Legislators Back on Job After Letting Hair Down

Welcome back, all you honorable members!

The legislative recess--George Bush, the father, would have called it “summering,” while the rest of us call it “vacation”--is over. The Assembly and Senate members take their seats again, some looking refreshed from the time off, most notably Joe Canciamilla, the Pittsburg Democrat.

It’s not the earring--that he’s had for maybe 20 years--but the shock of dyed blond hair that shocked his colleagues.

It is a spur-of-the-moment souvenir of his Kauai vacation, and one that surprised even Canciamilla’s wife.

The graduate of St. Mary’s College and the John F. Kennedy School of Law got a round of applause when he hit the Assembly floor Monday morning, and since then, he says, “I wish I had five bucks for everyone who asked me if I lost a bet.”

Canciamilla is not sure whether he’ll keep the hair; women have told him they rather like it, and “the reaction from men has either been a smile and a quizzical look or, ‘Gee, I wish I had nerve enough to do something like that.’ ”

Over in the Senate, John Vasconcellos, a Santa Clara Democrat, wafted back to work on the fragrance of the gardenia lei around his neck, like that of the floral garlands he handed out to his staff. Vasconcellos’ family emigrated from Portugal to Maui a century ago, and Vasconcellos goes back in October for the family centenary shindig. He intends to retire to his Maui condo, and if you’re thinking about subletting, he’s term-limited out in 2004.

Yo! Give It Up for Orrin Hatch!

If you stayed for the credits of the movie “Rat Race,” or just until the last scene, you will have heard the faint music and these lyrics:

America rocks! America rocks!

From its busy bustling cities

To its quiet country walks

It’s totally cool, it’s totally hot

I mean it’s like right there at the top--

America rocks! America rocks! America rocks!

You’ve been listening to the song stylings of Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and his musical partner, Janice Kapp Perry.

With a city--Los Angeles--overrun by screen composers, why have a Utah senator score a fragment of a film? The Salt Lake Tribune speculates that it may be because the movie’s producer-director, Jerry Zucker, intended it as a “thank you” to Hatch for voting in favor of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Zucker has a daughter with juvenile diabetes and wants stem-cell research into a possible cure.

The paper asked the senator, who has put out CDs of his gospel and love-song oeuvre, whether his vote may have had something to do with Zucker using the song:

“I don’t think so,” the senator told the paper. Then he paused, considered, and added: “It may have been a factor.”

Now America wants to know, will the Honorable Gentleman from Utah have to become a card-carrying member of some songwriters union?

Saying No to an Unfair Cuppa Joe

Money, said the late Jesse Unruh, is the mother’s milk of politics, but coffee has to run a strong second, and the coffee served in Congress is making a stir.

Concord Democrat George Miller--seen here quaffing whatever brand the White House serves--is getting after his fellow members of Congress and the House’s official coffee purveyor to clean up coffee’s act.

Three hundred pounds of Starbucks coffee are served up each week in the House alone, and that doesn’t include the brew the same company pours for the Supreme Court and other public institutions along the Crabcake Coast.

Miller is collecting his colleagues’ signatures to insist that the only Starbucks coffee being poured on the Hill is “fair trade certified” coffee. Starbucks, the king of caffeine chains, already sells “fair trade” coffee in its shops.

Here are the strong grounds Miller put forward for drinking only the fair trade bean:

Fair trade farmers, who don’t have to pay middlemen, earn up to four times more than farmers who do. Much “fair trade” coffee is grown in the shade, meaning less land has to be clear-cut to grow coffee. And fair trade growers get an even higher price if they grow organic beans.

California members who have signed on to the fair-trade-only petition: Barbara Lee, Pete Stark, Nancy Pelosi, Lynn Woolsey, Hilda Solis, Mike Honda, Sam Farr, Bob Vilner and Gary Condit.

Pouring fair trade brew, says Miller, would “send an important message that global trade can deliver quality goods and services without the exploitation of workers, their children and the environment.”

If Miller gets his way, watch for the new House brand, “Beans of Hill.”

And She Won’t Have to Change the Monograms

Mary Bono--the Palm Springs Republican who took the congressional seat her husband, Sonny, had occupied until he got killed on a ski slope in 1998--is getting remarried.

Her affianced is a Jackson, Wyo., businessman named Glenn Baxley--Baxley, Bono, so convenient for monograms--who met Bono in Palm Springs and will move there after the wedding, says Bono spokesman Rusty Payne. And when is the wedding? “November” is as far as it’s been narrowed down.

Bono was informally engaged a couple of years ago to country-music drummer Brian Prout, with whom she was seen smooching in the busy Rayburn Room between votes, before Prout departed on tour with his band, Diamond Rio, but in the end, no diamond came of it.

Quick Hits

* The state Assembly sent to Gov. Gray Davis a bill setting guidelines for the post of California poet laureate, including being a prominent published poet; the last poet laureate who held the job--indeed, clutched it tight for 36 years--was Fresno Assembly member Gus Garrigus, whose clunky rhyming verse really made him more of a doggerelist laureate.

* March Fong Eu, who is running to get back the secretary of state’s job she held for 20 years, gets a double-barreled blast of celebrity tonight in an event at the home of actress Dinah Manhoff, she of TV’s “Empty Nest” and the daughter of actress Lee Grant, where Ed Begley Jr. is expected to be among the guests.

* The organizers of last year’s Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles overlooked the needs of one constituency, but Republicans were not making the same mistake in Utah, where those who wanted to bring their guns to the party’s organizing convention last Saturday could bring their sidearms, so long as they checked them into storage lockers while Vice President Dick Cheney was speaking.

Word Perfect

“Your mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

The message on the only full-size commercial billboard in Livermore was purchased by an environmental group to appeal to scientists and engineers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to renounce work on nuclear weapons projects.

Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes .com. This week’s contributors include Mark Z. Barabak and Jenifer Warren.