Looking for Money in the Right Places
San Diego attorney Charles Sevilla, who writes a “Great Moments in Courtroom History” column for legal publications, collected this trial excerpt:
Witness: “She was fondling me, you know. We were playing, you know. We were goofing around. She was fondling me and it took her a little while, but she found it.”
Judge: “Would you clarify that, please?”
Attorney: “Found what?”
Witness: “Found the wallet.”
L.A. vs O.C.: In the eternal Southern California rivalry, some Angelenos may take pride in the fact that the Thomas Guide people put out an edition titled “Los Angeles and Orange Counties” (see accompanying).
After all, L.A. has top billing.
What the Angelenos might not know is that south of the Orange Curtain, the Irvine-based Thomas Guide publishes an edition titled “Orange and Los Angeles Counties.”
DRINK UP, IF YOU DARE: Wendy Mollett of Studio City came upon a variety of sake that seemed to think it was a bottle of tequila (see accompanying).
SLICE OF LIFE: My colleague Bob Pool spotted a clean-cut guy, smartly dressed for the links, a golf bag at his side, hitchhiking on Pacific Coast Highway.
As Pool said: “He was clearly looking for a driver.”
L.A. NOIR TOAST: For Barbara Fowlie of Ventura, the mention here of the old Ships coffee shops “brought to mind my first ‘Only in L.A.’ moment.”
Fowlie, visiting L.A. in the 1970s from her then-home in Michigan, was dining at the counter of the Westwood Ships “when a man sat down next to me and put bread in the toaster that he and I were sharing.”
(As I said, Ships was unique in offering self-serve toasters at every table, as well as on the counter.)
“When the toast popped up,” Fowlie continued, “he pressed down the lever and continued to toast the already browned bread. Pretty soon black smoke was issuing forth. I turned to him urgently, exclaiming, ‘Your toast is burning!’
“He smiled and removed his coal-black toast, all the while sharing--uninvited--the information that his psychiatrist had confirmed he suffered trauma as a child when his mother wouldn’t allow him to eat burned toast. So now he was indulging in repressed fantasies by acting them out.”
Probably a screenwriter.
NO VEGETARIANS FROM BEYOND: After reading some of the recipes of mystery novelists in this column the other day, James Glass recalled an episode of TV’s “The Twilight Zone” in which extraterrestrials land on Earth with a book titled “To Serve Man.”
These Bad Samaritan E.T.s are hungry to meet people, literally. “To Serve Man,” some earthlings find out after boarding the spaceship, is a recipe book.
THAT’S NO SPICY MEATBALL! Incidentally, in “The Triggerman’s Dance,” author T. Jefferson Parker cites a disturbing dining trend that I’ve noticed. When FBI Agent Sharon Dumars and Orange County Journal columnist Susan Baum stop to dine in a Laguna Beach restaurant, Baum says:
“Strange how all these new Italian places refuse to make spaghetti and meatballs.”
I think these places are full of baloney.
miscelLAny:
Yes, the Orange County Journal is a fictional newspaper. Lately, don’t know why, I’ve been thinking of the newspaper in the 1970s TV show “Lou Grant.” That one was called the Los Angeles Tribune.
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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.
