People and Events

Change “ommmmmm” to “vrooooom” and you’ve got the idea.

Years of driving three hours a day from Thousand Oaks to Los Angeles and back cut dismayingly into Zen devotee Todd Berger’s “zazen” meditation time.

So he learned to contemplate in motion, he said, replacing white-knuckle commuting with inner calm. “Not only did my driving ability improve, but I got to work feeling a lot less uptight.”

Berger, a psychotherapist now living in Marin County, is sharing his secrets for unraveling the Gordian cloverleaf of freeway frustration. He and his brother, Kevin, a rock music magazine editor with a pickup truck, have written the just-published “Zen Driving,” a how-to for their “non-method” of releasing the emotion and ego of driving.

It bothers Todd that the book shows up on “New Age” shelves, but “I guess most stores don’t have a ‘Driving’ section.”

And you wondered why they call them fins.

Steven Simon’s 1961 Cadillac de Ville has a rear view like no craft since Captain Nemo’s: a 17-gallon tank full of koi built into the back window.

On drives around town, it earned artist Simon as much attention as a Sig-Alert. Now his rolling oeuvre, entitled “Brace for the Impact,” will be sold Saturday at a Newport Beach rare car auction.

Simon said he did it for the fish, to get them out of the house once in a while. “I heard my fish complaining they’d never seen the Hollywood sign (and) I’ve always wanted to help bring some amusement to L.A. commuters.”

Top bidder gets the car, the fish and the tank. It may be the only work of art around that comes with a pink slip. You’ll have to find out for yourself whether queasy passengers get carsick or seasick.

You know what they say about life and art.

Well, death and art may not be so very far apart, either.

Consider the Grim Lumberjack’s victim, a 40-foot-tall one outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

One of the 32 Washingtonia robusta palm trees hefted into place along Wilshire Boulevard last March died a while back, and eight other healthy trees were replaced at the museum’s request for aesthetic reasons: unsightly scarred trunks from the move.

“One (dead) out of 32 is very good odds,” said Heritage Landscaping’s Keith Whidom, who supervised the installation and maintenance of the 40-foot palms. KCET magazine, headquartered nearby, had remarked on the palms’ sere and yellow look.

The dead fronds actually shelter the new green ones, explained Whidom. “Right now, they’re all in fine shape. In about a month or so,” he prognosticated, they’ll be “all nice and green.”

Have tort, will travel.

If the names sounded familiar, the two men who sued Chippendales nightclub last week, alleging that a women-only audience for all-male strip shows is unlawful, are no strangers to such challenges.

Andrew Exler, 27, a gay man from Palm Springs, was a teen-ager when he took on Disneyland’s policy of no same-sex dancing. A Superior Court judge ultimately agreed with Exler.

And Dennis Koire, 27, who was joined in his Chippendales suit by girlfriend Julie Palasco, 24, is the fellow who got “Ladies Day”--or night--specials knocked out of retailers’ repertoire. In 1979, Koire sued 11 carwashes and seven nightclubs, including the one that let his teen-age girlfriend in free on “Ladies Night” but barred him because he was under 21. The state Supreme Court agreed. Nowadays, the signs--if they offer anything at all--advertise “men’s day” as well as “ladies’ day” specials.

One more name may ring a Liberty Bell: their attorney, Gloria Allred, who calls her clients “civil rights pioneers.”

The recent death of actor Gabe Dell reduces the number of Dead End Kids leaders to two, Huntz Hall and Bernard Punsley. But fashion doyen Mr. Blackwell calls to say that some minor Kids members from 1930s stage and film productions are still around, including Richard Selzer, who appeared in “Little Tough Guy.”

Who is this Richard Selzer? None other than Blackwell himself.

“I know it might seem hard to believe that a dress designer was once a Dead End Kid,” he said. “But I grew up in a Brooklyn ghetto and I really was a rotten little kid.”

For any woman who ever earned Blackwell’s scorching ranking on his worst-dressed list, not hard to believe at all.