‘You never know when you’re going to meet Mr. Right.’

She stood on the stairway, looking down at the couples on the dance floor, a woman who looked old enough to have adult children, wearing a denim miniskirt and high-heeled white boots covered with shiny glass and metal studs.

The guys at the bar gave her a once-over and resumed talking to each other.

She hesitantly descended the steps, like a 14-year-old slipping into her first dance and trying to smile without showing her braces.

Outside the sun shone brightly. Inside the restaurant and bar, it was dim.

The afternoon dances in a Woodland Hills restaurant are a recent experiment by The Singles Committee, which has been putting on dances for seven years.

The committee was formed “by myself and 14 other guys who used to hang out at this bar in Calabasas,” said Ron Caplan, the committee president. “We were all popular men. We rented a country club, and 600 people showed up. That started all the big singles dances in Southern California.”

Organized parties are needed “because West Coast people aren’t as friendly as East Coast people,” said Caplan, 44, a retired food dealer from Baltimore. “East Coast people get together more often. You can have very close friends in the San Fernando Valley, but if they move to Brentwood you lose touch.”

Most of those in the crowd were between the middle 30s and early 50s. Two exceptions were a grandfatherly, bald man in suspenders--the cracker barrel kind, not the Wall Street type--and a woman in her early or middle 20s. A spectacular blonde in a strapless puffball of a mini-dress, she was the queen of the hop, with an endless line of men sliding out of the crowd to ask her to dance.

About 200 persons had turned up. They paid $13 for access to the buffet brunch, checkerboard dance floor and each other, testing the proposition:

Can a girl from a little suburb in the West Valley find romance with Mr. Right among the glittering lights of the used-car lots and shopping malls on Ventura Boulevard on a Sunday afternoon?

“She can try,” said Marilyn, a brunette computer operator from Thousand Oaks who gave her age as over 40.

“You never know when you’re going to meet Mr. Right.”

The afternoon dances are “a little different from the bar scene,” she said.

“Well, not that different I guess. Just that they’re in the afternoon, so it’s more respectable, quote-unquote.”

At least, she observed, “it’s an older crowd. It’s nice not to run into your own children. Last night I was at a party and two of my own daughters showed up.”

Earl didn’t think the age group was such a plus, though he is 58 himself.

“Most of the women here have been divorced--some of them two, three, four times,” he said. “I don’t believe in divorce. I’m a widower.

“All the broads here are only interested in one thing,” he said, rubbing his fingers together in the sign for money, the diamond in his pinky ring flashing. He wore black and white fringed loafers, a striped shirt open at the neck and several gold chains.

“Every one of them asks three things--what kind of car do you drive, where do you live and what you do for a living?

“I tell them I’m a proctologist from Compton and I drive a Volkswagen.”

Actually, he added, he is a successful land developer with a home in Encino and “a Jaguar for business and a Mercedes for fun, but I don’t want the broads to know that.”

She would never do such a thing, said Sandy, a 44-year-old potter from Agoura Hills, a blonde in a denim miniskirt, black stockings and white sandals.

“I don’t ask what they do until they ask what I do. Then it’s open season. Men ask the same questions, like whether you own your own home. Well, that’s a way of getting to know them. I know some men don’t like questions like that. Some of them are real secretive.

“And I’ve never asked anyone what kind of car he drives.”

The blonde puffball began running out of dance partners and sometimes stood drinking alone. The swinging grandpa had a new partner for every dance, the partners growing gradually younger as he worked his way from the oldest women on down.

Yes, said Sandy, she is divorced “and I’m looking to get married again, but I’m looking for a man with integrity--they’re harder to find than the ones with money.

“I met a nice one this afternoon. He took my number.”

Sometimes the search pans out, said Richard and Joanne Sells of Van Nuys, who were on a sentimental journey. They met at the same dance three years ago, he said, married and now have a 3-month-old daughter.

At the time, he had just separated from his previous wife. “I swore I’d never go to anything like this,” he said, but a friend badgered him into it and he struck up a conversation with Joanne “because she was the first person I was attracted to.”

“I felt sorry for him,” Joanne said. “I told him I had gone through the same thing, and he should be strong.”

When Joanne excused herself to make a phone call, Richard said, “the bartender tells me, ‘forget that one, buddy, she’s not coming back.’ I bet him $5 she’d be back.

“I won.”

“We’re living proof these things work sometimes,” Joanne said.

“We’re a cute couple.”

The disc jockey put on a pounding disco number. The swinging grandpa and the blonde puffball were going strong, dancing together, looking over each other’s shoulders to see who was left on the sidelines.