In her greatest role--as herself!Adrienne Omansky made...

In her greatest role--as herself!

Adrienne Omansky made reservations to fly with her mother, Celia Kushner, to Chicago, but when they went to pick up their tickets, they ran into a problem.

Omansky’s mother couldn’t provide any identification, Omansky said, “because she doesn’t drive. They weren’t going to let us get on the plane even though Mother’s going to be 84 in two weeks.”

But Kushner is in Omansky’s city-sponsored acting class. She pulled out a glossy photo of herself with her name on it. “That passed,” Omansky said. “So you see there are some benefits to being an actor in L.A.”

Assuming you’re an actor who looks something like your glossy.

FOR THOSE WHO LIKE TO LIVE ON THE EDGE: Thomas Appleton of Malibu came across an odd sort of offer--from a company apparently willing to help you obtain bad credit (see accompanying).

MISSING INFLATABLES REPORT: When Coco, a 30-foot-tall gorilla balloon, disappeared from a Whittier car dealership, its owner--Creatable Inflatables--offered a 1,000-banana reward as well as $1,000 in cash.

You knew someone would bite. Sure enough, a janitor at nearby La Serna High reported seeing the creature on the roof of the school, where it was apparently parked by some students. And he will receive the award--at least as much of it as he wants.

The balloon recovery was a relief to David Benites of Inflatables. “It’s worth close to $10,000,” he said of Coco. “You can’t imagine how much work goes into these.”

This was, in fact, the third recent snatching of an inflatable made by the South El Monte company. Some college kids took a 30-foot-tall Frankenstein owned by the city of Azusa. They returned it when they saw the incident featured on television (we think it was the show “America’s Most Wanted Inflatables”).

And a 20-foot-tall Maytag repairman balloon owned by a Pasadena appliance store was also stolen a while back. It’s still missing.

Of course, the store is only offering a $50 reward.

TWO-FACED? THREE-FACED? Jordan Austin of Port Hueneme, after reading the wording on a facial tissue box, says: “I don’t mind using the ‘recycled’ portion but I don’t even want to think about what the ‘post-consumer’ portion might contain!’ ”

VISITOR FROM EARTH: Parodying a recent disaster movie, the Planetary Society has put up billboards around town declaring: “This Independence Day, EARTH INVADES MARS!”

The space aficionados group is staging Planetfest ’97 at the Pasadena Convention Center July 4-6, coinciding with the scheduled Independence Day landing of Earth’s Pathfinder on Mars. After the landing, a six-wheeled land rover named Sojourner will do a bit of exploring. Live images from the red planet will be shown on a giant screen at Planetfest.

We’ll be watching to see if any of the images contain the Maytag repairman.

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When the shah of Iran was overthrown by revolutionaries in 1979, Los Angeles Road in Tehran was renamed Islamic Dress Road. But Newsday’s Nicholas Goldberg reports that most everyone--even those born after 1979--still call it Los Angeles Road. The new name for Queen Elizabeth Road--Peasant-Farmer Boulevard--never caught on, either. Of course, the latter might be more applicable if the street had previously been called Princess Di Road.