When ‘No Thanks’ Is Not an Option

Even before the earth-toned stucco dried on the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, the decorative exterior copper curtain created a firestorm of controversy: one man’s ugly-looking bug zapper being another’s highbrow homage to the Performing Arts--which, if memory serves, was a juggling act on the old “Ed Sullivan Show.”

The controversy continues to this day.

To mollify the half-dozen or so residents of Thousand Oaks who really care one way or the other (the attitude of most being, “What the hell; it’s up there now . . . why didn’t they ask me before they started?”) the City Council is conducting a poll to decide what to hang on the side of the building. Since public executions are no longer fashionable, we’ll ignore the obvious answer.

In a polling style reminiscent of the Russians electing Nikita Khrushchev, residents are being asked to phone in and vote yes on one of several options. Apparently “none of the above” was not an option.

I would like to propose a few options that the city fathers or mothers, as the case may be, have overlooked but are welcome to use (I’m nothing if not public-spirited):

* Option 1: Find the people who recently put that Chumash canoe and paddles on the side of the Ventura parking garage and have them stick one on ours. Maybe nobody would think that’s art either, but when they drove down the freeway they’d at least know what they were looking at. “Look, Elwood! Someone’s gone and stuck an iron canoe and paddles on the side of that thar building. I don’t like it.”

* Option 2: If the people in Option 1 want more than $100 to do the job, collect all the abandoned junk cars that have piled up within the city in the past six months and have someone handy (maybe a high school shop class could undertake the project) attach them to the side of the building. We all know how freeway drivers love to gape at wrecks, and this would slow them down to 85 mph to have a look--a definite highway safety advantage.

* Option 3: Contact the owners of a sports arena that’s going to be replaced with an even bigger, more expensive one--San Diego or the L.A. Coliseum come to mind--and see if they will give us their old DiamondVision or similar scoreboard. Then we could put up anything we want. Grandparents could put up pictures of their grandchildren. Politicians could put up signs without risk of them being torn down. Or we could just put up a picture of the copper curtain, so that when the architect came for a visit his feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

This option has several advantages: The architect wouldn’t sue the city; the graphics wouldn’t become obsolete and we could sell advertising space to make money for the city.

To vote for one of these options, merely write your choice on the back of any valid round-trip airline ticket and forward it directly to me. I will post the results as soon as I return from my vacation.