You know how sometimes you’ll sit around your house all stoned, and you and your friends will have some amazing idea? Let’s go to the Vietnamese market and buy live catfish and put them in Mikey’s pool, someone will say, and you’re totally all going to do it. But then you take a nap instead.

Well, when Friends of The District Ryan Smolar and Rachel Potucek have an idea, it’s less about crunchy snacks. After the idea is had, they convene some committees, build some bridges, meet with city departments, collect their permits, book a few bands, build a web site, and git ’er done.

It’s all terribly annoying.

This Sunday, as you’ve doubtless heard, the newest Long Beach sensation will be University by the Sea, and if you’re not going to it, I’m not sure I’m allowed to be your friend. Forget the dozens of hourlong classes for a moment (divided into four sessions; you may mix and match) and just gaze upon the (free) street fair: an underwater robotics tank! Flamenco guitar! The Long Beach Armada fastball camp! Film festivals! A Japanese rock garden! Some bands or something! A Crump-Off! And when these cats get face painters, they’re not some random hippies: face painting will be perpetrated by agents from the Hollywood Cinema Makeup School.

Forget the (free) street fair for a moment, and just gaze upon the “school” sessions themselves: Mayor Bob Foster teaches the history of the Roman Republic! Former MoLAA director Gregorio Luke teaches “Che Guevara: Life and Myth” (accompanied by guitar)! Cats from Wasabi teach sushi-making! A clinical social worker (Daniel Brezenoff) teaches “What Is ‘Burning Man’ and Why Should I Care?” And those are all just in the first session! (Except for the sushi-making.)

This is like going to Wesleyan!

At first, the troublemakers involved were going to put on the first-ever real-world YouTube film festival. The night they came up with that idea, they went home, and on the news was a story about New York City’s first-ever real-world YouTube film festival. And so? They had another idea!

“We were trying to come up with some different festivals that weren’t just events for the sake of putting on events, but that solved some actual problems,” Smolar says. “This event is to target people who want a culture, rather than just moving into a loft downtown because it’s cheaper than Marina del Rey. We want to let them know there is a culture here.”

The next thing you know, the president of Cal State Long Beach was slated to give a presentation on how to pay for and prepare for college (doesn’t the Cal State system still cost like $12 a year?), and the city’s police chief was committed to giving a lecture on The New Face of Crime (please, please, please let it be roller gangs!).

“This is the community,” Smolar says. “These people are all a phone call or two away.” And when Smolar went to get a letter of support from the mayor, the mayor offered to teach a class on Roman history, Smolar says, “and then recited Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar.”

About a thousand tickets total can be sold—and the $20 cost doesn’t just get you four classes, it also gets you free parking. The best registration so far was from a woman who chose a wine tasting session, the tequila class at Taco Beach, another wine tasting session, and “leadership skills.” But there’s also Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske lecturing on Long Beach’s wartime Rosies the Riveter; UCI Anthropology professors on the Culture of Money and Virtual Worlds; folks from the aquarium on sharks and marine mammals; Acting for the On-Camera Actor; Environment and Landscaping by a dude from the Water Department; a class on Piero della Francesca and one on Practical Politics: Turning Grassroots Fervor Into Political Success; and a beginner’s lesson in African Dance. It’s just like real college, but without the date rape.

From noon to 8 p.m., the Cal State Associated Business Students and the Long Beach Junior Chamber will be hosting the U-Sea “student union” at Mariposa—relax and celebrate, they tell us. From 4 to 6 p.m., you can take the maggots trick-or-treating on Pine Ave. And from 6 to 9 p.m., you can sit outdoors, Hollywood Bowl-style, and watch student films. (Bring a poncho.) (Also, all of those are free, you don’t even need to buy a ticket—except maybe the Student Union.)

The thing that Smolar talks about most, though, and that interests me least, isn’t any of the classes or wine tastings or underwater robotics tanks (courtesy of City College’s Electricity Department) where you remotely control your own HAL 9000—but the opening of the Jergins Tunnel. The “Safety First” tunnel was a pedestrian underpass to the Pike. There were vendors down there—“Someone would build a 20-by-20-foot house and sell nothing but doorknobs,” Smolar says. But then the city decided it was public property and kicked all the vendors out, and by the ’60s it was dark and scary (and probably smelled like homeless), so they shut it up and sealed it off. U-Sea will be using the tunnel to show old films: Buster Keaton at the Pike, kids who took home movies of themselves riding all the rides and holding the camera for a first-person view. Long Beach’s seminal video artist, Bill Viola, will have his films shown, too.

“We’ve been busting ass on this since June,” Smolar says happily. But he has one caveat: since many of the classes will take place in restaurants, for instance, and in many cases those restaurants will still be open and serving, “It really depends on a large chain of people doing what I tell them.”

UNIVERSITY BY THE SEA PINE AVENUE AND ENVIRONS | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.590.4948 | UNIVERSITYBYTHESEA.COM | SUN NOON-9PM | AFTERPARTY 8PM-MIDNIGHT | $20; $10 FOR STUDENTS; FREE FOR CHILDREN 12 AND YOUNGER

Tags: downtown, jergins tunnel, julius caesar, To Do, university by the sea