For Festival Artist, Fame--but No Name

L.R., where are you?

And who are you, really?

LaMonica Rio?

Leilana Reddiclyffe?

Lana Rastafaria?

Whatever your name, there’s a $1,500 check waiting for you at the Oxnard offices of the California Strawberry Festival. All it needs for completion are those two simple, elusive, suddenly magical words that are supposed to come after “Pay to the order of . . .”

Languidia Rhizome, maybe?

L.R. rushed into the festival office late one October afternoon. She was thin, blond, 5 feet 4 or so, perhaps in her 20s. She was accompanied by a man who could have been her boyfriend or husband. And she clutched what turned out to be the loveliest and most compelling of the 42 entries in the Strawberry Festival’s annual poster contest.

The festival people have been holding this contest for 18 years. They know the drill: Artist hands over berry-related masterpiece. Festival person punches artist’s name into computer, prints out receipt. Everyone goes home to live another day.

But on this particular October afternoon, the computer was down. And the office was in disarray, with boxes still unpacked from a move just a week or two before. Just minutes from the poster-contest deadline, L.R. breathlessly appeared. Her entry bore her initials--L.R., needless to say. An attached business card gave her name, address and phone number.

Only later--after the festival’s board of directors decided to give L.R.’s work the top prize--did anyone realize that the card was nowhere to be found.

“We kept the paper clip,” administrative assistant Sandi Montes-Cerna said ruefully.

Montes-Cerna was the only person staffing the office that afternoon--the only one to glimpse L.R., however briefly.

“You don’t know how many sleepless nights this has caused me,” she said. “I just won’t believe that we can’t find her . . .”

Montes-Cerna and her boss, festival manager Charlotte O’Brien, have contacted a number of arts groups and sent notices to newspapers. Pieces have appeared here and there--but L.R. is still Lost, Regretfully.

Her work--O’Brien describes it only as representational and done in pastels--will be unveiled in late February. It will also appear on T-shirts and in festival promotions, regardless of whether L.R. herself appears.

“It’s a wonderful poster,” O’Brien said. “We firmly believe in it. It shows her understanding of the connection between the festival and agriculture in Ventura County.”

If I were L.R. (and I want to stress that I’m not), I’d lay low for another few weeks. I’d take a page from the publisher of the wonderful political novel “Primary Colors,” and let the speculation build. Nothing is more titillating than anonymity.

Was Random House hurt when the book’s author--”Anonymous”--was finally unveiled as political writer Joe Klein? Was Klein--who then graduated from Newsweek to the New Yorker--irreparably damaged?

All the way to the bank.

But local festivals don’t beg for publicity with the deviousness of big publishing houses.

I would be surprised if the Strawberry Festival puts out word that L.R. insists on anonymity because she is a guerrilla artist, painting only at night, up in the hills.

I would be very surprised if the Strawberry Festival holds a news conference to absolutely, categorically deny that L.R. is really Britney Spears.

And I would be absolutely astonished to hear someone from the festival whisper that L.R. may have been a middle-aged man disguising himself as a blond in her 20s.

Did you know, by the way, that I once wrote a novel under the name Lefty Rosenbaum?

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at steve.chawkins@latimes or at 653-7561.