Red Hot Time In Sicily

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Being woken up by an erupting volcano sounds scary, but for Adriana Kahane, it is just a hazard of her business.

The Santa Monica juice company founder spends as much as four months a year at her home in Sicily, at the base of Mount Etna, where Dream Foods International bottles its blood orange drinks. Ash from the volcano is said to provide a fertile environment for the fruit, which is a sweet orange with red juice.

Though Mount Etna regularly spews ash, Kahane said this summer that she witnessed several large eruptions of lava. One morning, she was awakened at 4 a.m. by a low rumbling.

“I thought maybe it was fireworks,” said Kahane, 42. “I saw a huge amount of lava coming down the side of the volcano and thought, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ We saw most of it from our house.”

Luckily for her, the lava is directed away from people and buildings by natural barriers.

“It can be a little scary or threatening, but in recent times it hasn’t done a lot of damage,” she said.

Mortgage It, Sam

When he swapped his professional keyboard for a calculator in 1985, George Kahn didn’t think there would be a future for his music career. But today, the senior vice president of West L.A.’s Mortgage Capital Partners still moonlights as a pianist – and has found that it helps his business.

Since securing a weekly Friday night gig at Hotel Angeleno earlier this year, Kahn, 59, has gained more than a handful of clients: audience members who had asked about his day job.

“There are a million places to get mortgages,” he said. “But I have a passion for music and that’s attractive. … But if they come up to me that night and ask for a mortgage, I tell them to call me Monday.”

It’s not the first time his music has benefited his professional life. Kahn, who has put out seven jazz albums, said he ended up refinancing the residential mortgages for the owners of the studios where he completed his last two recordings.

Pine Ridge Transit

Think it’s tough getting from LAX to Brentwood? Try getting to Pine Ridge, S.D., home of the Oglala Sioux tribe.

Since early last year, Jonathan Levy, principal at Beezley Management in Calabasas, has made a half-dozen trips to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where his firm is the construction manager for a new tribal justice center.

But the reservation doesn’t have an airport, so he has to fly to Rapid City, S.D. – he said that usually results in a missed connection in Denver because the weather is so bad there – or to tiny Chadron, Neb., which has idiosyncrasies of its own.

“In Chadron, there are no rental cars, so you have to call in advance for the local Ford dealer to send a car (to rent) that sits on the tarmac,” said Levy, 45. “They leave the key for you under the mat. They trust you, which is beautiful.”

Staff reporters Richard Clough, Jacquelyn Ryan and James Rufus Koren contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].

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