Bonanza for Balboa’s Sophisticated Shoppers
They couldn’t help themselves.
The doors to Shop Till You Drop hadn’t even opened Thursday night and already Phyllis Ratliff had picked out $300 worth of jewelry, belts and clothing she wanted to buy.
“Eeeeek! It’s only 5:45!” said Ratliff, publicity chairman for the Sophisticates, a support group that sponsored of the shopping spree to benefit the Assessment and Treatment Services Center. “I’m interested in everything! No limits tonight!”
Ratliff, like other Shop Till You Drop committee members, had arrived early to help 25 vendors set up their wares at the Balboa Bay Club.
“I’ve already picked out a bracelet, a purse, a belt . . . the economy needs me out there jolting it!” joked Darlene Drummond, Sophisticates president, minutes before about 125 couples began to stride into a ballroom-turned-marketplace.
“Tonight the Bay Club becomes Swap Meet by the Bay,” quipped vendor Karl Rappl, owner of Beverly Hills Bag Lady. “They’re gonna swap till they drop!” Rappl’s leather bags had been the No. 2 best seller at last year’s event, which netted $7,000 for the center, a family counseling agency with offices in Orange and Tustin.
“I did a $1,000 an hour last year,” Rappl said, grinning. “Tonight, I expect to sell about 400 bags at around $100 apiece.” The vendors, Drummond explained, had paid $150 each to set up a booth and would donate 10 percent of their gross sales to the center. This year’s event--which included an open-to-the-public sale on Friday--was expected to generate about $20,000, Drummond said.
Guests attending Thursday night’s preview party had paid $20 each for the chance to shop (with merchandise mark-offs up to 30 percent) and enjoy chili and corn bread beside the club’s sapphire pool.
By 8 p.m., Joyce King of Corona del Mar’s faux jewelry booth was swarming with women smothered in baubles, bangles and beads. King, first-place vendor at last year’s event, said tennis bracelets, “those little diamond things made popular by Chris Evert,” were hot on everybody’s shopping list, as were her bigger-than-a-breadbox “diamond rings.”
“People in this area travel a lot,” King said, “and insurance rates are so high, they don’t want to take along the real thing. So they buy my fakes, and I never tell.”
King said her fabulous fake was so fabulous she had a hard time remembering whether she was wearing her real, 7-carat, pear-shaped diamond or her phony one. “I seem to wear the faux a lot now,” she said, adding that copies of the Duchess of Windsor’s jewels were going to be next on her Corona del Mar boutique’s glittering inventory.
Rose Smedgaard, poring over some sweats paint-splattered a la Jackson Pollock, said she had money to spend because her husband, Norm, had given her a check recently for their “16th anniversary and another check for the 17th anniversary of the day we met.
“I am a very sophisticated shopper,” she added, eyes glowing. “I can walk through a department store’s second floor and know in 15 minutes that they don’t have what I want.” Smedgaard’s pal, Gloria Nord, said she’d bought a belt and stashed it in her car. “I’m one of those people who has to buy what I like at the time. If I plan ahead, I just can’t do it,” she wailed.
The husband of Shop Till You Drop chairwoman Darleen Manclark took the prize (if there’d been one) for fastest draw of a credit card. Darleen had been inside the ballroom doors just six minutes when she’d spotted some earrings that matched her necklace. Husband William whipped out his MasterCard and said: “Anything for my sweetheart, even the Laker game.”
