‘Please do not use the pastor’s bathroom.’

A slender redhead wearing a long black coat and a sequined black beret stood alone in the dark Friday night in a cold vigil outside Woodland Hills Community Church.

She smiled a friendly smile and said hello to a stranger who walked past her into the church.

Then, just before 8 p.m., she whisked briefly into the Breese Chapel, a modest room where poets gather on the third Friday of each month to read their work and listen as others read in the Valley Contemporary Poets Series.

She apologized for holding things up. She was expecting friends, she said, and wanted to meet them outside.

A woman who was collecting $3 donations at the door showed no alarm. Things were moving at their own pace anyway.

In a few minutes, the redhead whisked back, leading four friends. They sat near the back and chatted. She sat by herself and opened a small book. Two men in her group, meeting for the first time, learned that they were both graduates of Santa Cruz, the tiny, free-form campus of the University of California.

One had become an actor. He was excited because he had just landed a part on “Hill Street Blues.”

The other produced his business card. “Experiential and Counseling Analysis,” it read. There was a figure in a flowing robe on it. He said it represented a Tarot card.

“A little Tarot psychology, eh,” the actor said.

About a half-hour late, Sylvia Rosen, director of the series, called the audience of 25 to order and made a few announcements. She said the series, sponsored by the Valley Cultural Center, was beginning its seventh year, making it, she believed, the second-longest-running poetry series in Los Angeles.

She also pointed out the bathrooms through a door behind her.

“Please do not use the pastor’s bathroom,” she warned. “It makes him very upset.”

Rosen introduced Jack Grapes, the first of two guest poets, as the author of several books, winner of a fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, teacher at UCLA, playwright and actor.

A stocky and homespun-looking man of about 40 with a fine beard and a boyish grin, Grapes acknowledged that his looks can belie his poetry.

“I guess I present a kind of jolly facade,” he said. His poems often dwelt upon anxiety and pain.

He read this from the title poem of his latest published work, “Some Life”:

Now there are women

who sit with other women

or they sit alone and I sit alone and watch them.

Just once I’d like one to get up

and come over to my table

and ask to sit and talk . . .

Some life is always better than none . . .

Some life is all we have.

A marriage that lasts 10 years;

A love affair for 2;

A weekend with a stranger;

A voice on the phone--

wrong number . . . .

Poems about his father, his personal possessions, his name, his own writing and even one about Count Dracula--an ode--treaded deftly along the division between manic and depressive, as in this his last and shortest one:

We’re going to get married

and have kids

and live together

and be bloody.

The second poet was the redhead, Suzanne Lummis, also a playwright and columnist for the Downtown News.

Her latest work, “Idiosyncrasies,” was bright, bouncy and full of straightforward humor.

Lummis began with a poem about her breasts, her second opus on that subject.

The first, a complaint, had been an enormous success, she said.

So when she “came to terms” with what she had, she wrote another poem, this time declaring them “precise, subtle, the most economical of forms.”

That too became an enormous success, she said. “So now I’m wondering where else I can go and further exploit my breasts.”

Bobbing right and left lightheartedly, Lummis read a poem about a missed encounter--she gazing out of a bus window thinking, as the man of her dreams passed by outside, what she would have said.

“I could have said, ‘If my body is not enough, I’ll bring friends,’ ” she said.

As Lummis read, the door behind her opened and a youth carrying a couple of chairs on his shoulders looked out in surprise. Rosen rushed through the door and closed it.

Soon several crashing noises came through the wall. Lummis stopped.

“Sylvia, are you locked in?” she deadpanned. “Did she go in the pastor’s bathroom?”

Before her next poem, Lummis noted that Grapes “had some complaints about women.”

“I had no complaints,” Grapes protested. “Did you think I had any complaints about women?”

“This one has some complaints against men--one man,” Lummis went on.

The poem described an attempted rape in which, despite its terror, Lummis never lost her glibness nor sense of humor.

“I’ll admit I was glib if you’ll admit you were insensitive,” she said.

Finally, though, she lamented the fading of the image of her assailant’s face.

“I never intended this to become blurred in my memory, to confuse you with other men,” she said.

After Lummis, three poets came forward for open reading.

Then several in the group headed to a coffee shop, presumably to seek further insights into men and women, joy and pain--the stuff of poetry.