TALENT HAS WAY OF ARRIVING AT THIS SCOUT’S DOOR

If you were casting the part of a talent agent for a movie, what sort of person would you pick? A rotund man in a checkered polyester jacket? White belt? Shaggy eyebrows? Rosy, rubbery lips that clamp around his cigar as he murmurs, “Kid, I can make you a star”?

Meet Key Dee Alan. Real life San Diego talent agent. Warm, motherly, able to sing opera and responsible for guiding the entertainment careers of more than 30 San Diegans. (And a Bolivian multicultural show group that arrived here earlier this week.)

“At least I will be guiding them if I survive this Fourth of July,” she said.

Alan was speaking in the Pacific Beach apartment of one of her clients, tenor Patrick Biggs. Perched on a sofa, in the narrow space between Biggs’ piano and a vast cabinet full of stereo equipment, Alan explained why the Fourth is going to be hectic.

At 10 a.m. she will be at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. “I’d arranged for a brass quintet to be on stage at the Community Theatre then,” she said. “But they’ve got union problems. I’m filling in myself with a mixture of contemporary and patriotic songs--’Let There Be Peace on Earth’ is one--helped out by another of my clients, guitarist Rick Scott.”

At 11 a.m. Alan will nip over to El Cajon to collect the Bolivian group, the five-member Rama Nueve. She’ll shepherd them over to La Jolla Village Square for their 1 p.m. performance at the upper-level concert area.

“As they’ve only just arrived, I thought they might get lost if I didn’t go along,” she said. “Their leader, Raul Allyon, plays over 43 instruments against a background tape of the wind in the mountains. It’s beautiful, spine-tingling music, different from anything I’ve ever heard before.”

From La Jolla Village Square, it will be back down Interstate 5, through the snorting holiday traffic, to the Del Mar Fairgrounds again. The Bolivians, dressed in their multicolored ponchos, reed pipes swinging from their microphones, will be performing on the stage of the Community Theatre at 5 p.m.

Alan won’t even have time to put away her notebook (the one in which she records audience reaction to her clients) after that performance. Biggs, resplendent in his tuxedo, will be singing show tunes and classical opera for the next hour.

“When I sang at the fair the other Saturday the audience enjoyed the Irish songs the most,” Biggs said. (He had just come to the end of “Galway Bay,” he remembers, when the Navy marching band went past on the midway. “It seemed,” he said, “a good moment to pause.”)

Singing at the fair, on the stage of the Community Theatre, is not exactly a formal situation. Your audience is likely to wander in clutching a bag of popcorn, or cinnamon rolls, or small, sticky children. And they are likely to keep wandering in and out all through the performance.

“Ah, but an audience is an audience,” Biggs, 37, said with enthusiasm. “What does it matter if they’re dressed a little casually?”

Biggs was accustomed to a more stay-in-their-seats type of crowd when he sang with the San Diego Opera. He appeared with them for more 12 years--until 1982, when degenerative arthritis compelled him to sing from a wheelchair.

“I love to sing. When I look out and see the reaction on people’s faces I can feel myself drawing them in. It’s an emotional experience on both sides of the stage,” he said.

Biggs isn’t Alan’s only client who happens to have a handicap. She also handles soprano Anna B. Carson. Carson, born in San Diego in 1953, had polio as a baby. She usually uses a leg brace or a crutch on stage.

“I’ve found it best to be up-front about an artist’s handicaps. It’s the first thing I mention to someone who is interested in booking them,” Alan said. “I also mention that neither Anna or Patrick have ever let me down. When they say they’ll be somewhere they always are.”

Alan herself studied privately with five professional opera singers, but put her own singing aside while she was raising three children. Now her clients are a second family. She never advertises for them. She is not in the Yellow Pages. Clients just seem to appear, she said, cropping up in her life as if fated to do so.

“Not all of them are what I’m looking for, of course,” she said. “I look for the kind of artist who touches the spirit--the heart--of others.”

She usually auditions new people at her home, rather than at her El Cajon office. “It’s more relaxing for them,” she said. “And my piano is there in case they need accompaniment.” It is also often fun. “When the Cheers Barber Shop Quartet came to audition, I could hear them singing on the doorstep before I opened the door,” she said.

Most of her clients are singers or musicians. But she also handles two disc jockeys and several public speakers. One client, Ben Decker, is a juggler-comedian. Alan first spotted him performing at Horton Plaza.

Alan has been running the KDA Entertainment Talent Agency for only 18 months. She has found being a talent agent exhausting work, full of frustrations but also full of adventures and challenges.

“One of my adventures is going to happen at the fairgrounds on the Fourth,” she said. “At 8 p.m.”

At that hour, at the end of her hectic day, Alan, clad in a green satin evening gown--”Although I’ve no idea where I’m going to put it on. The back of my car, maybe?”--will join Biggs on stage. She has always, she admits, been in awe of Biggs’ voice. Accompanied by the Gus Rheinhold Orchestra, artist and agent together will sing “God Bless America.”

You wouldn’t expect the agent with the checkered jacket and the cigar to do something like that.