A Red-Letter Weekend for the Wacky

The Redondo Beach Lobster Festival is back. But this year there won’t be lobster marriages on the white sandy beach. Nor will grown men dressed as lobsters be seen parasailing behind speedboats skipping across the ocean. Nor will you see a team called the Caped Crustaceans parachuting into the small lagoon where the festival is held.

No. This year festival organizers will be shooting people into the air via some kind of weird bungee contraption so they can try their luck at grabbing a plastic lobster dangling at the end of a rope. Kids will be participating in a lobster-calling contest. And pirates will be hanging out on the beach.

“It is a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek type of thing,” Redondo Beach Mayor Greg Hill said. “But it’s a lot of fun.”

The third annual festival, which starts this afternoon and runs through Sunday at King Harbor, seems to include everything needed to guarantee that a horde of people will show up. There is live music, lots of food and a host of wacky events that might go down in the city’s memory as a weekend not to be forgotten.

Most important, as any festival organizer knows, is the wacky.

“You have to come up with innovative ways to attract people,” said Kathi Sharpe-Ross, a public relations and marketing consultant who recently organized the Ultimate Brainfreeze Challenge Competition in Santa Monica. “People are living in an interactive media age. You really have to work harder to get their attention.”

Attention grabbers can range from free food samples to unusual events. Last year, organizers of a Mexican Independence Day celebration in South El Monte held a giant macarena dance-a-thon to try to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. They enticed 75,000 people to show up.

At a recent Scottish Festival in San Juan Capistrano, there was a bony knees contest for all men wearing kilts.

“You try to do the interesting and the unique,” said Lisa Pacini, a public relations and marketing specialist in Laguna Beach. For the California Recreational Vehicle Show this weekend in Pomona, she has booked the Victor McLaglen Motor Corps, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle stunt and drill team, to entertain the crowds.

But few can surpass lobster festival organizer Jim Hall for his wild and crazy ideas that keep the crowds coming every year.

“Festivals are expensive to produce. This one will cost $4,000 an hour and is 28 hours long,” Hall said, sitting in a restaurant overlooking the Seaside Lagoon at King Harbor, where the festival begins at 4 p.m. today. Workmen were busy laying planks to create a mock Atlantic City boardwalk. Lobster steamers were stacked to one side. More than six tons of the succulent crustaceans had been shipped from Rockville, Md.

The lobster festival began two years ago to reacquaint people with the Redondo Beach Pier, which was closed and rebuilt after gusty storms and a fire heavily damaged it in 1988. The Redondo Beach Pier Assn. hired Hall to create an event.

The first festival featured the expected and the unexpected. There was a marriage between Crustina, a 6-pound California spiny lobster, and Arnold the Terminator, a 10-pound lobster living at the Redondo Beach Marine Laboratory.

Days before the festival, Crustina had been found in Lunada Bay by Redondo Beach City Clerk John Oliver, an avid diver. He was planning to donate the female lobster to the local marine laboratory to mate with Arnold. But Hall, upon hearing of this, decided the two could not breed unless heir union was made legal.

“It was love at first bite,” Oliver said, without missing a beat. He presided over the marriage ceremony holding a lobster cookbook instead of a Bible while looking out over the white-capped waves. Hall slipped a plastic ring onto one of Crustina’s antennae. The two lobsters continue to live in the same tank at the marine laboratory, where they have spawned many offspring.

That same year, Leroy, a 10-pound Maine lobster on exhibit at the festival, was liberated from his tank by animal rights activists concerned about his future, even though Leroy was supposed to be donated to the marine laboratory. Instead he is believed to be residing in South Bay waters.

Last year, Hall had planned to launch “lobsternauts,” people dressed as lobsters, into the harbor with a trebuchet--a siege engine used for hurling stones and missiles during medieval times. But city officials nixed that idea.

They also quashed this year’s stunt that would have seen lobstermen hurling themselves from a plane to float to the festival grounds. So Hall, who is never at a loss for ideas or words, came up with the bungee idea. Participants who grab the plastic lobster get $100 donated to a charity.

“What I’m trying to do here is get more people down to the pier and rebuild a sense of community that has been lost,” said Hall, who has been working to ensure that the anticipated 20,000 festival-goers have a good time. “But on Oct. 13, I’ll have my nervous breakdown.”