Tripping over celebs on skid row

THE PERILS of skid row in Los Angeles can be stated in too-muches and too-fews: too much violence, too much illness of mind and body, too much crime and dirt and hunger and noise. And too few decent beds and good meals; too few safe, clean refuges, even too few private places to go to the toilet.

And then there’s one day in particular, when a certain kind of too-muchness hits the red-alert level. That day is today, Thanksgiving Day. The danger is an excess of celebrities and the news media that swarm in their wake.

Skid row’s missions and shelters don’t see a news crew for months on end. And then comes Thanksgiving, when their poor patrons can get their retinas burned out from camera-light candlepower as paparazzi trail the celebrity swarm “giving back” and dispensing hot food to the down and out. A few years ago, a slightly panicky staffer at one mission called over the walkie-talkie: “I think we’ve got too many celebrities in the cooking area.” In Hollywood? Is there any such thing?

If you watch the news accounts carefully, you’ll see the beneficiaries of all this charity appear none too keen on being made into human props.

Am I sounding cynical? Sorry. There are a number of skid row star stalwarts, regulars such as Edward James Olmos and Henry Winkler, who pitch in even when no one is around to photograph them doing it. But that doesn’t alter the fact that except for these photo-op moments, the closest that a lot of the paparazzi and their famous prey get to skid row is at a movie shoot in the authentic downtown grime.

The missions and soup kitchens are necessarily and understandably grateful for any attention and assistance they get and would never be as flippant as I am about this; they can’t afford to be. But their holiday volunteer shifts are sometimes as oversubscribed as Vanity Fair’s apres-Oscar party.

A Los Angeles Mission worker, a few years back, told my colleague Anne-Marie O’Connor that in the two weeks before Thanksgiving, the mission was turning away 200 volunteer offers a day. How many of those 200 people call back on, oh, March 11 and say, “Hey, could you use some help this week?” On skid row it’s feast or famine, mostly famine.

There’s one more group of do-gooders to watch for today and tomorrow: politicians. If there’s any time to feel sorry for politicians, it’s on these holidays, when they migrate from event to overfed event. I can see a not-so-fantastic scenario: Arnold Schwarzenegger tying on an apron and showing the news crews how to “terminate” a turkey. But I can’t decide whether he’d reminisce over the pumpkin pie about the schlag of his Austrian boyhood or lecture the diners about how bad whipped cream is for the arteries.

Like Arnold, a few celebs we’ll see today will be burnishing a tarnished image. One Fourth of July, Zsa Zsa Gabor made Hungarian goulash and ladled it out to the needy as court-ordered amends for slapping a cop. In the mix you can always spot some fading celebs who otherwise couldn’t get their mugs on TV if they jaywalked naked on Rodeo Drive. We could have an entire “nouvelle vague” of volunteers -- the also-rans of reality television.

I’d say there’s even an outside chance that Robert Blake will show up this year too -- although to hear him tell it, after the $10 million he spent on lawyers in his murder trial, and now a jury order that he pay his dead wife’s family $30 million, he may wind up eating the free food, not serving it.

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PATT MORRISON’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.