Life, Debbie Reynolds thinks, is like choosing a vase that a few years later doesn’t seem to be what you thought it was so you push it back on the shelf and don’t think about it."

Debbie and her company of 38 open tonight at Shady Grove in an entertainment she’s based on old-fashioned vaudeville. Ironically, the show is intended to make money for a museum of the movie world that displaced vaudeville, a Hollywood Hall of Fame. Debbie, to her own surprise, seems to be a prime mover into the project.

"When Metro, where I spent so much of my career, decided to sell its costumes and props, there wasn’t time to form committees and have benefits or anything like that. I just borrowed from my bank and bought what I could.

"Now, though, we have something going. We’re going to turn the old Garden Courts Apartments into our physical hall. I used to take dancing at Eugene Loring’s studio down in the basement but 20 years ago I didn’t even know it was a hotel. We’re going to turn each of its 250 rooms into the set for a favorite old movie, giving some movies five or six rooms.

"Metro amounted to a museum in itself. I’ll always remember being outbid for that brass bed I used in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. It was originally bought for Cabin in the Sky and later used in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I lost it to a woman from Texas who told me:

"Honey, Ah jes luv yew and ev’ry movie yew’ve evah made but I jes gotta have that baid. You kin come an visit it any time yew laike.’ Well, I don’t think she really loved me very much, do you?"

"One buy I made, though, was a bargain, $1,200 for models of wagons and cabins used in the old Western movies. They’re not miniatures, but models about three or four feet long. Their period exactness is amazing and must have cost hundreds of thousands in research alone. I wanted to buy Roman models, you know, from Ben Hur and those epics, but everyone’s high these days, apparently, on Old Rome and I couldn’t touch a one.

"Edith Head is handling the costumes. We got some wonderful clothes from Desiree and [Norma] Shearer’s Romeo and Juliet. Of course the material’s become brittle and faded but they’re marvelous for our purposes.

"Twentieth Century-Fox has promised to be more generous but I’m worried about what’s happening at paramount, owned by a conglomerate. What Paramount could do for our Hall of Fame! Don’t call it a museum. That’s so stuffy.

Debbie had just flown in from Toronto, where about eight members of her troupe had gotten ill on the food. The show’s notices were "poison. They seemed to think they were reviewing the Persian Room instead of vaudeville at that grand, huge O’Keefe Center. The autographed pictures I give away were held at Customs because, they told me, 'it’s the day after a holiday and we never do anything the day after a holiday.’ Then they wanted to charge $100 duty, which they later reduced to $20, but by then it was the last day of the run. I’m sure Canada’s a very nice place but I never want to go back there."

"Of course, why should anyone go anywhere? You have good entertainment on TV today, really tops. To get people away from their tubes you’ve got to five them what they can’t get at home. That’s why I thought of this vaudeville show, something for everybody, from our Lady Weight-Watchers - our Barbara [Streisand], who weighs 300 pounds, used to be a stripper, but she keeps her clothes on- to our young, young, young kids who sing and a Washington comedian named Rip Taylor."

As for her own TV show, which died in infancy last season, Miss Reynolds blames herself: "I’m just not a Lucille Ball. There’s only one. And because I had a verbal agreement that I would not be sponsored by a cigarette company doesn’t mean I had it in writing. You’ve got to get everything in writing. For Mary, Mary, it took me six months to learn to smoke and a whole year to stop smoking once I’d started. I thought I’d been very firm about that but I didn’t have it in writing. So, like that vase I was using as a symbol, I’ve pushed it to the back of the shelf."

Not long ago Miss Reynolds went to the 20^th graduation anniversary of her class at Burbank High:

"Bob Brickman hugged me and said: ‘Frannie, you’re the only one who’s made it big.’ I had to laugh. My real name is Mary Frances and Bob Brickman was the first boy ever to kiss me. He wore braces and cut my lip and it almost kept me from ever wanting to kiss anyone again."

I remarked that despite her loans at the bank for her Hall of Fame, the loss of her TV show and a bad week in Toronto, Miss Reynolds left hand still wore one of the biggest diamonds I’ve ever seen.

"That’s shoe," she laughed, "I’m show."

Shoe is her husband, California shoe retailer Harry Karl. Show is Debbie, still signing autographs 20 years after her high school stardom.