among the 150 guests. The committee is co-chaired by Betty Sigoloff and Nancy Vreeland.

*

Breezy: The breezes in Rancho Santa Fe couldn’t blow strongly enough to cool down the luncheon Gerald and Robert Parsky hosted at their Buena Vista Farms on the last day of the Republican National Convention. New York party planner Clive David massed white umbrellas over the tennis court for 200 guests. Still the butter turned to liquid--in the shade.

The Parskys, chairmen of the San Diego Host Committee, but still Angelenos, too, mixed governors and delegates with California pals--Gov. Pete Wilson and Gayle, former Ambassador to Mexico John Gavin and Connie, Joanne and Roger Kozberg, Russell and Carol Penniman, Ginie Braun, Tom Kranz, Peter and Kacey McCoy.

In the evening they hosted 600 for dinner at the Hyatt Regency with co-hosts Alex and Fay Spanos. The Doles and Kemps didn’t show, but San Diego Mayor Susan Golding accepted a rousing “Happy Birthday” salute.

Elsewhere on the Social Circuit

Santa Monica Museum of Art benefited from the screening of Miramax Films’ “Basquiat” at Pacific Design Center . . . The Women’s Care Cottage benefited from the Beautiful People Awards brunch at Sheraton Universal Hotel. The cottage serves homeless women and children in the San Fernando Valley.

* UCLA is one of only five universities recognized by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education with the 1996 Circle of Excellence Award in Educational Fund Raising. Others are UC San Francisco; the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . . . Doran H. Ross has been named to head the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, succeeding Christopher B. Donnan . . . Patricia R. Anawalt has been named by the Archaeological Institute of America to serve as the Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lecturer, speaking at local AIA societies across the nation.

* Nedra Zachary received the decoration of Merit in Gold from Austria as co-founder and director of the National Vocal Competition for Young Opera Singers sponsored by the Loren L. Zachary Society.

* Mary Lou Loper’s column is published Sundays.