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No Butterflies on Your Behind

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Once upon a time, when everything was laid back and loosey-goosey, they referred to Santa Monica as L.A.’s mellow little sister, a place where life was sweet and hassles didn’t exist.

Well, that’s all changing. Seems now the city is always trying to regulate something, to forbid, to frown upon, to limit or require.

They’ve been pecking away at street vendors, for instance, for about the past 10 years, and now they’re at it again.

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The Targets of the Day are the henna artists who work the Third Street Promenade, an easy string of shops and restaurants just a spit away from the ocean. Everything from psychic cats to one-man bands have coexisted on the Promenade since the beginning, trying their best to dodge the regulators and earn a few bucks from the passersby.

Public safety is pretty much the excuse regulators use for forbidding this or limiting that among the street performers, but I can’t for the life of me see how henna artists are affecting anyone’s safety.

They don’t carry Uzis and their tables aren’t big enough to block the street in case a Godzilla monster looms up out of the ocean, like in those Japanese movies when everyone goes screaming through Tokyo.

And they don’t outrage public decency either. You couldn’t get a henna artist to tattoo a butterfly on your behind if you begged him.

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When I talk about henna tattoos I don’t mean the kinds of permanent imprints sailors got during drunken sprees in foreign ports.

Henna body art, or mehndi, originated about 5,000 years ago with roots in India, Africa and the Middle East. It usually involves mystic designs like Celtic bands or Indian swirls and doesn’t specialize in naked women, swastikas or serpents entwined around a globe and anchor.

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The designs are applied with a brown paste made from crushed henna leaves and fade away in about three weeks, unlike the tattoos you get if you’re an outlaw biker. Those last until you’re chain-whipped into Harley Heaven.

Celebrities like Madonna and Sharon Stone helped popularize henna art by having themselves adorned, and the teenagers followed. They in turn were pursued by worried parents who for some reason began to equate henna tattoos with things like sex and drugs or, worse, bad grades and no dates.

Cops, preachers, teachers and city regulators followed, waving Bibles, citation books and municipal codes.

Deputy City Atty. Patrick Brooks came running too. He’s part of a team drafting an ordinance aimed at regulating street performers. Partial (gasp) nudity is one of the issues. In addition to clearing the streets so that people might flee from Godzilla, the city, by God, wants no nakedness on the Promenade. Brooks says that henna fans are “baring parts of their bodies that pedestrians don’t want to see while they’re dining.” Uh-huh.

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I talked to some henna artists about this and they swore upon Siva’s grave that they don’t encourage nor would they even think about applying a henna design to any part of the body considered, in their words, “private.”

For those bewildered by the reference, this would include all of one’s various erogenous zones but not, say, one’s ears or toes.

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The henna artists do mostly intricate designs around ankles, wrists and upper arms, body parts which, if exposed, ought not to knock anyone into their linguine. One of them did confess he henna’d a belly button once but it was in front of a bookstore, not a restaurant.

All of the artists I spoke with are young guys who have studied art and are offended by a section of the proposed ordinance that wants to change their classification from artists to “free speech vendors,” whatever that is.

“They’re trying to eliminate us through reclassification,” 22-year-old Mark Vahamaki said angrily. “People who make noise are the problem on the Promenade, not artists. We don’t make noise.”

Jerry Rubin, the legendary pit bull of peace and free speech, is organizing a campaign to keep the henna artists in business, waving enough writs and petitions to make even a dedicated bureaucrat think twice.

Patrick Brooks says they’re all trying to work things out. The henna artists, for instance, are willing to use smaller blankets they sometimes lay on the ground around their tables. This would minimize tripping by panicked crowds fleeing from Godzilla.

That and the no-butterflies-on-the-behind pledge ought to satisfy the city’s regulators for . . . hell . . . weeks.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.

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