Odds & Ends Around the Valley : Market Watch

Hot Summer Parties

Calypso, reggae, Caribbean, Brazilian, Latin--this summer’s most popular party themes have a hot musical beat, according to several party planners.

“A lot of people have been doing the lambada in clubs, but it’s just starting to catch on in private parties,” said Alana Joos, president of Entertainment Express in Encino, which provides live bands and disc jockeys for parties. The cost of bands booked through her company varies from $500 to $2,000; a disc jockey runs between $400 and $500.

To keep up with the trend, canny caterers have been changing the contents of their chafing dishes.

“We get every magazine known to man on food and every week we get books. You have to catch the feel of the food and be imaginative with it,” said Carolyn Baer, a partner in Cheers Catering in Northridge.

Jamaican beef patties, fried green plantain with pineapple relish, all kinds of fritters (banana, split pea, spicy salt codfish), sweet potato balls, chicken marinated in rum and fruit juice and then fried are some of the treats that Baer’s company dishes out.

Standard decor for these parties includes a tropical fruit display and tropical flowers, and all the tropical drinks are embellished with little umbrellas. At one recent party, Baer lined the driveway with pineapples that had their innards scooped out and candles placed inside. “We also made a huge tent of lights--with no canvas at all--because we thought it gave it a Caribbean feel,” she said.

While the San Fernando Valley’s summer heat is appropriate to the mood, the pastel decor of most homes is at odds with the bright, vivid colors these themes rely upon. Once the music starts, though, who will notice--or care?

A Poet’s Prerogative

“Good writing is rewriting. I must go through about 50 or 70 drafts of a poem before it really gets finished,” said poet Dorothy Barresi, 32, of North Hollywood. “I’ve been working on some of my poems for seven or eight years.”

Her inspired faithfulness has been rewarded. Barresi is the recipient of this year’s New Women Poets prize awarded by Barnard College in New York City. Her winning collection of poems, “All of the Above,” will be published by Beacon Press and distributed nationally next spring.

“The poems are about confronting disappointment, rising above that, and trying to find transcendence in ordinary things,” she said.

In the creative writing courses she teaches at Cal State Northridge, Barresi, an assistant professor, stresses the importance of revision. “From the heart to the typewriter to the reader is not the way to go about writing quality work,” she said.

Her book is undergoing yet another rewrite before she sends it off to the publisher, even though most of the poems have already appeared in literary magazines.

“I’ve been a finalist in quite a few competitions last year with this particular manuscript, and I thought it could go on like this for a couple of years. I was lucky,” she said, adding with a laugh: “The professor says, ‘Hard work pays off!’ ”

Weighty Problems With Metallic Balloons

“We’ve been making balloon bouquets for funerals even,” said Phil Sherman, owner of Balloons by Magic World in Chatsworth. He was illustrating the degree to which balloons have become a part of the personal expression business--keeping company with greeting cards and flowers.

Unfortunately, helium-filled metallic balloons (the shiny silver kind, also called Mylar) have been responsible for causing occasional power outages when they float up in the sky and get tangled in overhead power lines. Consequently, the balloon industry recently faced the anger of the California Legislature.

Now all metallic balloons must come with a weight attached to keep them from flying away. Furthermore, metallic ribbons cannot be attached to any balloons, and releasing metallic balloons into the atmosphere is also prohibited.

According to Maureen Egan of the Balloon Hut in Northridge, consumers are enamored of metallic balloons because they last so much longer than latex. “A latex balloon lasts about 10 hours, but Mylar can go for a week or two, depending on the weather,” she said.

Sherman has even banned the practice of releasing helium-filled latex balloons into the air for parties or special events. “They’re exceedingly biodegradable, but why put one more thing into the atmosphere?” he said. “Instead of balloon releases, we do balloon drops.”

In Sherman’s view, the balloon manufacturers are working to deplete their metallics inventories before promoting a new shiny silver balloon that doesn’t conduct electricity. “I think they’ll be outlawed eventually,” he said.

Is It a Drip-Coffee Can?

According to KNBC weatherman Fritz Coleman, the average rainfall at the Burbank Airport is 15 inches a year. “Right now, we’re at about half of that,” he said. What makes the picture even more grim is the fact that most rainfall occurs in the first half of any given year.

Both the Burbank and the Van Nuys airports have sensitive rain gauges that accurately measure the amount of rainfall. “Our Valley projections are done out of those two areas because pilots need much more in-depth weather projections, and that’s where they do the navigational forecasting,” Coleman explained.

Nonetheless when Coleman announces the amount of rain we received here after a particular shower or downpour, he invariably hears a different report from some viewers.

“We have what is known as the Coleman effect,” he joked. “The amount of rainfall in your back yard will be twice to three times as much as the amount I said there was. For some reason, birdbaths, coffee cans and Jacuzzis always seem to collect more rain than the rain gauges we use. They never collect less--it’s always more.”

Even in a drought.

Overheard

“Joe Hunt, Barry Minkow, Mike Milken and now Mike Glickman--it doesn’t pay to be a Valley wonder boy anymore.” --Diner at the Bistro Garden at Coldwater in Studio City