Stars featured on new postage stamps honoring vegetarians

It isn’t every day that Pamela Anderson shares billing with Pythagoras.

But that was just one of many oddities on display Tuesday outside the Hollywood Post Office, where the blond bombshell joined former game-show host Bob Barker to promote postage stamps featuring famous vegetarians.

The limited-edition sheet of 20 44-cent stamps produced and sold by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, makes for an unusual assemblage — linking Anderson, Barker, Woody Harrelson and Joan Jett to Pythagoras, Mohandas Gandhi, Leonardo da Vinci and Leo Tolstoy.

Anderson unquestionably was the main draw for the crowd of photographers, who started shouting requests the moment she stepped out of an enormous black GMC Denali SUV.

“Over your right shoulder, Pam!” “Just here, on your left!” “Pam! Pam! Paaaam-ela, look over here!”

Smiling and turning obligingly this way and that, Anderson made her way up the steps to a waiting Barker and, holding his hand as they faced the cameras, told him: “My mom and dad are huge fans.”

He wore a tweed blazer of gray, maroon and black, with matching maroon turtleneck and gray trousers. She wore a smoky blue-gray sleeveless dress that reached mid-thigh and revealed cleavage and lacy, peach bra — as well as the barbed-wire tattoo on her left arm.

Both held blown-up versions of the stamps bearing their images.

Barker, who will turn 88 next month, said he’d been a vegetarian for about 35 years; before arriving for the afternoon’s festivities, he said, he’d eaten potatoes with garlic, some fruit and cauliflower.

“Pam, give him a kiss!” a photographer shouted. “No, we got a kiss already. Do something else,” another screamed out.

“Lick the stamp, Pamela! Lick the stamp!”

Dan Mathews, PETA’s senior vice president, had to shout to be heard as he introduced the stamps.

“People think that eating vegan is a new trend, but it was actually 3,000 years ago that the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras wrote that carnivores are digging their graves with their teeth,” he called out, his words punctuated by constant camera clicks and whirs.

“It’s like ‘The Day of the Locust’ out here. You’ve got to love Hollywood,” said Steve Wiecking, 44, who came upon the scene when he stopped at the post office to pick up a package from Amazon.

Others wandered by too, including a musician named Charles Dudley, who arrived to get his mail in shiny gold cowboy boots, silver sunglasses and a spotlight-ready, many-colored, tinselly jacket.

One woman in a ragged black T-shirt and shorts wedged her way into the crowd of cameras, burning cigarette in hand, and asked Anderson if she “could possibly spare a dollar or any change.”

“You look beautiful,” she said, when Anderson apologized for not having anything on her.

nita.lelyveld@latimes.com