Red Onion girls seem to know the importance of perfect fingernails. : Looking for Those Who Look for Mr. Goodbar

“It seems like anyone in the Valley, when they turn 21, that first night out, they come here.”

Jim Camuso was behind the bar at the Red Onion on a recent Wednesday night, turning calibrated quantities of vodka, lime juice and triple sec into something called a kamikaze and extolling the virtues of the Woodland Hills club that employs him.

In the spirit of journalistic enterprise, I had asked someone who knew the West Valley better than I do where its biggest pickup place was. And he had answered, intriguingly, “The Red Onion--that’s the place to go if you really want to get stepped on.”

Just as I was not talking butcher shops when I used the term “meat market,” he was not talking crowd-control problems when he answered. He was talking about places you go to meet diverting others who will, most probably, eventually stomp on your heart.

Reporters don’t have to work as hard in such places as the people who are there ostensibly having fun.

“You can’t get more than one drink per person at this bar,” Camuso said, obviously proud that the management was actively addressing the problem of customers who are sober enough to get the little key into the ignition but too drunk to drive.

And Camuso also liked the club’s approach to what older folks call bouncers. “Instead of big guys that intimidate people, they have small guys who know how to talk,” he said. (That’s always been my preference, too, although there’s a case to be made on both sides.) The Onion’s articulate ejectors are known as door hosts.

As Camuso pointed out, the club has a strict dress code. Tattered jeans, T-shirts (for men) and ripped sneakers are all verboten. And there’s another no-no. “You can’t wear a hat,” he said. That puzzled me at first, but Camuso made the hat ban crystal clear. As he explained, “It impairs the view of other people.”

As 300 of their generation surged round and round the Red Onion, their poses casual, their eyes as sharp as hawks,’ six young women took a time out in the scrimmage of appetite.

In a room marked Senoritas, they enjoyed an obviously welcome break from relentless conviviality. Theoretically, at least, they could have stopped smiling as soon the door closed behind them. Instead, they continued to smile reflexively, radiantly, at anyone who walked in. (Does that happen in the Senors Room, too, I wondered?) They even grinned contentedly at themselves as they fine-tuned their corporeal assets in the mirror over the sinks.

If the ladies’ room provided only a five-minute respite from the possibility of rejection, that would be enough. But it has good lighting, too.

That matters, because all this preening was anything but frivolous. Other species have turquoise tail feathers or polka-dotted sides to mesmerize choice specimens of the other gender. Red Onion girls seem to know, if only in their wise young bones, the importance of perfect fingernails.

Cover Girl and Revlon keep our race alive.

Denise Griffin of Woodland Hills stood in front of the mirror expertly fluffing out her corona of blonde hair until it looked like a gigantic dandelion. Blue-eyed and six feet tall, Griffin made an imposing flower.

“I find it an asset,” she said of her height. “They see a lot of ordinary out there. It gives them something to talk about.”

Laura Langsfeld is shorter than Griffin, except for her legs, which are longer than my entire body. Langsfeld popped into the ladies’ room to freshen up the red dot on her nose.

The 26-year-old Reseda woman is a waitress at the Onion, which requires its staff to wear special costumes for each of several different “theme” nights. This was Play Girl Night at the club, and so Langsfeld and her male and female colleagues were dressed much like Playboy Bunnies. They had rouged their noses, penciled rodenty-looking whiskers onto their faces and donned rabbit ears.

Langsfeld, whose nickname is Mert, isn’t crazy about her rabbit outfit, she confessed, as she tugged at the skimpy black leotard that is its major component. Customers have an understandable but annoying tendency to grab at her fluffy cotton bunny tail. But she had already made $120 in tips on a slow night. And anything is better than Monday. Monday is Rockin’ the Cradle Night, and the female staff wears diapers.

Langsfeld occasionally discovers a memorable man as she twists through the nightly logjam of bodies to deliver Long Island iced teas and bottles of Foster, two currently favored potables. Occasionally but not often. As she put it, heading back to work, “I haven’t met anybody who’s blown my dress up, so to speak. A lot of play toys but nothing serious.”

Dean Groover, 30, worked at the Red Onion more than a decade ago. He was back as a tourist. Pointing to a Pia Zadora look-alike in red Spandex tights and Tom Cruise shades, he speculated on the secret of the club’s ear-splitting success. “The loneliness factor,” he said. “They just don’t want to be alone.”