The personal touch:A shopper at a Beverly...
The personal touch:
A shopper at a Beverly Hills department store recently noticed a Bentley with the license plate HUSTLER parked outside. A valet explained that magazine publisher Larry Flynt was inside. Later, when the same shopper exited, he noticed that Flynt’s Bentley was gone. “You won’t believe what happened,” the valet said. “For a tip, he gave me two magazines.”
CARRYING URBAN SPRAWL TOO FAR: Marvin Jordan and Joan Bromberg of La Quinta are former Angelenos, which is ironic in view of the sample they received from a company selling personalized key tags. “Apparently this typesetter thinks that any city whose name begins with ‘L.A.’ must be a suburb of Los Angeles,” Bromberg observed.
LIST OF THE DAY: One thing you have to admit about folks in the entertainment industry--they can come up with colorful names for their kids. Some examples, with the celebrity parents in parentheses:
* Chastity Bono (Sonny and Cher)
* Free Carradine (David Carradine and Barbara Seagull; Free has since changed his name to Tom, while Seagull has gone back to being known as Barbara Hershey)
* Montana Fishburne (Laurence Fishburne)
* Bryce Dallas, Paige Carlyle and Jocelyn Carlyle Howard (Ron Howard; Bryce was conceived in Dallas; Paige and Jocelyn were conceived at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City).
* Dakota Johnson (Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith)
* Wolfgang Van Halen (Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli)
* Zelda Williams (Robin and Marsha Williams)
* Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle Willis (Bruce Willis and Demi Moore)
* Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva Zappa (Frank Zappa)
Then there’s boxer-TV personality George Foreman, who named his first son, George Edward Foreman Jr.--and the three sons that followed George Edward Foreman III, IV and V. He varied the routine for his daughter, naming her Georgetta.
FLAKY GUARANTEE: In a weekly newspaper, Maida Maynard of L.A. saw an ad for some house paint “not used,” causing her to ask: “What do you do if the paint is used? Peel it off?”
SOME RHYME, SOME REASON: About half the mail we receive now is in verse, stemming from our recent campaign on behalf of songwriters to find words that sound like “Los Angeles,” as well as “orange” and “month.”
For that great L.A. song waiting to be written, we want to thank poet Helen Friedland (“sandal-less,” “animus” and “mess,” among other submissions).
Chris Koreivo, meanwhile, paired “orange” with a playwright (“for Inge”) while Sara Oldberg rhapsodized, “Fiscal doings in the County of Orange / Have some relationship to grunge.”
As for “month” (a challenge from a reader), we thought of a legendary L.A. car dealer: “It’s been months and months / Since we heard from Madman Muntz.” (Please hold your applause.)
miscelLAny:
Zoila Rickard found a West L.A. shop with an unusual feature. “I’ve gone to Adela’s Beauty Salon for many years,” Rickard writes. “She gives a nifty haircut. She’s Romanian and could double for Meryl Streep. She has a beautiful voice and on request will softly sing while snipping and curling. We all know about singing waiters, but a singing beautician. . . .”
