What's in a Name?

Tom Blair's i On San Diego

MEDIA MAGNET: Never mind the mess piling up on his desk at City Hall, if there’s a live TV camera within a thousand-mile radius, city attorney Mike Aguirre will probably be in front of it. Aguirre, who never misses an opportunity to pose as San Diego’s mayor, turned up at the scene of the Mount Soledad landslide last month, strutting for network affiliates and having his “Al Haig moment” in the absence of San Diego’s elected mayor. Aguirre even managed to get in front of the camera of an MSNBC reporter, who interviewed him briefly. But Aguirre must have felt shortchanged. “That,” the reporter said, before moving on to more compelling theater, “was San Diego City Attorney Mike A-gwire.”

SAN DIEGO SHUFFLE: Forbes.com is out with its annual “Best Cities for Singles” rankings, and San Diego’s number 7. (Forbes starts counting single people at age 15, which seems a bit young, but hey, a win’s a win.) Meanwhile, Forbes singles out two San Diegans among our most eligible: developer Fred Maas and Maria Hunt. If you’re thinking about asking Maria for a date, don’t plan to cook for her. She’s The San Diego Union-Tribune’s food critic . . . The shaky new ABC comedy Cavemen was originally to be filmed in Miami, but producers were goosey about committing to the high budget of long-distance location shooting. And so it was moved to San Diego. But in name only. It’s being shot on a sound stage in Hollywood .. . Ralph Keyes, who at 27 launched his prolific writing career in San Diego with the best-seller Is There Life After High School? (before moving off to Ohio), considers it a legacy. His son David, 27, just landed in San Diego, where he’s begun a Ph.D. program in anthropology (at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies). On successive days last month, op-ed pieces by father and son were featured in The Christian Science Monitor . . . Gavin Kaysen, the wunderkind chef (he’s 28) at El Bizcocho in Rancho Bernardo——and one of San Diego Magazine’s 2007 People To Watch——will soon have to be viewed from afar. He dons the toque November 12 as the new executive chef of New York’s hot Café Boulud.

OF THE BEHOLDER: At a local fund-raising gala, a natural beauty wearing a low-cut gown was showing off an elaborate diamond necklace, loaned to her by the presenting jeweler of the event. And she was feeling rather good about it, until the wife of a local cosmetic surgeon walked up. “My dear,” the woman said, “you have entirely too many wrinkles on your chest to be wearing that many diamonds. You must come into the office!”

LIKE NO BUSINESS: Harvey Fierstein’s musical update of the 1956 movie drama A Catered Affair, by Paddy Chayefsky, won praise from the local newspaper. And while other reviews of the Old Globe production were generally favorable, Los Angeles Times critic Charles McNulty panned it, writing that “Chayefsky’s expiration date passed long ago, [while] Fierstein serves up the saga as if it were fresh milk.” But Fierstein strikes back. On his blog and in e-mails to friends on Broadway, Fierstein writes, “In life there is always one badly behaved guest at the party, and in this case it was the reviewer from the L.A. Times.” . . . Musical-comedy icon Julie Andrews slipped backstage for a visit with Fierstein after an early-run performance of Affair. Of course she liked it . . . When Jerry Coleman, the beloved Padres broadcaster, is inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame this month, he’ll be in heady company. Among his fellow inductees: comedian Jimmy Durante, legendary New York deejay Dan Ingram and jazz pianist Marian McPartland. Fox TV’s Sean Hannity hosts the ceremony . . . Jersey Boys, back in San Diego at the Civic Theatre (via Broadway) after premiering three years ago at La Jolla Playhouse, has a pair of homeys in lead roles: Steve Gouveia (who created the role of Nick at the Playhouse) and Deven May (Tommy DiVito), who came up out of Vista’s Rancho Buena Vista High School.

NO FEDERAL CASE: Ivan Boesky, the 1980s stock wizard who amassed a fortune estimated as high as half a billion dollars, eventually went to the slammer and paid a $100 million fine for insider trading. Later, he turned up in La Jolla, where he gained something akin to celebrity status with his regular strolls down Girard Avenue. As recently as 2004, Town & Country magazine listed Boesky as “hiding out” on La Jolla’s Mount Soledad. But to neighbors of his hilltop estate, he’s very much a real presence. One neighbor, in fact, recently filed suit against Boesky. Nothing compared to his past legal woes, but pesky just the same. The neighbor says Boesky has built an elaborate entertainment center——complete with stage and dance floor——that cuts into the hillside slope and laps 31/2 feet over onto her property.

FINAL WORDS: Minutes after word went out on the wires that famed mime Marcel Marceau had died, Tom Gable was in my e-mail with the perfect epitaph: “Let’s all observe a moment of silence.”

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