Music Machine Faces Some Routine Problems

The Music Machine, Chula Vista’s answer to Up With People, has a novel problem: How to adapt the high school song-and-dance group’s routine to a 25-foot-long float careening through the streets of a French city when the float is just six feet wide.

The 11-year-old ensemble--proud possessor of 59 awards from 52 festivals, 40 of them first place--has been invited by the city of Nice to perform in its next Mardi Gras celebration, which dates to the 13th Century.

But how do 30 performers re-create, say, “Jailhouse Rock” on a rolling platform the width of small car? Or bring alive a Disney medley or a piece of jazz? Ron Bolles, the group’s organizer, has until mid-February to get that problem solved.

The Machine, as school Principal Manuel Llera calls it, is a select group of fewer than 40 students plucked from the 1,650 at Bonita Vista High School. They train together for hours each week and have seen a good chunk of the West.

They’ve won the International Jazz Festival in Reno, and been the first American “show choir” presented at the North Sea and Montreux jazz festivals in Europe. Last year, they performed in Washington, D.C., prompting the invitation from Nice.

“I tell you, we have parents that call and say, ‘My daughter is entering kindergarten,’ ” marveled Llera. “ ‘What private instruction can I get for her so that when she gets to high school she can be a member of The Music Machine?’ ”

Another problem facing the France trip is money: Nice is footing the bill for food and lodging, but travel and other expenses for each participant will cost $907. With 37 students, Bolles and six chaperones, that’s almost $40,000.

The group, however, has a booster club with fund-raising powers seemingly second only to United Way. Through a raffle, rummage sale and community donations, the support group hopes to raise enough cash to cover any students who can’t afford to pay.

Last year, for Washington, boosters raised nearly $50,000.

PR Match Game

Who would imagine that public relations people would have difficulty striking up conversation? But, strange to report, they are staging a party for themselves on the promise that they will never again have to utter the words, “What’s your sign?”

This Oct. 29 party is being called a Human Scavenger Hunt--a mysterious tribal ritual the PR Society of San Diego intends to use to drum up new members. At the door, each guest will receive a list of dubious attributes of San Diego publicists.

They will then have to match the attributes to the right people, many of whom, presumably, they will not know. So their lists will become a license to accost strangers with impertinent, personal questions.

A few samples: Can you recite the alphabet without singing? Do you sleep in pajamas? Were you ever a San Diego Chargerette? Did you really appear on the Larry Himmel show without pay or see Echo and the Bunnymen live?

Strange to think of professional promoters becoming beset by bashfulness.

“They do, though,” Jennifer Elliott of Heying & Associates assured us. “They do.”

Museum Gearing Up

Having vanquished the nettlesome cloggers and other dance and sports groups that sought to keep an auto museum out of Balboa Park, the organizers of the San Diego Automotive Museum are now hunkering down to the task of making their idea fly.

The question is, how to make a barn full of 1929 Lincolns and Lamborghinis compete for public attention with contemporary entertainment extravaganzas like the Olympics, Cirque du Soleil, “LA Law,” or 100 Elvis impersonators at the Statue of Liberty on the 4th of July.

Architect Don Goldman has in mind something more “interactive” (for people not jaded from “interacting” with their own cars). The way Goldman describes it, the museum would be a kind of exploratorium for auto-philes, a high-tech country fair.

For example, he is counting on a giant, walk-in engine like the throbbing, walk-through heart at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Another thought is a walk-through electrical system tracing the peregrinations of electrical power from battery to spark plug.

There might be cars balanced on hoists for an underbelly view and earphones dropping from the ceiling for private discussions of particular cars. Other attractions will be videos, films, period gas pumps and motel rooms, murals and ever-changing exhibits.

“Museums, particularly on this scale, are big business,” Goldman said recently. “Operating budgets are huge. And that makes marketing and merchandising king.”