Society Page
by Midge Grebbens
Screaming Rags has relocated. Joanne has gathered up all her wonderful vintage clothing and moved about a block east from her Lankershim location to 4918 Vineland, on the corner of Huston and Vineland. Her new location is a little less visible, but her regular customers will appreciate the funkiness of the new location. She’s just up the street from Odyssey Video and the Iguana. Keep an eye on Vineland—it has some very interesting buildings. Like the rest of NoHo, it’s depressed and overlooked, which loads it with possibilities.
The Boom Boom Room has added a deli-bar, serving soup and sandwiches. The corn chowder comes highly recommended. A little coffeehouse insider info: it’s the same corn chowder served at Aroma, fresh from a kitchen somewhere in Silverlake. We haven’t done a price comparison, but who really prices coffeehouses anyway?
A new coffeehouse has opened in Toluca Lake called the Royal Grounds. It is decorated in keeping with its tony environs and should prove popular to the local Tolucans, but the best part is that Portrait of a Bookstore will be relocated at Royal Grounds this month. It will be a leaner, more specialized bookstore. Coffee and literature go together naturally, and bringing these two businesses under one roof is a coup. Eagles has demonstrated this by opening a newsstand, specializing in funky, hard-to-find publications and a large assortment of gay publications.
Actor’s Alley has succeeded in relocating their two productions that were displaced by the earthquake damage to the El Portal Theater. The Peter Lefcourt comedy The Audit is playing March 4–26 at the Horseshoe Theater at Valley College, and The Male Animal, playing April 8–May 1, has been moved to the Little Theater, also at Valley College. For ticket information, call 818-508-4200. We encourage you to support this company because what they’re attempting to do at the El Portal is very important to the character of NoHo, Valley theatre, and theatre in Los Angeles as a whole.
Conservations with the Artists, in conjunction with Words and Symbols, a group exhibition of two- and three-dimensional works exploring the juxtaposition of words and symbols as a tool for visual language, will take place March 12 at 1:30 p.m. at the Artspace Gallery, 21800 Oxnard Street, Woodland Hills. Also at the Artspace Gallery will be Folktales: All Things Magical and Mythical, part of a monthly after-school storytelling series with hands-on art experiences, for children of all ages, March 16 at 3:30 p.m. For further information, call (818) 716-2786 or (213) 237-1373.
Beginning- and intermediate-level writers are invited to apply for the spring session of Wordsmiths, a free playwrights workshop at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC) in downtown Los Angeles, by submitting a theatrical script on or before April 2 to the Performing Arts Division of the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. The 12-week workshop, led by playwright Silas Jones, is designed to develop and encourage new voices in the Los Angeles literary/theatre community. Participants will create traditional and non-traditional theatre pieces with an emphasis on script analysis, critique, and the craft necessary to complete each work. Open to playwrights age 18 and older who reside in Los Angeles. For more information, call 213-485-1635. ♦