Sept. 7, 1957

The week’s cordon bleu for eccentric behavior goes to a sharply dressed
young man who came into a hill Street bat cave around midnight and
ordered a beer.

Before sipping any, he unlatched a luggage case, extracted a trumpet,
poured about half the beer into it and sloshed it around. Some spilled
on his clothes, the floor and the bar.

Lou, the bartender, frowned but said nothing. Almost anything goes in this place.

But then the fellow belted out a few notes on the horn, causing other
customers to shudder, and Lou said, "no, no, no, no," pointing out the
place had no floor show or dance license.

The fellow desisted only to the point of pouring about an inch of brew
instead of half into the trumpet from his second, third and fourth
glasses of beer before testing it for sound.

By this time there was only the hint of noise. The sound was more like a faulty bilge pump.

Enchanted by this charade, Mike Molony asked why he was pouring good beer in the trumpet.

The young man fixed him with a glassy stare and, instead of answering
the question, said stiffly, "In France, they do it with champagne."

Then he lifted the trumpet into position and with a dramatic flourish
blasted a moist fanfare, packed up and departed into the night.

PERHAPS it’s
the Van Gogh influence. Anyway, artist Claire Vadnay recently got the
urge to paint some sunflowers. She called several flower shops and
nurseries but they didn’t have them.

One nurseryman said the only thing to do was plant some seeds and grow
her own. He pointed out they grow very fast. This she did and painted
her picture, rather elated about this new communion with nature.

If anyone else gets the impulse, there’s a large patch of them on
Sepulveda Boulevard a short distance north of Ventura Boulevard.

A HUSKY young
man wearing a Nazi officer’s uniform with swastikas and decorations
came into a highway restaurant in Malibu the other morning accompanied
by four other youths who kept up a noisy, laughing repartee with him
about the costume.

People in the restaurant looked at him but no one inquired if he had a part in a movie or was wearing the uniform as a gag.

A woman of French origin who saw the Nazis at their worst got up quietly and left, unable to finish her breakfast coffee

"I know," she says, "it was 12 years ago and we should forget, but I can’t."

VACATION NOTES Jack
Jarvis, Seattle columnist, drove his MG to Victoria, B.C., where it
attracted considerable attention. An Englishwoman asked, "Is that one
of those funny little foreign cars?" "Yes, ma’am," said Jack, "made in
England." "Oh," she said….

I didn’t see it while I was up north last week but Bill Vernon of the
Stenotype Co. here photographed a highway sign between Quincy and
Portola stating, "Deer, Keep Off Highway Motorists Are Passing." Yep,
the deer up there apparently can read.

MISCELLANY — Harper’s
magazine has come up with the word "unnice." Some people just can’t
bring themselves to say "lousy"…When Bill Hazen passed the place the
first letter of a neon sign on Olympic Boulevard west of Figueroa was
blacked out and stated "HOTOGRAPHY." A salute, no doubt, to the
Inconsequential trial… Mike Kaplan of Variety, who will conduct a
UCLA extension course this month in Contemporary Reviewing in the
Theater Arts, and Hal Levy, who will give his course in Popular Lyric
Writing for the sixth year there, got together the other day for a
chat. Conclusion, mutually arrived at: Maybe they should put their two
courses together and teach people how to become Al Jarvis…

The Let’s Have Better Mottoes Association selection for September is
"Think Big"–printed on a card in type so small a magnifying glass is
required to read it… Leon Lukaszewski has a suggestion for the
gray-haired gent who is driven to a 7th Street office building daily in
a chauffeured convertible and has to push the front seat down to
squeeze out the door: Come down the ladder one more run and ride in
front with the chauffeur.