Good Gravy! That’s What GOP Means?

Food for thought: The other day, I published the photo of the Culver City bakery with the sign that said: “Florida ballots 4/$1.” Now, with Americans hungry for some resolution of the election, Howard Cohen of North Hills noticed what seemed to be a tirade against the Republican Party on a restaurant bill (see accompanying).

EXPLANATION: The restaurant told Cohen that “GOP” stands for “gravy on potatoes.”

RESPONSE: So? I always thought that’s what the Republicans said “GOP” stands for, too.

KILL ‘EM WITH LAUGHS: For this column’s pre-Halloween 2001 section, David Ruggeri of Anaheim shared a mention of a place not usually associated with entertainment while Dee Hartman of Encino offered an ad with a faulty (and eerie) rendering of “port-a-potty” (see accompanying).

CHAIR MAN OF THE SKIES: Over the years I’ve written about Larry Walters, the North Hollywood truck driver who made one of history’s strangest aerial journeys on July 2, 1982. As he later retold it, he strapped himself to a lawn chair attached to several weather balloons, lifted off from San Pedro and stayed aloft for two hours, reaching an altitude of 16,000 feet and startling at least two airline pilots.

Walters gradually descended into Long Beach by shooting out the weather balloons with a pellet gun. He was later fined $1,500 by the FAA for endangering aerial traffic but at least got to appear on David Letterman’s TV show.

“Surprisingly, Walters’ life was never transformed into a made-for-TV movie,” I wrote several years ago.

But it has inspired a new musical--”The Flight of the Lawn Chair Man”--now appearing in Philadelphia. The plot doesn’t strictly follow Walters’ story. First, it’s set in Passaic, N.J. (What--Passaic is more romantic than San Pedro?) And, too, the play’s lawn chair pilot encounters Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart on his journey, while Walters did not (at least I don’t think he saw Earhart).

Anyway, it’s too bad Walters isn’t around to enjoy the spinoff. He committed suicide in 1993.

WHEN THE BANDINI HIT THE BLADES: In a discussion of tricks that USC and UCLA students have inflicted on each other prior to their annual football clash, I related the attempted fertilizer drop on the Tommy Trojan statue in 1958. I said the Bruin bombers misjudged the wind and had the stuff blown back in their faces. Not all of the stuff, though.

USC alum Irene Kennedy writes: “I was just coming out of my dorm, Town and Gown, when this attempt was made. I watched the fertilizer drift toward the Rose Garden in Exposition Park.”

So, she added, “perhaps some good was done.”

miscelLAny:

Dana Point-based Surfer magazine awards a surfboard to the author of the most entertaining letter of the month. Latest recipient was a reader who told of how he was riding some waves off the coast of Canada when he was informed by a lifeguard that he was at a nude beach. The lifeguard “pointed out that everyone had to be naked at that beach, so we stripped down for some of the best nude surfing we’ll probably ever have.”

The naked truth?

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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, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., 90012 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.