Dance Benefit’s Motif Red Hot

SAN DIEGO —  Danah Fayman, always true blue to the cause of dance in this city, camped it up as a “Red Hot Mama” at the jazzy gala for the San Diego Foundation for Performing Arts.

At “An Evening at the Cotton Club,” given Saturday in the Versailles Room at the Westgate Hotel, the corn grew thickly on the temporary stage as Fayman donned blond curls to harmonize with fellow Red Hot Mamas Reba Brophy and Phyllis Parrish in a racy rewrite of “My Mama Done Told Me.” The lyrics were aimed, as the trio announced, at persuading the 225 guests to part with a few extra dollars for the promotion of dance in San Diego.

The routine capped a night of nonstop entertainment that had as its centerpiece a full program at the Spreckels Theatre performed by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

After watching the Ailey company float and wrestle through the alternately lacy and steely arabesques of “Night Creature” and “Revelations,” the guests returned to the Versailles room to catch the costumed socialites known as the Juletone Performers tap out the widely accepted advice that “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” The Juletones headlined the official Cotton Club Revue, given as a coda to six hours of performances that included stepping high and wide to the a cappella crooning of the Pieces trio, and doing a localized version of stomping at the Savoy to the brassy rhythms of the Cheathams.

Event chairmen Brophy and Parrish expended rather more than the usual effort researching their theme. Brophy said that the pair watched two films, “The Cotton Club” and “Harlem Nights,” to discover useful motifs from Prohibition-era New York clubs. Parrish, who said the net from the evening was expected to top $50,000, avowed that she had in fact viewed a videotape of “The Cotton Club” at least 100 times, or “every day and every night” for a couple of months. “I’ve seen it so much that it’s in my blood forever,” she said.

The results of this movie marathon started at the hotel’s valet parking stand, where a machine-gun-bearing gangster menacingly directed arrivals to ascend the elevator to the main lobby. There, party patrons--and hotel guests, too, were drawn relentlessly into the Cotton Club mood by human props, including a pair of knickerbocker-clad kids from the “City Moves” dance project in the city schools who tirelessly tapped through endless buck-and-wing routines.

Just past the youngsters, the sweeping grand staircase that leads to the second-floor ballrooms was lined by lean, lanky models wearing sultry looks and rented furs; to some, this moody tableau seemed like an express “A” train that rocketed them to the make-believe Harlem on the second floor.

The usually sedate function rooms on this floor--linked by a foyer decorated Jazz Age-style with life-sized brass palms--took on new names for the evening, the Cotton Club-Versailles Room joined by the Bamville Club and The Black Orchid. Each space served a different purpose, although some of the overflow crowd had to dine in a section of the Fontainebleau Room, used after the Ailey performance as a dessert buffet and a dining room for the dancers.

The guests by and large seemed to greet the proceedings with enormous enthusiasm (and indeed, those who were there wanted to be, since party-goers on the prowl had their pick of several major fund-raising galas that evening), which lived up to a cocktail hour prophesy that Fayman shouted through a wall of raging jazz.

“Dance is a language of its own, and I think everyone who sees the Alvin Ailey company tonight will be converted to dance for good,” Fayman said, as a trombonist at her back searched the lower registers for deeper meaning.

Party patrons included Barbara and Bill McColl, June Barrymore, Leonor Craig, Louarn Fleet with Philip Johns, Dian and Ray Peet, Shirley Millard with Jay Stockham, Gloria and Charles Melville, Joy and Jim Furby, Sally and John Thornton, John Parrish, Valerie Preiss with Harry Cooper, Rose Patek, Sandra and Jeff Schafer, Francie Starr, Jo Qualls with Terry Hughes, Luba Johnston, Jim White, and City Councilman Wes Pratt and his wife, Brenna.

Little of the buzz that sizzled through the hallways at last Thursday’s gala preview of the 10th annual “Art Alive” exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art emanated from itinerant bees.

The guest list included a percentage of the volunteers who drive many of the city’s more successful fund-raisers, and the buzz was that the museum may have trod rather insouciantly down the garden path by taking the unprecedented step of staging Art Alive without the services of a volunteer committee. The guest list of 250, or about half the number that at tended the 1990 version, was offered repeatedly as evidence that institutional fund-raisers need a volunteer boost.

For its part, the museum rather cleverly suggested a volunteer connection by presenting this Art Alive in honor of the event’s nine past chairmen.

“In this 10th year of Art Alive, which really has become a city tradition, we wanted to honor all the past chairmen for their contribution,” said museum director Steven Brezzo. “This year, we didn’t want to impose a challenge on a volunteer, so it was much easier to plan the event internally.”

There was no denying that Art Alive did sparkle. Whatever the influence, the dozens of professional and amateur florists who interpreted the museum’s artworks with complementary arrangements seemed to aim primarily for beauty this year, and if some floral interpretations seemed shrinking violets in comparison to the bold extravagances of years past, the overall effect was charming.

Art imitated art in the floral echoes set up between the Zurbarans, Monets and Pissaros and the arranged blooms that interpreted the paintings’ themes. Party arrangements included lavish buffets in the downstairs galleries, sweets upstairs and quiet entertainment by the Sterling Strings and the Recorder Ensemble.

A number of past chairmen and their husbands attended, including Rose Lee and Harold Kvaas, Jean and Robert Paige, Barbara and Karl ZoBell, Mary and Robert Allan, Katy and Michael Dessent, Carolyn and Arthur Hooper and Junko and Larry Cushman. Among others present were SDMA benefactor Muriel Gluck, Ingrid and Joseph Hibben, Esther Burnham, JoBobbie and Guy Showley, Helene and Edward Muzzy, Mary and Irby Cobb, and Kaneko Bishop.