A Night of Club-Hopping: Finding Right Match Takes Lots of Looking

Notes from a club-hopping Friday evening:

8:30 p.m. Cabaret lounge, the Airporter Inn, Irvine:

Jan and JoAnn sit at a cocktail table near the bandstand. The musicians talk quietly among themselves, adjusting cables and wires, glancing at the crowd gathering in the cavernous room. Business suits. Sensible shoes. Some polyester. First set starts in 15 minutes.

JoAnn, 40, in a red print dress and red dangling earrings, lights a cigarette.

“I love to dance, and that’s why I go out,” she says. “Jan’s a little bit more up-tight than me.”

“A lot more,” says Jan, 38.

“But I try to have the attitude that we’re just going out to relax and have a drink,” JoAnn says. “We work hard all week, and we deserve a break. Who cares if no one asks us to dance?”

JoAnn pauses, smiles. “Of course, it’s hard to maintain that attitude Friday night after Friday night after Friday night.”

Jan lives in Placentia with her 11-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son; JoAnn lives in Fullerton with her 20-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son. Jan and JoAnn work together at an engineering company. They say they find single life “depressing.”

“We don’t have a social life,” Jan says.

“But we do go out,” JoAnn says. “We try to pick clubs where we won’t run into our kids.”

On the table by Jan’s beer bottle are pieces of a torn-up cocktail napkin.

“When we came in,” Jan says, toying with the napkin shards, “there was this guy sitting all alone. I could see him looking around. . . .”

“She said she thought he was cute,” JoAnn says. “I told her to write him a note.”

“Sometimes she writes the note,” Jan says.

“I’m the aggressor,” JoAnn says. “If she wants to meet someone, I write a note and take it over and say, ‘This is from my friend.’ ”

Jan tugs at the sleeves of her gray suit. “I wrote the note this time,” she says. “It’s the first time I’ve written the note. I wrote: ‘Please don’t take this wrong, but I saw you sitting over there, and you look as bored as I do. If you’d like to join us, please do. Please don’t take this as a come-on.’ I didn’t want to sound like I was hitting on him.”

“You should have written faster,” JoAnn says.

“Before I was done, he got up and left,” Jan says. “Oh, well.”

JoAnn laughs. “Too bad you tore up the napkin. You could have used it for someone else.”

10 p.m. Peppers, Garden Grove:

Rodney, 21, stands just inside the entrance, watching the rain quicken outside the open doors. A line forms near the building--one dozen, two dozen, 40 people huddled together, waiting to be let in.

Inside, it’s SRO. Leather minis. Skintight jeans. Big hair. Cleavage.

Strobes flash with the beat and spotlights lurch around the dance floor. The deejay shouts, “Scream!”

Rodney pops a piece of gum into his mouth.

“This is a good place to meet girls,” he says. “I’ve met three girls here that turned into relationships. One relationship lasted a month--she was 27. When she found out I’m 21, she had a cow.

“Tonight,” Rodney shrugs, “I don’t know. Some of the girls are acting stuck-up. You look at them, and they look away. Forget it. You gotta catch their eyes. If you look at a girl and she looks at you--bam. You’re scoring.”

Rodney lives in Orange and works in a warehouse. He says he doesn’t drink much when he goes out, just a beer or two, because he’s a body-builder. Got to keep the weight down.

“Girls like big bodies,” he says, massaging his right bicep. “They like it when you tease. Like on the dance floor--you shake your buns, roll your tongue around. They love that.”

Tom, 25, student and salesman, stands near the dance floor. He shouts at his friends over the thundering music, his shoulders bobbing with the beat. When the deejay says scream , Tom lets out a hoot and raises his arms like a fighter who has just delivered a knockout punch.

Led into the lobby of the adjoining restaurant, Tom settles demurely on a bench.

“I don’t go to clubs much,” he says with a shy smile. “Maybe once or twice a month. With friends from work. I don’t usually dance when I go out--I can dance and all, but I don’t have the nerve to ask someone.

“If you meet someone in a club, it’s probably not the person you’d like to spend the rest of your life with. That’s what I’m interested in. Marriage, family, all that. But I don’t know where to go to find it.

“I guess I’m looking for a woman who’s about my age, not square but someone with a moral outlook--honesty, loyalty. That’s the most important thing.”

11:15 p.m. The Hop, Fountain Valley:

Susan and Randy hold hands and gaze at the couples on the dance floor. Susan turns back to Randy. He reaches for his beer.

The room is warm, loud, friendly. A blue-jeans crowd dancing to the Outsiders, the Beach Boys, James Brown.

Susan, 22, back from UC Santa Barbara for the weekend, met Randy, 26, four hours earlier during “happy hour.” Susan started the evening with girlfriends, all of whom are gone now; Randy came to the club alone--something he has done more than a few times, he says, since he moved to Fountain Valley six months ago.

“I saw him dancing with all these girls,” Susan teases. “Then he said ‘hi’ to me, and I thought he was someone I know from school. That was weird. Then we danced.”

“We sort of danced,” Randy says. “It was a slow song.”

“He told me he got the chills,” says Susan, giggling. “He said he didn’t know if that was good or bad.”

Randy loops his arm through Susan’s. James Brown is begging please, please, please . Randy and Susan slide off their bar stools and head for the dance floor.

1 a.m. Bobby McGee’s, Newport Beach:

Betsey, 27, sits at the dark wood bar, the toes of her spike-heel shoes tapping on the Oriental carpeting.

“My boyfriend thinks I’m at a lingerie party tonight,” she says with a shake of her long blond hair. “He’s the jealous type. He’d kill me if he knew I went to a bar with a girlfriend.

“But you know what? Looking at the bar life just makes me appreciate what I have at home.”

Steve, 27, thinks he should probably get home--he told his fiancee he would be home by midnight, which only seems right, since they’re getting married in the morning. But his friends keep ordering kamikazes and the cocktail waitress is a looker and then there are girls to dance with, “one in particular,” Steve says, grinning.

“I called (my fiancee) at midnight,” he says, “but the line was busy. So I called back at 12:30--busy. I guess I should call again pretty soon.”

“The story,” says one of his friends, “is that Steve’s in San Diego. That way, no matter when he calls, we’ve got another hour. It takes at least an hour to get home from San Diego.”

2:30 a.m. Kiss, Costa Mesa:

Lisa and Sheena study their images in the bathroom mirror.

“Got a comb?” asks Lisa, 24, a gym teacher.

“Nope,” says Sheena, 21, a model.

Sheena draws thick black circles around her eyes with eyeliner. Lisa runs her fingers through her hair. Lisa and Sheena are sisters. They both live in Anaheim.

“We saw men going into this club, so we just followed,” Sheena says. She drops the eyeliner into her purse.

“Actually,” Lisa says, “we’re here to exercise. Dancing is great for your legs.”

Sheena smiles at the mirror, revealing the silver latticework on her teeth.

“I hate these braces,” she says.

“Forget it,” says her sister, dancing back into the club. “Let’s go aerobicize !”

Here come the holidays again--that frantic, expensive and often lonely time of the year. How do you handle the holiday blues? What’s the best way to get through all the parties or keep yourself sane at home as we slide toward 1988? Send your comments to Single Life, Orange County Life, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa 92626. Please include your phone number so that a reporter may contact you. To protect your privacy, Single Life does not publish correspondents’ last names.