BY JIM KNIPPENBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
How to tell if people really like a place: They try to buy the floor.
Referring here to Brenda Vaccaro and husband Guy Hector. She's in town playing the late fashion queen Diana Vreeland in Full Gallop (through Nov. 1) at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati.
Oh yeah, and eating. Already Vaccaro has found three favorite restaurants: "She loves Nicholson's," says ETC staffer Sarah Warner. "Not just the food . . . she and Guy are trying to buy floor tiles left over from construction for their home."
Vaccaro also is taken with the Waterfront, after having dinner there with a gaggle of ETC supporters.
Ditto, Nicola's, the Over-the-Rhine Italian place. She liked it so much that Wednesday's cast party was there.
Some bash, that. A ton of heavyweight artsy types showed for cocktails and chow. Among them: Stan and Mickey Kaplan, as in Jarson-Kaplan Theater; long-time ETC supporters Ken and Murph Mahler and John and Ruth Sawyer; philanthropist Patricia Corbett and pal Shelby Wood; record exec Barbara Gould; opera activists Jack and Barbara Hahn; and designer Patrick Korb, who sweated bullets doing the drop-dead Gallop set.
Oh yeah, most of the opening night audience showed, too. Gallop director D. Lynn Meyers invited them from the stage.
Vaccaro, who had to be tired (memorizing 48 pages of dialogue will do that), pretended not to be, smiling all the while in the Vreeland-esque bright red jacket she wore for her curtain call. No sense breaking character, 'eh?
SING IT!
Uh, perhaps you were wondering (heaven knows Psst! was) what all those road side construction workers were doing last week singing "Y.M.C.A.,"complete with hand motions.
Not exactly the macho anthem one expects from a bunch of burly workers in ill-fitting T-shirts. At least not in broad daylight.
Blame Kevin Bray. Seems the free-lance videographer was shooting a video to show at the kickoff party for the Cincinnati YMCA's Annual Support Campaign. Much of the money raised goes to "Y' construction projects and repairs, so party planners decided to involve random construction types.
So for three days last week, Bray and camera headed all over the Tristate to strike up the grisly band. Most of the workers laughed at first, then went along. Some, such as a Covington crew fortified with Miller Lite, were more enthusiastic than others.
Bray had no refusals. Just a lot of rubber-necking motorists.
ANOTHER TOOT: OK, we give up. What is it with kazoos?
First Oktoberfest has 25,000 people play the things downtown, hoping for a spot in the Guinness Book of Records.
Now this: Steve Finn, artistic director at the School for the Creative and Performing Arts, is tracking down 76 local celebrities to toot kazoos Nov. 13. Smack in the middle of Tower Place atrium at lunch time.
He's asked Jim Scott, for example, but hasn't got an answer yet. And Pops conductor Erich Kunzel, who's out of town that day. Other requests are still out.
The tune? "76 Trombones," of course. Because, Finn says, SCPA is doing Music Man (Nov. 19-29) and he thought it might drum up interest among downtowners.
"I wanted 76 real trombone players, but that proved impossible," Finn says. So they'll use trombone kazoos.
"They're kazoos, but they look like mini-trombones," he says, adding that they are more "aesthetically pleasing" than the standard kazoo. But not necessarily more pleasing to the ear.
Psst! appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Have an item to report? Call Jim Knippenberg at 768-8513; fax: 768-8330.
KNIPPENBERG ARCHIVE
