It’s Buy, Buy, Buy ‘LA Alive!’

If to live is to spend, and the greatest joy of spending is to buy the unbuyable, then the weekend auction at the Music Center’s “LA Alive!� black-tie gala was to die for.

“Our goal was to have the kind of luxury items you can’t go out and just pay for,� said co-executive chair Joy Fein.

Some items were adventures more than luxuries, such as a night on patrol with a Los Angeles Police Department helicopter or pit passes to the Indianapolis 500.

But a week at Wimbledon with center court seats or a few days at the Villa D’Este on Italy’s Lake Como certainly qualify as luxury.

Falling somewhere between adventure, luxury and a thousand points of hype would be lunch for 20 at I. Magnin with high-powered Washington socialite Georgette Mosbacher.

Entertainer Barry Manilow (backed by Denny Le Roux’s band) was featured at the sold-out gala in the Grand Hall of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“Everybody usually says, ‘Oh no, not another dinner--can’t I just send a check?’ � said Burt Sugarman, who chaired the gala with his wife, “Entertainment Tonight’s� Mary Hart. “We wanted to do something where people would be glad they got dressed and drove Downtown.�

Assisting in making the 550 guests happy were executive co-chairs Fein and Anne Johnson, and LA Alive! co-chairs Joni Smith, Deborah Tellefsen, Lili Zanuck, Pam Mullin, Mary Ann Mobley, Susie Field, Peggy Parker Grauman, Terry Stanfill, Keith Kieschnick, Jennifer Diener and Diane Morton.