Pied Piper

When the book is written on Orange County community theater of the '80s, the section on musical comedy might read like Tim Nelson's resume. For almost a decade, he has been a ubiquitous figure in troupes from Garden Grove to San Clemente. Performer, composer, lyricist, musical director--the tall, blond, 32-year-old stage veteran with the Buster Brown face is all of these.

While living in San Diego in the late 1990s, Anwar Awlaki regularly fished for albacore and shared his catch with a neighbor. At the local mosque where he preached, he delighted in playing soccer with young children and taking the teenagers paint-balling. "He had an allure. He was charming," Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, outreach director of an Islamic center in Falls Church, Va., where Awlaki later gave sermons, told reporters in 2009. With his fashionable eyeglasses and fluent English, the U.S.-born radical cleric also had been called a "Pied Piper of jihadists," an Internet phenomenon who produced video and audio recordings to lure Westerners to his extremist ideologies.

Education agitator Steve Barr's many detractors will tell you that he's a megalomaniacal publicity hound. So why don't I feel dirty standing beside him, dutifully taking notes as he rhapsodizes about a sheet-metal warehouse in Watts? The building is as ugly as the pit bull pacing behind the rusted chain-link fence that protects it, but Barr sees only potential beauty.

Hans H. Baerwald Retired UCLA professor, scholar of Japanese politics Hans H. Baerwald, 82, a retired UCLA professor and scholar of Japanese politics, died June 2 at his home in Pope Valley, Calif., the university announced. He had prostate cancer. Baerwald was born in Tokyo on June 18, 1927, to a German businessman and his wife. Growing up in Japan, he learned to speak German, Japanese, English and, after transferring to a Swiss school in the late 1930s, French.

The Los Angeles Music Center Opera will bring a musical adaptation of "The Pied Piper" to some San Gabriel Valley elementary schools. The students will join opera professionals to perform the work for other students and parents after five weeks of preparation. The fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders will play the rats, townspeople and children who are led away by the Pied Piper. They will also play a variety of percussion instruments, including bells, chimes and shakers.

The people of Hamelin town smell a rat and they're pretty steamed about it. Little Broadway Productions takes a musical look at Hamelin's rat problem in "The Pied Piper" at L. A. Valley College. In this version, written by Nancy Seale, with music by Ed Archer, the little lame boy Ludie is an orphan outcast who suffers from low self-esteem. Perhaps if he can rid the town of the rats, he'll be accepted, he thinks.

Question: What are small and noisy, often travel in packs and are capable of throwing even the most genial adult into a tizzy? The answer could be either kids or rats. In the Paper Bag Players production of "The Pied Piper," it's both.

With beams of white light making him look like a cute-as-a-button 20th-Century Pied Piper, curly-locked saxophonist Kenny G didn't waste any time Monday at the Universal Amphitheatre in pulling out his sure-fire gimmick to get the audience's most visceral reactions via a showy display of circular breathing.

For almost two years, Guillermo Alvarado has been a kind of Pied Piper of this border city, roaming its alleyways and avenues, often with a soccer ball in hand, in search of ninos de la calle-- street kids.

Following is a review of today's screening in the Los Angeles Animation Celebration: "Krysar" (The Pied Piper), (Czechoslovakia, 1987) Nuart Theater, 5:30 p.m. 50 minutes. This eerie, stop-motion version of the familiar story of the Pied Piper focuses on the greed and gluttony of the burghers of Hamelin, rather than on the miraculous delivery of the city from a plague of rats.

STRANGE things can happen in a New York City subway station. For the Trinidad-born musician Asheba, the 42nd Street E Train platform was the place where he became "blessed with spirit of children's music." While he was performing there in the early 1990s, a little girl named Sparkle asked if he knew "Itsy Bitsy Spider." Asheba did not, and had her to sing it for him. He recast the well-known nursery rhyme with a Caribbean rhythm, and it later wound up the title track of his first CD, "Go Itsy."

Education agitator Steve Barr's many detractors will tell you that he's a megalomaniacal publicity hound. So why don't I feel dirty standing beside him, dutifully taking notes as he rhapsodizes about a sheet-metal warehouse in Watts? The building is as ugly as the pit bull pacing behind the rusted chain-link fence that protects it, but Barr sees only potential beauty.

Timothy Leary's dead No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in -- "Legend of a Mind," the Moody Blues * ALTHOUGH MAY 31 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Timothy Leary, there will be no gathering of the tribes anywhere to commemorate the event. Unlike Jerry Garcia, whose posthumous profile remains so high that the toilet from his home in Marin County was recently stolen after it was auctioned off for charity, Leary's name has not been enshrined on a Ben & Jerry's ice cream carton.

"The Pied Piper of Saipan" almost didn't get into World War II. Guy Louis "Gabby" Gabaldon was just 5 feet 3 and had a perforated eardrum; the Navy rejected him. But when the Marines learned he could speak Japanese -- gritty slang picked up on the streets of Boyle Heights -- that was a different story. That's how Gabaldon came to capture more than 1,100 Japanese single-handedly, leading soldier and civilian alike to safety.

This remote farming town in northwestern Mexico has tried just about everything to rid itself of rats: cats, poison and even cash rewards for killing the thousands of rodents infesting businesses and destroying the corn harvest. So when retired Massachusetts salesman Stephen Petren called and said he had a foolproof method, local officials took him up on it. Now, Petren, who speaks no Spanish, is using hand signals to teach Mexicans how to exterminate vermin. Petren, 71, from Holliston, Mass.

In "Always on His Mind" (July 5), about Willie Nelson and his guitar, Trigger, Nelson was referred to as "the pot-smoking, pistol-packing Pied Piper of Outlaw Music." Well, boy howdy! Too bad that Nelson would never run for president, because I'd vote for him in a flash. Compared to all the phony, pedophile priests in the headlines and the petroleum-fueled Texan now in office, with his Vice President "prickly Dick Cheney," Willie and his boys would be our nation's best representatives, here and overseas.

"The Pied Piper of Saipan" almost didn't get into World War II. Guy Louis "Gabby" Gabaldon was just 5 feet 3 and had a perforated eardrum; the Navy rejected him. But when the Marines learned he could speak Japanese -- gritty slang picked up on the streets of Boyle Heights -- that was a different story. That's how Gabaldon came to capture more than 1,100 Japanese single-handedly, leading soldier and civilian alike to safety.

Mildred Mathias doesn't care much for formal portraits of herself. A world-renowned botanist, horticulturist and conservationist, she is ranked among the top scientists in her fields. So lofty is her academic reputation that almost a dozen flowers are named after her around the world. But she much prefers more casual portraits, taken in the jungles of the Amazon, the mountains of South and Central America or the cloud forests of Costa Rica, with their brilliant green and red quetzal birds.

I laughed at your July 10 article, "Westsiders Could Use the Pied Piper," because it wrongly blamed "urban sprawl ... [driving] animals from their dens" and the drought drying up food sources as reasons people have roof rats on their properties. Roof rats (Rattus rattus) don't come from our wild lands. They are human-introduced pests that are from the Old World. Roof rats and our household cockroaches, as well as European pigeons, are rarely found far from human habitation. Don't blame nature for the doings of people.

Those Westside rats have gone too far this time, moving into tony, ivy-adorned homes and dining al fresco in sidewalk cafes. Campaigns are afoot to get rid of them. Arid conditions and the march of urban sprawl into hillsides have driven rodents from their dens throughout Los Angeles County while lush greenery, water and good eating have drawn them into some pricey locales.