Forest Lawn hopes, of course, that when the proper time comes along they will return.

Answering the call of duty, a mortuary hostess named Hannah Cohen and an apprentice embalmer named Darin Drabing gave up whatever other revelry they might have planned for New Year’s Eve and stayed on at work through the first few hours of 1985.

They work at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in the Hollywood Hills, just east of Universal City. Each year the all-purpose memorial park keeps its doors open until 2 or 3 a.m. and invites New Year’s celebrants to stop by for a free cup of coffee on their way home.

This gesture is intended to prevent a few of those who have drunk themselves into the high-risk category from becoming Forest Lawn clients prematurely. But it is hoped, of course, that when the proper time comes they will return.

Cohen and Drabing made a good team for this double-edged assignment.

Cohen, a stout young woman with curly red hair, has the kind of charm that would make any place feel like home. She talked rapidly and constantly bubbled with laughter and information on where she works.

Drabing, on the other hand, was appropriately severe in a gray suit with a white shirt and slender red necktie. He spoke infrequently and in a slow and even cadence.

They awaited their guests in the green carpeted sitting room of the mortuary, which is a replica of George Washington’s Mount Vernon home and is decorated sparingly with period furniture, like a real living room.

When the first guest of the night arrived around 9:30 p.m., Cohen, dressed in a navy suit and turtleneck sweater, took a seat behind the large wooden desk where she usually greets families arriving to visit the deceased in the mortuary’s sitting rooms.

“We call them slumber rooms,” she volunteered with a giggle. “I love talking about Forest Lawn. Our entry gates are exact replicas of the gates at Buckingham Palace. Did you know that?”

Drabing emerged from a long hall from the back of the building. He was carrying a cup of coffee on a silver serving tray with a silver spoon and silver creamers stuffed with packets of sugar and powdered cream. The silver was real. But the cup looked a little strange. It was Styrofoam.

“Usually we serve in china, but you get Styrofoam because we didn’t want to burden the housekeeper tonight,” Cohen said to the guest, who was a reporter.

Drabing said there would be enough coffee for a hundred guests.

“I made up a big urn,” he said.

“Big urn? Boo!” Cohen said with another giggle, reacting to the word for an object used in an entirely different way by the establishment.

At that hour there weren’t any visitors. So the reporter continued on his rounds, promising to return after midnight when the high-risk group would presumably be out on the road.

Not much had changed by 1:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The white walls of Mount Vernon and the black gates of Buckingham Palace were still brightly lighted against the black silhouette of the Hollywood Hills.

Cohen and Drabing sat outside on a bench in the cold.

“We’re trying to stay awake,” Drabing said.

By then there were about a dozen names on the guest register.

“I have to admit that half of them were employees stopping over on their way someplace,” Cohen said.

But the night had not passed in complete tedium. She said two older men who said they were movie photographers came by.

“They sat down and made themselves right at home,” Cohen said. “They talked to us a lot about photography. One was an old stunt man. He told us about all the movie people who are here that I didn’t know about.”

“It was like being trapped in a Fellini movie,” she said.

In a less ostentatious setting just a few miles away, Greg Bishop and Sharon Schaffner dedicated their small sandwich shop as a way station for the party weary.

From 4 p.m. on New Year’s Eve to 4 a.m. on New Year’s Day they made no sandwiches but kept their store open to give away free coffee to all comers.

Their shop, tucked away in a corner shopping center on Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank, is decorated with photographs of eagles, bighorn sheep and elk and framed paintings of Jesus, one of which turns into a picture of the shroud of Turin from certain angles.

Bishop, a smiling man with a short gray beard, acknowledged that he is only a sometime sportsman. “But I’m Catholic from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head,” he said.

Like the people at Forest Lawn, he has an eye for the value of a gimmick on a night when everyone is really hoping there won’t be any real news. Early in the day a television news crew came by to film the shop.

At about 10 p.m. Bishop and Schaffner turned on a small black-and-white TV. A few friends stopped by and watched as Bishop told his television audience that if he could keep just one driver from having an accident it would be worth the 12-hour vigil.

“You’re a star,” Bishop’s friend said. “OK, now can we go home? We saw it.”

The shop was empty most of the night. But about 1 a.m. several young couples arrived with the New Year’s spirit.

They were friends of the owners, and this was their last stop before going home.

While they were there, the little shop came to life with laughter and conversation. And Bishop and Schaffner seemed to have a happy New Year, even if they saved no lives.

“We saw Forest Lawn on the television,” Bishop said. “It was really dead over there.”