Wherefore Art Thou, Daisy Mae?:The Shakespeare League...

Wherefore Art Thou, Daisy Mae?:

The Shakespeare League of Pasadena has announced that, in April, it will stage “Li’l Abner” at the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium.

At last, a literary mystery is solved! It was Al Capp who wrote the plays credited to the Bard.

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip

That started on a tropic isle, aboard this tiny ship.

The mate was a mighty sailor man,

The skipper brave and true. . . .

No, this wasn’t Shakespeare. It was the musical theme of “Gilligan’s Island,” the 1960s sitcom starring seven stranded B actors.

We’re singing the jingle again because the show’s fan club, which is based in Studio City, has sent Hawaii Gov. John D. Waihee a 30,000-signature petition to change the name of Maui to Gilligan’s Island.

“ ‘Gilligan’s Island’ is not just a TV show, it’s American folklore,” explained fan club leader Bob Hines. “It’s worthy of an enduring honorarium.”

At last report, the petition was marooned in the governor’s office, where a secretary laughed it off.

How about a traffic island in Hawaiian Gardens?

Get Me to the Finish Line on Time:

Lorin Johnson of Seattle and Peter Elkin of Irvine, who met after completing the 1990 L.A. Marathon, will marry at the finish line of the 1992 run Sunday. Oddly enough, Johnson first noticed the previously divorced Elkin because he was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Marriage is the No. 1 cause of divorce.”

One form of literature produced by the computer age is the sales-slip ditty (see photo). Consider it a kind of psychic rebate.

Terry Cassidy figures her company’s product, Brief Relief, may become “very popular with people stuck in L.A. traffic.”

Corporate customers already include the Department of Water and Power, Pacific Bell and Universal Studios.

Brief Relief, Cassidy says carefully, is useful “where conventional restroom facilities are not available or are in poor condition. It’s a portable restroom in a bag.”

Specifically, it’s a plastic bag (capacity: 16 ounces) containing chemicals that “gel the liquid, deodorize it and act on the uric acid to neutralize it so it can be disposed in a trash container,” said Cassidy of American Innotek Inc., based in San Marcos in north San Diego County.

Apart from being useful in traffic--aviation companies are also customers--Cassidy sees Brief Relief (price: $3 per bag) as an integral part of the emergency preparedness kit of the future.

“When the Big One comes and plumbing goes out,” she said, “it could solve a lot of problems.”

miscelLAny:

West Hollywood, a city with an area of about two square miles, has four zip codes.