THE BELL CURVE:

I hope you watched the Kennedy Center show on CBS last night. It’s an annual affair in which a half-dozen artists in a broad range of fields are honored annually for their contributions over many years to make this a better world to live in. It’s a show I try not to miss, and last night it held a special attraction.

Although you didn’t see him, one of our neighbors contributed mightily to the production — and even got a standing ovation.

His name is Treb Heining, he’s achieved modest fame as the Balloon Man, and you’ve read about him before in this space. But last night, even by his own tough standards, he outdid himself.

It all started 10 days before the show was to be taped when Treb got a call from one of its producers. They were having a problem. The finale of the show was a musical piece called “Love and Mercy,” composed and performed by singer Brian Wilson, backed by a boys’ choir from London. All this was to take place amid a sea of beach balls — in recognition of Wilson’s Beach Boys — floating down softly from the roof of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The problem was that beach balls, even loaded with helium, would drop like rocks on the audience. So the producers had been exploring for weeks the possibility of converting balloons to resemble beach balls that could produce the hovering effect being sought. But nothing was working, so Treb was asked if he could make it happen. In 10 days. And he took it on.

The first big problem was finding paint that would stick, then deciding whether to apply it with the balloons flat or inflated. The second big problem was how to control the behavior of the balloons so they would drift lazily to provide a mystical backdrop for the concluding ceremonies.

Several days and $1,000 worth of paint later, it was discovered that the paint had to be applied with the balloons inflated; otherwise it would flake off.

Since it took 2 ½ hours to convert 10 inflated balloons to beach balls, there was simply not enough time to paint the 400 balloons originally planned, and so the number had to be reduced to 60. When the price didn‘t go down accordingly, the producers balked and seemed ready to give up, which was OK with Treb because no solution had yet been found for controlling the drift of the balloons.

“I told them,” recalls Treb, “that it will be downright amazing if we can bring this off. That it’s not something you can buy off a shelf.”

So when three days before the taping the producers decided to go ahead, Treb and his working partner, Bill Schaffell, arrived in Washington hungry and tired, took a cab to the Kennedy Center and set up shop to start painting while they experimented with how to obtain the proper drift of the balloons.

Key components were the proper mix of helium and air that would allow the balloons to stand still in mid-air and the discovery that differences in air temperature between the paint shop and the main theater must be compensated for in order to keep the balloons from bursting.

There were a multitude of other problems, too, but this will give you the idea. And, finally, when all the deadlines had been met and there was no more that could be done, Treb stationed himself backstage to sweat out the finale. “People all around me were just enjoying themselves,” he recalls. “I was just scared.”

While he waited, he kept being run into by notables coming off the stage — Caroline Kennedy and Cameron Diaz he remembers especially — who shook his hand for no other reason, apparently, than his being there. This helped keep his mind off worrying about balloons popping or plummeting.

When the moment came — as you who were watching know — it was golden. The balloons gyrated out of the ceiling, dancing to the music from the stage and drifting gently into the audience.

The spell was so complete that the crowd stood and applauded, the first time, Treb said, that his balloons had ever been accorded that honor. Remembering that moment, he added pensively: “And no one ever knew that they weren‘t really beach balls.”

Next to John Wooden and Vladimir Guerrero, Stephen Sondheim is my biggest hero. And so when “Sweeney Todd” appeared in our local movie houses last week, I couldn’t wait to see it. Unfortunately, I chose Christmas afternoon. And “Sweeney Todd” is about as appropriate for Christmas Day as Dick Cheney entering a personality contest.

I first saw the play in New York almost three decades ago, and it blew me away — a powerful, gripping near-opera with undertones of social justice and haunting music including two of Sondheim’s most moving love songs, all set against a violent theme of revenge.

The movie — of which Sondheim reportedly approved — is built around the same elements, but the difference in focus is stark, almost as if we are seeing two disparate images built of the same parts.

The movie leaves nothing to the imagination. It is afloat in blood, with every throat-cutting offered up almost lovingly. On the stage, the violence was left to our imagination. We had to work at it a little.

It rather reminds me of the changing treatment of sex in film. Today, every grunt and grind is pictured with technical precision. Not all that many years ago, our imagination was required to fill out the picture. Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow standing in a doorway exuded more sex than most of the grind-it-out versions today.

And the rivers of blood in “Sweeney Todd” washed away much of the substance and music I responded to 30 years ago.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.