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Oh, the delightful tales the cast members told about their experiences on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1958 filming South Pacific, adapted from the James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific. They were at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences screening of a restored 70mm Fox print of the Joshua Logan musical, with its rapturous score and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. The capacity crowd at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre relished every minute of the film’s nearly three hours. You had to be there.

This was a rare and heart-warming reunion of the musical’s players. Mitzi Gaynor starred as Nurse Nellie Forbush, John Kerr portrayed Lieutenant Joe Cable, France Nuyen was the Polynesian beauty Liat. They engaged in interviews with the Center Theatre Group’s artistic director Michael Ritchie, who had done his homework. Although we beg to correct him that the movie received ten Oscars, when Google informs that the film won only one for Sound. But would that it had won ten. Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi starring Leslie Caron was awarded the Best Picture Oscar that year.

Mitzi, of course, did her own singing, while the singing of John Kerr and Rosanno Brazzi, who played the plantation owner Emile de Becque, are credited to Bill Lee and Giorgio Tozzi. Interviewed by director Fred Zinnemann to play Ado Annie in Oklahoma, Mitzi was told that the role had just been cast with Gloria Grahame. “Bitch!” grinned Mitzi at the Academy audience (nobody pronounces the word “bitch” with such ardor). Well, she auditioned for South Pacific, and landed the fabled role that was played on Broadway by Mary Martin, with Ezio Pinza as the plantation owner.

John Kerr discussed auditioning for South Pacific, after his Broadway success as a student dubious about his sexuality in Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, starring opposite Deborah Kerr. He appeared as a regular on ABC’s Peyton Place, and, in time, received his JD, then followed an attorney’s career in Beverly Hills. He added that it was he who prepared the will for his South Pacific love interest, France Nuyen.

“Indeed, he did,” said the Marseille-born France, who dreamed of being a sculptor. She arrived in New York speaking only French, and was pursued by the Candy Jones-Ted Conover modeling agency. “One morning a limousine arrived at the French Bakery where I was working on Lexington Avenue, and delivered me to Mr. Logan, Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein for an audition. I hadn’t ever acted, yet I won the role, and my life changed.”

“Lady Gaga Wonderland” is how Elton John describes it. Cuckoo Gaga, who earned $62 million last year, dressed as a bride inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe horror novel in a see-through gown and a gilded cage over her face during Elton’s 12th annual White Tie and Tiara Ball at his Old Windsor estate not far from London. Elton reports that Lady Gaga bounced and flounced with volcanic energy, thunderously dueting with him for the 650 guests, which included couturier Valentino, Elizabeth Hurley with husband Arun Nayer, Kate Beckinsale, Sharon and Kelly Osbourne, Kid Rock, the Scissor Sisters, Boris Becker, Jon Bon Jovi with family.

The Ball raised $10 million for the Elton John Aids Foundation. More than 15 countries benefit from the Foundation, which oversees $30 million for life-saving medications and educational programs for thousands of men, women and children with AIDS.

Not far from England, the real McCoy tiaras turned out in Stockholm. Gold and silver tiaras shone with historic jewels during the wedding of Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden to her physical trainer Daniel Westling, now a Prince, who cried when they exchanged rings. The wedding’s been lauded as a “triumph of style” by our local wedding planners. More than l,200 royals and dignitaries, in elegant gowns and white tie with princely ribbons and medals, filled the Stockholm Cathedral.

An estimated 500,000 onlookers crowded the streets, and more than 500 million television viewers watched what’s hailed as the largest royal wedding since Prince Charles and Diana’s. Princess Victoria is the beautiful daughter of Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia. Checking out the slide show on the Internet, we find lessons to be learned from the Swedes on the epitome of grace and style and understated chic.

GQ and Vogue have published fair and informative articles, and now the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd zeroed in with a recent column about concerns facing mobile phones. “Just as parents tell their kids that, believe it or not, there was a time when nobody knew that cigarettes and tanning were bad for you, those kids may grow up to tell their kids when nobody knew how dangerous it was to hold your phone next to your head and chat away for hours.”

She reports that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s forged ahead with San Francisco being “the first city in the country to pass legislation making cellphone retailers display radiation levels.” What worried the Mayor was his pregnant wife Jennifer talking on the cellphone nonstop, and he began “reading new studies on the vulnerability of children’s thinner skulls to radiation.”

Dowd adds that studies remain contradictory about carcinogenic potential. Still, a Swedish study, notes Dowd, “followed young people, who began using cells as teenagers, calculated a 400 percent increase in brain tumors.” Dowd finds technology to be a narcotic, and that Newsom’s resigned to his own addiction. “I love my iPhone.”