Photo by Jim Coit

Arffmann would often prepare meals for Loew’s large dinner parties. Among the guests were Liz Taylor and Nicky Hilton, Shelly Winters, and Janet Leigh.

On the Saturday before Easter, as afternoon clouds rolled in from the ocean and splintered the rays of the sun, the sidewalks along Girard Avenue in La Jolla undulated with pastel-clad shoppers who moved up and down the street and inspected each window display with discerning, critical gazes. Under a large palm tree, in front of a vacant store at 7645 Girard, Albert Arffmann and Mark Freeman slowly plucked weeds from a tree well. Their pace was far less brisk than the movement around them; they seemed to be taking their time, in fact, carefully extracting each yellow oxalis weed and placing it, with equal care, atop a growing pile on the sidewalk. The two men had been working — for free — since 8:00 a.m., weeding, picking up litter, and planting a pink geranium in each of the tree wells along the avenue, all part of Arffmann’s personal crusade to have the area looking its best for Easter Sunday.

Albert Arffmann and Mark Freeman slowly pluck weeds along Girard Ave.

Photo by Jim Coit

As the afternoon grew late, Arffmann — an iron-gray-haired man whose brown cords, blue work shirt, and copper-colored rucksack would hardly qualify for a showroom in the street — continued his ongoing quest to beautify La Jolla, a project he began shortly after first arriving here in July of 1976. An occasional pedestrian stopped, said hello, and thanked him for his efforts. To each he was extremely gracious. At the approach of one passerby, Arffmann’s watery, silver-blue eyes suddenly brightened, and, in an excited voice just above a whisper, he motioned to the red Natal plums in the tree well that the weeds had hidden from view.

After wounds and POW captivity in France, the unreciprocated love for a woman named Olga and the death of his mother, “I was so keyed up when I would hear music, I couldn’t help but dance."

Photo by Jim Coit

“Aren’t they lovely,” he asked, both as a question and an exclamation. “You’d never know they were down there, what with all those weeds strangling them. Now they have a chance to thrive and enjoy the beautiful sunshine!”

He returned to his work and began whistling the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25, which drew quizzical stares from several shoppers, unaccustomed to hearing classical music coming from a gardener, especially from one who appeared to take as much time with his work as the weeds took to grow. And if one were content with surface impressions, the sight of two men volunteering their free time on a Saturday, huddled over a bed of weeds, would seem rather odd.

Arffmann runs the Pearl at a loss.

Photo by Jim Coit

One or two onlookers muttered as much on their way to the next window. They would also have found it odd to know that this self-appointed street cleaner/gardener danced with Ruth St. Denis, studied the classics at Columbia University, and wrote a utopian allegory meant to change the world. He also works eighteen-hour days and operates the Pearl Restaurant at a loss.

At Theatre Intime in Los Angeles famed dancer Ruth St. Denis encouraged Arffmann in free-form, expressionistic movements.

Photo by Jim Coit

He is, in addition, a seeker of signs. The discovery of the Natal plums underneath a patch of weeds, like the discovery of a pearl inside an oyster, is a revelation to him, a sign that hidden truths can be uncovered. “I am always looking for God’s will,” he said as he patiently plucked weeds with gloveless hands. “I am skeptical of my own, and I prefer His judgment to my own independence. ” For Arffmann, these signs reveal the path he should take. One in particular he recalls with elation. In August of 1979, he worked as an unofficial fundraiser for the International Year of the Child and performed benefit dances in the streets of La Jolla to raise money for the cause. His efforts were only moderately successful — less than fifty dollars — and he wondered if his performances, along with his projects to clean La Jolla and to open a restaurant, were right in the eyes of his maker. Later that month, at a wedding reception for friends in Solana Beach, a young Indian boy named James Matthew Deserle Charging Dog brought him a fortune from a cookie. It read: “If you go to the right place, you will receive an offering.”

For Arffmann the ambiguous message was clear, so the following Sunday he went to his church. La Jolla Presbyterian, and danced on the sidewalk across the street after the first service let out. Few parishioners came to watch (a row of cars blocked their view) so he decided to dance on the lawn of the church. Just before the next service was over, Arffmann was limbering up on the grass when, as he recalls, “a flock of seven or eight seagulls, in a perfect circle, spiraled above me in the blue air. Then one of the gulls dropped a fish from out of the sky and it landed at my feet.” A sign, an indication from his creator that his path was true. He renewed his dance with jubilation.

The sixty-two-year-old Arffmann regards the Pearl, an open-air restaurant located at 440 Pearl Avenue behind La Jolla Produce, as the symbolic fulfillment of a long journey, one that offered him few such signs along the way. He was born in Yonkers, New York in 1920 of a Norwegian father and a Scottish-English mother. Arffmann says as a child he was always "sensitive and highly nervous — rather on the hyper side.” He developed an early affection for the arts, especially dancing, which he would perform whenever company came to visit. On one of these occasions, his aunt Sophie was watching. She smiled at him, Arffmann recalls. “I focused all my attention on her. Wanting to please her tremendously, 1 became apprehensive and nervous” — which she noticed and tried to hold back a laugh at the sight of a boy so appreciative of her attention . "Then she couldn’t hold it any longer and burst out laughing. It crushed me completely, you see, because I thought she was ridiculing me. She was not, but my creative desire to dance lay buried, because of that misunderstanding, for the next twenty-one years.”

He spent those years studying the humanities and eventually enrolling at Columbia University, where he majored in liberal arts and became a prized student of the distinguished scholar Jacques Barzun. With his mentor’s encouragement, Arffmann spent a portion of his senior year in 1943 beginning to write a utopian book, The Song of Man, in which five “masters” — Plato, Shakespeare, William James, Jesus, and Nietzsche — take a sleeping man, symbolic of mankind, to a mountain-top. As the sun rises and a rainbow forms, they throw the naked man into a pool of water. “Then he awakes, now the enlightened Golden Man; he ascends the rainbow from the blues to the higher vibrations of the red, and has a vision of the Golden Isle, the perfect Holy City in the Book of Revelation.”

Arffmann’s book was not completed when he finished school and, as a member of the Enlisted Reserve Corps, was called to fight in World War II. Sent to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas in 1944, the twenty-three-year-old Arffmann joined A Company of the Forty-second Armed Infantry Batallion and became known as “the man who was working on the book.” At one point Arffmann’s captain asked him if he wanted to be a sergeant. “If he had known me better,” Arffmann says today, “he would never have asked me that question. I was never sergeant material. All I wanted to do was write the book.” Which the captain let him do, in the pantry of the mess hall late into the night. On the final evening before they were shipped to Marseilles, Arffmann completed The Song of Man and had it sent to Barzun.

By the time his company reached Alsace, on the eastern border of France, the war had taken its toll on this visionary author of utopia. A close friend, Clyde Woertendyke, had been killed, shot in the mouth. Arffmann says, “I had seen enough by then. The war was hellish; we had so terrified the innocent people of the villages.” Near Heppenheim, Arffmann’s and two other companies were pinned down in an apple orchard by heavy gunfire. Twelve German Tiger tanks, dug into the snow on a hillside, riddled the barren trees with bullets, grenades, and mortar fire. Arffmann sustained a minor wound, shrapnel in the heel. After an eerie lull in the battle, the American soldiers were suddenly surrounded by Germans. The survivors were taken either to P.O.W. camps or, in the case of the injured, to a hospital.

The Germans were systematically shooting those wounded who were unable to move. One of these men was Corporal James Jeffery, who had been hit by shrapnel in the right eye, the skull, the right hand, and the left leg. “They were shooting the people who couldn’t walk,” recalls Jeffery, now a free-lance writer living in Berkeley, California. “I was lying there, couldn’t move, and I heard the random gunshots slowly coming toward me. I called for help. Al was in a row of prisoners being led away with their hands up. He came over — he was wounded too, in the heel. He lifted me on his back and carried me all the way to the hospital. I’ve got to say that if he hadn’t done that, I probably would have been killed there in the snow. Al’s a very unusual man. He never complained at all and always did things to make everyone’s life a little happier. He’s one of the bravest, most humble guys I’ve ever known.”

Arffmann’s wound was cared for in a French hospital run by the Germans. During an air raid, in which American planes bombed the area, Arffmann and hundreds of other wounded men ran downstairs to a basement shelter at the hospital. The door was locked. As he ran back up the stairs, jostled by crowds of panicked men, something cracked his head. “It felt like someone’s teeth had struck me, or a small weapon.” After the bombing ceased, he was placed in a large ward. No one bathed him or cared for his head wound, and a serious blood infection set in, along with a high fever. In a delirium induced by the fever, he felt he had gone to hell.

Three months later, in the spring of 1945, the hospital was captured by American troops. Arffmann returned home in a fragile condition. He entered graduate school at Columbia, paid for by the disability compensation he received from the government, and he studied comparative religion and philosophy of religion for the next two years. But ill health, along with an unreciprocated love for a woman named Olga and the death of his mother in 1947, led to pressures that demanded a release. He found one in dancing. “I was so keyed up that an art was born. I would hear music and couldn’t help but dance. I hear that’s an abnormal psychic reaction — the compulsive part, you know — but I was just so delighted to be dancing!” He left New York that year with ten dollars in his pocket. “I wanted to go to Alaska,” he remembers, “to be absolutely as far away as possible from the world. I was deeply frustrated by the affair because my love was not returned for a year. There was no fulfillment, so for the first time in my life I literally ran away.”

When he reach Campbell’s Comers, near Hamilton, Ontario, Arffmann passed a large, prosperous farm. Its apple orchards were in full white blossom. Drawn by their beauty — as well as by the need to earn some money, since one penny was all that remained of his ten dollars — Arffmann decided he wanted to work at the farm. Just as he made the decision, the sun came out from behind a cloud and, simultaneously, a car pulled up. The driver asked him if he wanted a ride into town. Arffmann said no, he wanted to work with his hands in the “beautiful soil” of the farm. The driver said he’d never get a job there — that one doesn’t gain employment just because one likes the looks of a place — but that there might be an opening at the steel foundry in town. “It was like a dream,” Arffmann says. “The farm sparkled in a golden sunlight after a rain, and the instant I made the choice, the man arrived and said I couldn’t do it. ” Reading the combination of events as a sign, Arffmann declined the ride and walked up the dirt road to the farm. He found the owner, a man named Harry Long, surrounded by his crew of Indians, all of whom were separating strawberry plants from a large bin in preparation for the spring planting. Long gave him the job instantly, along with free lodging in a small cabin, and Arffmann worked the soil for almost a year, which improved his health and revived his spirits. He devoted the next twenty-five years of his life to that study, the result, he feels, of the crossroads he came to at Campbell’s Comers.

His love for the woman in New York, however, remained unreciprocated for the next seven years. Arffmann explains his prolonged ardor by saying, “The compulsive is strong in my nature. I wrote the Song of Man feverishly; I danced compulsively in New York and on the golf course next to Harry Long’s farm — you know, on the nice greens; and I plan projects on the most grandiose scale. Love has been the motivating factor in all that I have done, my own earthly love, and also the eternal love of God. My love for Olga lasted eight years, yes. But if you turn the number eight on its side and stretch it just a little, you have the symbol for infinity.

The dream of performing a dance to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” for Walt Disney brought Arffmann to California in the late spring of 1948. “The dance is based on that part in Plato’s Republic where people are trapped in a falsely lit world of unreality — or reality with a small r — and it is about liberation from that dark cave into the bright sunlight of truth. You know, if Nureyev could dance the ‘Cave’ today, he could revolutionize the world.’’ Arffmann felt at the time that Disney would comprehend the symbolic dance instantly, even though it had yet to be devised. ‘ ‘I was completely confident I could create the dance at the scene itself — I do everything extemporaneously — and that when Disney saw me perform, he would let me play the part of the philosopher, liberating the people from their chains.’’ He left Canada with his thumb out and forty dollars in his pocket. He planned only one stop in his four-day, four-night dash across the country — a visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the mother of a friend Arffmann had cared for in the P.O.W. hospital but who died of his wounds. The sight of his friend’s mother weeping over the death of her son, combined with his own declining health (caused by the rapid pace of his journey) dulled his dream. “The zeal to see Disney faded as I arrived,” he says. ”I never pushed it at all when I finally came to Hollywood.” Instead he got a job as an usher at a Warner Brothers’ theater. Other jobs followed, including work — for meals and board only — as a chef/butler/houseman in Hollywood. The job paid him one dollar a week for washing cars and extra duties. “It was just enough to pay for my shaving equipment,” he says, ”but I wanted a job like that to have enough free time to study dancing.”

In 1949 Arffmann secured employment with Arthur Loew, Jr., who at age twenty-one had inherited a million dollars from his father, owner of a large chain of theaters. Although the job called for a chef/butler/houseman, Arffmann was hired basically for his cooking skills, which he had acquired while working his way through college. Arffmann would often prepare meals for Loew’s large dinner parties. Among the guests were Liz Taylor and Nicky Hilton, Shelly Winters, and Janet Leigh, then in her early twenties, whom Loew was dating at the time. “She’d come to the house — a two-story white structure off Sunset Strip — almost every night,” Arffmann recalls. “Such a beautiful girl. A Christian Scientist — and beautiful inwardly, too. She would heap her plate once, and then have this enormous second helping. Always. And she had such a little thin waist. Her hearty appetite was so reassuring to me, that she enjoyed my food.”

During this period, Arffmann went to Theatre Intime, the combination studio-church on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles owned by famed dancer Ruth St. Denis. A statuesque woman who was then in her early seventies, St. Denis believed that the dancer should be an entertainer, an aesthete, and a prophet. Her belief that “the Kingdom of God will be ushered in by the dance” found resonance in Arffmann’s own attitudes. He studied with her for a year, cleaning up the studio late at night to pay his tuition. He also worked with Lester Horton, a dance instructor who emphasized technique rather than the free-form, expressionistic movements encouraged by St. Denis. After two years Arffmann set out on his own. He planned a series of dance concerts designed to bring about spiritual enlightenment, but the strain of full-time employment plus long nights of preparation for the concerts eventually overcame him. His excessive work led to exhaustion, and then to a nervous breakdown.

"I didn't know there was such a thing as a nervous breakdown — that you could do that to yourself,” he recalls. Following a six-month recovery period, Arffmann worked many more years as a chef/butler/ houseman in the Los Angeles area and danced only sporadically. In 1960 he fell in love for the second time and moved to San Diego — first to an apartment near Balboa Park and later to a house on Texas Street — to be near the woman. For eight years, while he worked odd jobs as a gardener and a cook, the woman never reciprocated his love for her. When he realized that he loved in vain, Arffmann devoted his energies to two goals that had been dormant in his mind for years. He felt a need to repay the government for the disability compensation he had been receiving since 1947, and he wanted to establish a spiritual-cultural arts center in San Diego similar to the one Ruth St. Denis had created in Los Angeles.

From 1968 to 1975 Arffmann worked seven days a week, often sixteen hours a day, converting his North Park home into a combination church and cultural center. His labors were invigorating at first. “I was happy and very fulfilled,” he remembers. “I reached a pinnacle physically — a burst of glorious new health at the age of fifty. ” He gave a series of dance programs at the house, which were attended by small but encouraging audiences. “There would be therapeutic value, I hoped, to the performances themselves. As Nietzsche says, art is with us to prevent the bow from snapping.” And after he felt the church was successfully on its way, Arffmann concentrated on becoming financially independent of the disability compensation he had been receiving.

While still building the church — paving a parking lot, erecting outdoor platforms — Arffmann began taking jobs as a gardener in the area. He also rented out a portion of the house to two people for additional income meant to free him from the compensation. ‘‘The couple were ideal, but gradually they put extreme stress on me with their demands, so that slowly, with the increasing amounts of work I was doing, along with the psychological pressure at home, there were mounting tensions that weakened my condition. Finally, during a cold winter rainstorm, I rode home ten miles on a bicycle, chilled, fatigued, and extremely hungry. I ate a large meal quickly. Something snapped. I found myself, to my horror, caught up in the throes of a compulsion to eat food. I became ravenous all the time, like a wolf, and would race home to bolt down quarter-pounders. Dairy Queen ice cream — sometimes as many as ten pints at one sitting, followed by a full-course dinner — butter, and dates. It was a breakdown, caused by exhausting overwork and extreme stress, that manifested itself not in silence but in compulsive eating. This condition continued for a year.

“It was another extreme low of great physical weakness, brought about by my desire to repay this wonderful country for the compensation I’d received. All I could do in that condition was to stay in bed and sleep late. But I couldn't even do that, because Texas Street had changed; it had become a racetrack. Unpainted cars would shoot up the street, stop in front of the house, and make loud, roaring noises. Planes were rerouted over the house, too. Everywhere there was noise.” The exhaustion and the compulsive eating, which hospitalized him for a year — from the summer of 1975 to the summer of 1976 — led to a spiritual crisis. Arffmann felt that his God had abandoned him. “I began seeing every dark aspect of my life that I had glossed over before — little incidents when I had been catty or unpleasant or had accidentally said an unkind word to someone. I saw that God was punishing me — justly — for these weaknesses. And even the sun. His vivid symbol of eternal light, became to me a sign of hell. I began to see it scientifically, as a mass of exploding gases with great blasts and zoomings of fire. I felt that my punishment was to shoot into the sun, while retaining all my senses, and burn there for eternity. Filled with terror by this vision, I prayed to God for just one more opportunity to do something for the benefit of my fellow men and women.”

On July 1, 1976, he left Veteran’s Hospital in La Jolla and found an apartment on Ravina Street, just off Pearl Street in La Jolla (he’d sold the house on Texas Street). Though still in ill health, with his weight around one hundred pounds, he would go for brief walks up Pearl Street and see “horrible conditions — like a garbage dump. I couldn’t look down, had to keep my eyes on the sky, and then I knew I had to go out and do something. The streets shouted, ‘Clean me!’ ” He began slowly at first, almost inching his way up the street, sweeping and picking up litter. But as his health improved — from the fresh air, the work, and the people commenting favorably on it — he gradually extended his route to Prospect, down Jenner, and then back up Ravina to his apartment — a daily circle that took a minimum of twelve hours to complete. The feeling that he had found a means of repaying his country buoyed his spirits, and he regarded his humble tasks with pride. “I worked up to the point that there was not a cigarette butt on the streets of La Jolla. I didn‘t care what people thought. I believed God wanted me to clean our avenues. We were so badly littered.” The improvement of his physical well-being encouraged him to fulfill his second dream, the establishment of a “spiritual, cultural arts, health center, and restaurant.”

Arffmann first had the idea for a natural-foods restaurant in 1970. He perceived a “semi-nutritional crisis nationally” and had brainstormed the idea with friends. In 1978, after he had been cleaning the streets for two years, Arffmann wanted to “serve the community” not only as a houseman — or cleaner — but also as a chef/butler. “This way I could perform in the capacities God had trained me to do.” Just over the fence from his studio apartment was a garden "piled high to the trees with boxes.” After several possible sites for the restaurant had fallen through, Arffmann contacted Robert Harrington, who owns La Jolla Produce, which is on the same property as the garden. Harrington admits he was reluctant at first. The proposal seemed a bit farfetched. But, he says, “You have to get to know Al. He’s a very kind, sharing, and extremely gentle man.” Harrington agreed to rent the garden and an adjoining kitchen in January of 1978.

A series of setbacks postponed the opening, and it seemed to Arffmann that “an octopus of requirements had the Pearl at the bottom of the ocean, and I couldn’t bring it up.” Architect’s sketches for the garden were drawn up — one for a fiberglass building, another for three greenhouses — only to be dismissed (yet paid for nonetheless). Contracted jobs, like plastic instead of copper plumbing, had to be torn out and re-done all over. Arffmann, who never went out during this period — and whose only form of entertainment, since money was so tight, was listening to an AM radio — discovered that the job was much larger than he had first imagined. “I was a domestic chef,” he says, “with no business background whatsoever. But slowly the Pearl came to be born.” With the aid of friends, personal loans, and a rummage sale, the restaurant opened on March 29, 1980. “I have always felt,” says Arffmann of the opening, “that God sent the stresses of my life to teach me to do something right, for God and mankind, through the Pearl. God has given me one more chance to build a spiritual center — a gateway to the Holy City — and soon there will be a string of pearls, first in San Diego, then in California, and then around the world.”

One enters the combination outdoor/indoor restaurant by means of a wooden walkway to the left of La Jolla Produce. Two signs — one saying “Pearl,” the other, painted red, blue, and yellow, saying “restaurant” — point the way. The walkway leads around the side of the produce store to an enclosed garden, in the center of which is a redwood deck, where modest tables and chairs and a tall, four-colored sculpture are watched over by a stately pepper tree. Its protective canopy also covers a rock fountain, a small indoor dining area, and several varieties of flowers, the most prominent being morning-glory and pink-blossomed impatiens.

The first thing you notice about this comfortable garden is what is not there: no menus on wooden chopping blocks, no salad bars under slanting glass that catches your breath and fogs your choices, no forty-five-minute waits in theme-oriented cocktail lounges. There is no alcohol, in fact, and smoking is not permitted. Instead, the humbly priced menu includes soups, salads, and vegetarian entrees, though fish and chicken dishes — steamed or poached — are also available. And Arffmann himself is the menu. Dressed in white pants and a white, collarless shirt, he comes to your table and announces, “l am the ‘Men-You’ are looking at him. I am the plural man. There is plurality in all of us. ” There are, according to Arffmann, pluralities of symbolic meaning in almost every feature of the Pearl.

The world for Arffmann is a symbolic landscape. Where one would see a tree for a brief instant and then disregard it, Arffmann is drawn into the object to the network of symbolic meanings that for him reside within. Thus a single tree — to most a woody trunk with leafy branches; to a botanist an interplay of xylem and phloem — becomes for him the biblical Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Life, or a family tree and by extension the family of man, “rooted in the ground but reaching toward the heavens." The majority of his symbols come from Christianity, his chosen faith, but others stem from his reading of the classics and Eastern religion. Seen through his eyes, the Pearl Restaurant takes on a different set of dimensions. “Did you see the sign?” he asked one afternoon as we made a tour of his premises. “The restaurant sign? Its colors are not in their proper vibrational sequence, which would be red, yellow, and blue, instead of the way they are: red, blue, and yellow. But notice that the three letters painted yellow spell a word within the larger word. They are s, u, and n. And the glorious sun is the light of the world, a symbol for God, and the source of all growth and life. It gives us Vitamin D and a golden tan — if we do that properly. And Plato says we are all in a dark cave, unable to see the light of truth. The Pearl, as symbolized in this sign, is a gateway to that light.”

Other objects at the Pearl have similar hidden significances. The fish that fell at Arffmann’s feet is buried next to the rock pond; the impatiens flowers suggest to him the patience of his God; and five tissue collages in the enclosed dining area “contain many spiritual revelations.” But the slender, sixteen-foot-high sculpture, created by La Jollan Aldo Signori and entitled “Oh Lord, please let me not be misunderstood,” stands, in Arffmann’s eyes, as a symbolic sentinel for the meaning of the Pearl. Painted black, reddish brown, yellow, and white, the sculpture rises from a square base, broadens two-thirds of the way up into two squared, C-shaped extensions, at the heart of which is a yellow ellipse, and then sweeps upward to a thin half moon on its side. Although the design is largely Constructionist, an interrelated form without an intended meaning, Arffmann regards its symbolic value to be “as great as any religious art done in the Twentieth Century. It was completed in 1978,” he says, ‘‘and as we lived with the sculpture it transformed itself before our eyes into symbols of great significance. The curved top part, called the ‘verbalizer’ or speaking part of the sculpture, is the praying Virgin Mary, in a dialogue with heaven. It is also the cross on which Christ was crucified, the elongated antenna of the butterfly — symbol of the born-again Christian — the sword, which is the word of God, and finally, including the great world of the Orient, it is also the lotus, symbol of spiritual enlightenment and wisdom. All are interweaved in the sculpture.”

Arffmann sees the Pearl itself as joined together by a similar linkage, each object beginning with the letter p. The three trees in the garden — the pepper, the palm, and the peach — shade the small pond. For a while the mascot of the restaurant was a 'possum, which would sit atop the back fence. And a close friend has called Arffmann “the protector of the Pearl,” which makes him the seventh and final p in the chain. “So there are seven p’s,” says Arffmann. "Of course the number seven is very significant. It is the biblical number of wisdom, the Seven Pillars. And John refers to the Holy City in Revelation as the city four-squared, in his words, and four-by-four equals sixteen. P is the sixteenth letter of the alphabet. And each of the four walls has three gates and” (he closes his eyes and quotes from memory) “ ‘The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, and transparent as glass.’ And John also says that ‘The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every jewel. ’ Which is the meaning of La Jolla — the jewel! This substantiates — the seven p's — that we are one of the gateways to the Holy City. ”

Arffmann often works hours that would exhaust a teen-ager. With the aid of blond, seventeen-year-old Julie Beights and Mark Freeman, a twenty-eight-year-old Persian, Arffmann works into the early-moming hours, cleaning the restaurant and preparing the Pearl for the coming day. “Imagine you were having some friends over for dinner,” he says, "and imagine the numerous preparations you would make. Now imagine you were having many friends over twice a day, for lunch and dinner. The work certainly does multiply.” When he is free, Arffmann and Freeman clean the streets. To pay for their equipment, the flowers they plant, and the beautification project in general, Arffmann performs benefit dances at the restaurant every Wednesday at 4:00 and 7:00 p.m.

His “dance poems” combine musical accompaniment (Debussy, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky), freeform, spontaneous movements — influenced by St. Denis — with recitations from the Bible and his own poetry. Though there are several variations, the central theme in these dances is a yearning for enlightenment. Someone — a child, a swan, a peacock, or mankind — is unknowingly caught in a realm of illusion and untruth. Like the sleeping soul in the Song of Man. each discovers spiritual enlightenment by the end of the dance. Something happens to Arffmann as well.

At his initial benefit performance on Wednesday, April 7, a handful of visitors — who had come, as one said, to see “the sensitive, benevolent man”— witnessed a transformation and donated a total of fifteen dollars. Because he had not danced in a while, and had little time to rehearse, Arffmann’s gestures and movements were stiff at first, his landings on the redwood deck unstable. But soon his rhythms became freer and more graceful — as if the act of dancing had lifted the weight of a thousand daily concerns from him. His mouth opened in youthful awe, and he performed with an inward elation, metamorphosing into the child who now is free to dance. One of the observers, struck by the increasingly spirited performance of the frail, white figure, whispered, “It’s his dove’s eyes that are dancing. You envy his moment of joy.”