Greek Los Angeles

L.A.'s Byzantine-Latino quarter showed off its exotic profile last weekend at the second annual St. Sophia's Greek Cathedral festival. The church plaza at the corner of Pico and Normandie, west of downtown, swayed with Greek folk dancers in the afternoon and a Cuban band at night. For two days, the scent of stuffed grape leaves and leg of lamb crossed with whiffs of green corn tamales.

L.A.'s Byzantine-Latino quarter showed off its exotic profile last weekend at the second annual St. Sophia's Greek Cathedral festival. The church plaza at the corner of Pico and Normandie, west of downtown, swayed with Greek folk dancers in the afternoon and a Cuban band at night. For two days, the scent of stuffed grape leaves and leg of lamb crossed with whiffs of green corn tamales.

Hoping to finally settle the fate of the Greek Theatre, Los Angeles Recreation and Parks officials recommended Thursday that the city award the theater's lucrative operating contract to the lone bidder--the Nederlander family. With House of Blues pulling out of a lengthy battle for the contract, parks official said they have little choice but to give the contract to Nederlander, which has operated the landmark theater for nearly three decades.

I take exception with Mike Hiserman's comment in the June 13 Morning Briefing that the Athens 2004 organizers must be desperate to allow those who have not fulfilled the required mandatory military service to serve as volunteers in the Athens Games. Over 85,000 applications have already been filed, and it is projected that they will surpass the 100,000 mark and representatives of the Organizing Committee will be traveling to the USA and elsewhere to interview the applicants, before a final selection is made.

The anti-Greek attitude of The Times manifested itself again in the May 12 editorial, "Now the Macedonia Option?" Aside from the unanswered question of why injecting foreign troops into the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM (the name by which that country was accepted by the U.N.) would help bring peace to Bosnia, which has no common border with it, your editorial contained a blatant inaccuracy: You state that Greece "may well rather see Macedonia absorbed into Serbia than independent on Greece's border."

Somewhere up there in California heaven, Charles Fletcher Lummis is not a happy man. A journalist and an obsessive collector of all things Western, Lummis was a pioneer L.A. historian who defended the cultural heritage of our state and region against those who would insult, ignore or steal it. He founded the city's first museum and built its first important museum building in 1914. And today, his Southwest Museum still rises like a castle on a hillside overlooking Lummis' favorite corner of the city, the Arroyo Seco.

Rialto police said Thursday they are considering making three women who faked their own disappearance pay for the $10,000 investigation into what police feared was a bloody kidnaping. "Why should the taxpayers be duped for a harebrained idea like this?" asked Rialto Police Capt. Phil Greek. Greek said an investigation of the hoax perpetrated by Suzanne Ballinger, 38, her 17-year-old daughter, Sherry Richards, and Sherry's friend, Laura Fleming, 18, cost the Police Department about $10,000.

1. Peter Himmelman (Coach House, San Juan Capistrano). This most serious-minded of rock songwriters did justice to his deeply probing, loftily aspiring songs, but it was his flashing wit and gift for comic improvisation that made this such a surprising, thoroughly entertaining show. 2. Lou Reed (Greek Theatre, Los Angeles). Playing on the night L.A.

How do you get to the Greek Theatre? Practice. Practice. Practice. . . . Carlene Carter took that paraphrasing of an old joke literally in the first of her two sets Monday night at the Crazy Horse Steak House, turning in a show that is best described as a work-in-progress, albeit a mostly delightful one even at this raw, early stage. Tonight, Carter is scheduled to be at the Greek in Los Angeles, opening for Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Firefighters struggled Tuesday night to contain wind-whipped flames that scorched hundreds of acres in Griffith Park, forced the evacuation of some of Los Angeles' best-known landmarks and raced toward hillside homes in Los Feliz, prompting a hasty evacuation. The fire was the park's worst in at least three decades and was the latest of several to strike the Hollywood Hills in what has been the driest year on record.

Elton John was an unknown 23-year-old singer-pianist whose debut album hadn't even been released in this country when he walked onstage in the Troubadour club in West Hollywood 28 years ago for his first U.S. performance. But the Englishman's blend of musical craft and theatrical flair hit the audience with an electricity and impact that a debut show quite likely hasn't seen. It was the beginning of a phenomenal success story that has led to more Top 40 U.S.