BLOCK HAS WEEKLY RADIO DATE WITH L.A. SINGLES

Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody. I got some money ‘cause I just got paid. Now I wish I had someone to talk to. I’m in an awful way.

--Chorus from the song “Another Saturday Night”

“Hi, I’m Susan Block, your date for the night. No, not the whole night. Just the next 60 minutes. But they are going to be 60 terrific, romantic minutes. That’s right. Romance is not just in the air, it’s on the air. ‘Date Night’ is here to get you a date. All you have to do is give us a call. Then we’ll get personal .”

The voice is part sass, part silken promise of candlelight and wine and, maybe, just maybe, a little something more.

Its owner is a 30-year-old Yale graduate (class of ‘77) and daughter of a Philadelphia lawyer.

She’s host of what is either the most enriching new participation sport in town or Los Angeles’ latest theater of the absurd. It all depends on listeners’ notions of good taste, threshold of voyeurism and needs and inclinations.

“Susan Block’s Date Night,” slithering across the radio waves every Saturday from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. over KIEV-AM (870), has been heard for more than a year now, during which time it has attracted a cult following made up of both the hot-blooded and the lovelorn.

Or, as she herself puts it, “people who think it’s bizarre, entertaining and, sometimes, even touching.” An abridged version runs from 11 to 11:30 p.m. Sundays, called, naturally, “Susan Block’s Late Night Date Night.” As far as she knows, the show’s format is unique in Los Angeles, though a similar radio match-’em-up program called “Affair on the Air” has also been broadcast over KFRC-AM in San Francisco for the past year. (That popular two-hour program (7 to 9 p.m.) airs Monday through Friday.

Her program’s popularity says much about the Los Angeles area’s social fragmentation, Block maintains. “L.A.’s a city where people feel cut off from one another,” she said.

Block encourages men and women to telephone and talk on the air with compatibles of the opposite sex; Block and an aide match them. Block calls the conversations “blind dates on the air.”

“Tell us who you are--first names only please--because we don’t want your mama to know you’re calling a radio show to get a date,” Block announces. “Tell us what you do, what you wish you could be doing and, most important, what sort of lady or gentleman you’d like to do it with--whatever it is.”

If the conference calls go well, Block suggests that participants write to each other to arrange in-person meetings, which, she hints, could lead to the start of something big. According to the follow-up she has been able to determine, it sometimes does.

No charge for the live call-ins. But: “Be sure to enclose a dollar for postage and handling. “ Block’s voice ranges up and down a scale of suggestiveness from cozy to intimate to ooh-la-la and back to cozy.

A second major component of “Date Night” is this, as Block describes it on the air:

“And now is the time for tonight’s first series of exciting, enticing pre-taped, pre-paid ‘Date Night’ personals on the air. So listen carefully. Get your pens and papers ready to jot down the names of and numbers of these ultra eligible date-nighters.”

The “personals,” reminiscent of those appearing in such print media as the New York Review of Books and the National Singles’ Register and, locally, the L.A. Weekly, are preceded by the playing of “The Want Ads” as sung by a group Block identified as the Honeycones. The song goes like this:

“Wanted. Young man, single and free. Experienced in love preferred. But will accept a young trainee. Oh, gonna put it in the want ads.”

The personals cost $30 for 15 seconds and $50 for a half-minute and are played both Saturdays and Sundays. The cost goes up to $90 for a minute, which Blocks doesn’t recommend.”We think a minute is too long,” she said. “We think the message and the personality come across best in a quicker time.”

This from Rob: “Looking for one of those dates that would start, oh maybe, Friday night and end up late Sunday afternoon after we’d read the New York Times, had fresh orange juice for breakfast, that sort of thing. What about me? Well, let’s see . . . I’m 30 years old. Medium height. Great body. . . . “

And this from Donna, who said she is divorced and 31: “I want to get married. I don’t want to work anymore. I want to have a baby. And I want to have a house down by the shore. And I want to be able to, like, buy a new Chrysler LeBaron. And I want to have a baby sitter. And I want my husband to take out the trash because it’s a boy thing. And I want to go to Hawaii.”

Block, however, shies away from the term matchmaker. “I’m not an expert,” she said. “I don’t give people advice; I talk to people. I suggest people meet. I’m not so much a matchmaker as chaperone. I help people get together.”

But, she added, she takes extra precautions about how she does it.

“I see danger. But I think we minimize that danger by having them write to a person in care of a box number. We don’t give phone numbers on the air. They do that in their letters. We also suggest they meet in a public place the first time, not invite anyone to their home. Everyone talks a lot on the phone before they meet.

“Perverts are discouraged by that. Maniacs are not likely to write a letter, go through a series of phone calls, then meet in a coffee shop.”

However, she estimated that about half who do meet wind up in sexual liaisons--”if they’ve been dating five or six times. But most people are interested in a relationship. . . .

“When we do get complaints from people after they’ve met, it’s about a person being ugly or a tightwad. We don’t get complaints about attacks from perverts.”

Block maintains that callers and tapers of personals constitute a cross section of the population, ranging in age from 16 to 70. “They rarely are kooks,” she insisted. “We get all kinds, including doctors, lawyers and even professional models. One beautiful young woman of 24 has heard from all kinds of guys and right now she’s dating two of them regularly.”

Block, who tried the theater the first three years after graduating from Yale, later turned free-lance writer, and that led her to the idea of “Date Night.”

She got an assignment from the Bay Guardian in San Francisco to write an article about the kinds of men and women who advertised in the weekly’s personals columns. “I had a huge response to the article,” said Block, a slender, auburn-haired, smartly groomed woman. While researching the piece, the unmarried Block met a man with whom she developed a three-year relationship, now ended.

The article also led to an offer to do a book, “Advertising for Love--How to Play the Personals,” a paperback published last year by William Morrow, and assignments for such magazines, she said, as Penthouse, Playgirl and Redbook on relationships between the sexes.

Block, who had been a disc jockey on the university’s radio station while attending Yale, a year ago suggested that L.A. Weekly, which, she said, “was trying to beef up its classified ads,” sponsor the radio show for three months.

“I did a demo tape, and the classified advertising manager agreed,” she added. “And KIEV liked the idea of attracting a young singles crowd; it brought a whole new element in for the station.”

Block estimates that about 20% of the “Date Night” listeners are “regulars,” men and women who tune in faithfully each week. Some call her outside show hours to tell her what success they have had in meeting people and what kind of relationships, if any, have developed.