A CHRONICLE OF THE PASSING SCENE

A Dog of a Happy Hour

They have happy hour for dogs and cats at the Petmart in Warner Center. The festivities take place from 3 to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday at the gourmet pet food store.

Folks hearing about this for the first time are probably going to be scandalized. After all, a lot of the participating animals are probably underage.

Consider a bombed St. Bernard who samples too much of what it usually brings to stranded skiers and then bolts the cocktail party and runs amok in the fine wine section of the nearby Irvine Ranch Market.

No, no, no, that’s not the idea, says Petmart owner John Onestinghel.

During happy hour his pampered clients get appropriate free treats.

“We picked out our slowest hours and days and thought this up to bring in customers,” Onestinghel says.

“The pets have almost as much fun playing with each other as eating. The owners get information on new products, and I get to make a sale or two.”

Back-to-Basics School Wish List

The economic crunch has done awful things to our school system.

“Schools are asking us for things like paper, books, earthquake survival kits and vacuum cleaners,” says Jan Sobel, executive director of the Encino Chamber of Commerce.

Each year the chamber puts on an event called Taste of Encino and gives the profits to local schools.

“We ask the school administrators to tell us what they want in the form of a wish list, and we give them as many things as we can,” she says.

“We expected to have requests for specialty items like computer hard- and software or funding for special programs. Their requests are not for educational enrichment but the basics. We just got a request for someone to come and repair a broken copy machine.”

This year, Taste of Encino is from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sept. 13 at the Courtyard Shops, 17401 Ventura Blvd.

For $1 to $5 a plate, people can get generous samples of food from 22 restaurants, places like Cha Cha Cha, Emilio’s Presto Trattoria, Islands Restaurant, Stratton’s Parkside Grill, Truly Yours, Delmonico’s Seafood Grille, Drew’s and Chin Chin.

Sentimental (Air) Journey

Clay Lacy, 60, of Encino started to test his wings in his birth state of Kansas when he was 12. He’s been flying through life since.

He was a flight instructor by the time he was 16, and at 19 he was United Airlines’ youngest pilot, he says.

During his 40 years with United he logged more than 12 million air miles, more than anyone who has stayed within the Earth’s orbit, he says.

In 1976 he hit network television news doing something dangerously silly. He was shown flying a DC-8 at 250 m.p.h. with “The Human Fly” standing on the wing.

“The Fly--can’t remember his real name--told me Evel Knievel told him to call me,” Lacy says. “The Fly wanted to walk on an in-flight Lear jet. We compromised on the DC-8 because we could tie him to a post on the wing.”

His airline pilot friends called it the answer to airline overbooking.

Lacy Aviation, based at Van Nuys Airport, has been flying the rich and famous for 30 years.

He says he’s taken the time to give flight lessons to Danny Kaye and sell a plane to Frank Sinatra.

A few weeks ago he took mandatory retirement from United Airlines, for which he has flown every route it was assigned.

To celebrate his last trip, he took a sentimental journey.

After he landed at LAX from the Orient, he came back to Van Nuys Airport.

From there he packed a group of friends into an old DC-3 tricked up to look the way it did in the ‘60s and flew them up to Santa Barbara for lunch, imitating his first run for United, in 1952.

You Can Hear Hollywood Buzzing

A casting call went out from Touchstone Pictures to the nation, sort of a Junior Miss version of the talent search 40 years ago for the perfect Scarlett for “Gone with the Wind.”

Eight hundred phone lines were set up to give hopefuls information about auditions in Burbank, New York, Atlanta, Boston and Chicago.

The studio was looking for a girl between 9 and 12 to play opposite Michael J. Fox in “My Life With Mickey.”

She could be any ethnic background, and she had to be under 5 feet tall.

It was supposed to be the perfect publicity kickoff for what Touchstone hopes will be a high-concept movie.

Then came the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow explosion.

Hundreds of young girls showed up at the appointed time and place in the cities anointed, and hundreds more auditioned via videotape.

One casting official at the studio, however, wondered if there shouldn’t have been a lot more.

Allen’s admitted involvement with Farrow’s adopted grown daughter combined with Farrow’s accusation that he molested their adopted 7-year-old daughter--a charge Allen vehemently denies--have “made everyone, particularly stage mothers, nervous and suspicious,” the casting official adds, referring to worries about where the girls would be going and who would be overseeing them.

“All anyone anywhere in show business is talking about is the Affair Allen,” says the caster.

Overheard

“Would you like me to put what’s left over in a doggie bag for you?”

--Waiter with an attitude at the Bistro Garden at Coldwater to woman who had asked for a refill on the bearnaise sauce