Newcomer From the East Finds It Hard to Plug Into the Southland’s Mind-Set

“An expensive habitat of superficial, phony, shallow, materialistic people in pursuit of a quick buck.”

Before he moved here, that’s what people warned Russell about Southern California, and he thinks it’s true.

The 47-year-old Westchester, N.Y.-born divorced geologist, who has spent most of his adult life in Denver, Houston and small mining towns in the West, is quick to add that he’s “not passing judgment on the goodness or badness of this. It just is, and the majority of people out here seem comfortable with it.”

After a couple of years in Southern California, Russell thinks it’s very easy to meet people here. But his friends tend to be other newcomers from New England, the Midwest and Northern California who share “similar failures in our social lives,” similar values and a united outlook on Orange County natives.

Making an impression on the natives is another matter.

“I met a young lady at work whose entire life was spent in Torrance and Garden Grove,” Russell writes in a letter to Single Life. “When advised that I was originally from the East, (she) frowned, looked at me and said, ‘You’re stricter.’

“We still laugh at this, but the Orange County native was telling me, in her way, that my values and style of life were a lot different.”

As “just an average-looking person” without “a California body” or “a beautiful tan,” Russell, who lives in Huntington Beach, feels like an outsider in a “social whirl” that is “Fast Lane and very competitive.”

“The successes in the Orange County singles life are driven by what I call visuals,” he writes. “Your looks, where you live, the kind of car you drive (some women he has met have refused to ride in his new pick-up), the need to see and be seen in the proper clubs, the size of your paycheck and the degree to which we seize upon trendy things.”

Singles dances tend to be “Ken and Barbie fashion show nonsense,” he says, marveling at the makeup-and-dress rituals women go through before they make an appearance at top Orange County watering spots. (“You have an image in your mind about these Spanish bullfighters getting ready.”)

Russell claims that he “doesn’t give a damn what a woman looks like.” Listening to his buddies at work picking favorites among the secretaries, “I’d rattle off a list (of women he liked), and they’d say, ‘What do you see in her?’ and I’d say, ‘She has a nice personality.’ ”

But he has made attempts to befriend comely women, only to find that they don’t always say what they mean.

“There’s something out here called Calspeak,” he says. “Probably the most outstanding example of it is the refrain, ‘I’ll call you.’ In Southern California, that means, ‘Goodby.’ In the rest of the country it means I’m gonna call you.”

One “very attractive gal” he met told him she’d like to go to Santa Fe. “So we talked about this periodically all summer, and around September I thought I’d better make some plans.”

She finally said she wanted to go Halloween weekend. “When the date got close I called and said, ‘Look, if I can get the tickets two weeks before, we can save a bunch of bucks.’ ”

Then she said she had to check again about getting time off from work. Trying in vain to reach her at home as the deadline closed in, he called her at work.

“She said, ‘Well, you know, I really didn’t think it was going to go this far. I’m seeing someone else.’ And then she got mad at me because I left a message on her answering machine and (her) boyfriend heard it and they had a fight.”

A female co-worker who listened to his lament about problems finding a woman “with depth and substance” agreed with him that “the attributes of common courtesy and sincerity (as I understood them) might not be commonplace out here.”

“She also verified my thoughts that women out here over age 35 carry a lot of anger and seem to have been beat up emotionally,” Russell says. He has found that women in this age group from the Midwest tended to be “very angry at their mothers,” while the anger of women in Orange County “is directed at men--real or imagined wrongs from husbands or boyfriends.”

At community college singles seminars, Russell says, “All you hear is women complaining about how they’re dating jerks and weird guys.

“I’ve talked to people at work about this and another gal said, ‘Oh, yeah, a friend of mine is dating a nice guy, but she’s going to break up and go with a jerk.’ I said, ‘Women out here like jerks.’ ”

So what kind of guy is a jerk?

“A superficial person,” says Russell. “You know. Again, I try not to be judgmental about this, but it seems to work for most people out here.”

But isn’t there life in Orange County beyond the trendy spots? Don’t people meet real people doing normal, everyday things?

Russell doesn’t think so. “Women don’t go to church to meet men,” he says.

His advice for anyone contemplating a move to Orange County is to “come out and look the place over” first. “Get on the 405 at 4:30 p.m., visit the Irvine Ranch Market, visit the Red Onions and see for (yourself) the Barbies and Don Johnson look-alikes, walk the beach at sundown.”

Yet despite his problems with this area of the country, Russell gives it “a generally favorable rating.” He says it’s “a joy to be living in a place where there’s so much to do, sophisticated people and a buoyant economy.”

When East Meets West

How about it, newcomers? Do the natives make you restless? If you’re in Russell’s predicament, how do you cope? Or do you disagree with his assessment of the Orange County singles scene?

Let’s hear from the natives. Are you sympathetic or do you know a different OC singles world that Russell may not have discovered? How do you feel about the newcomers? Can you spot one a mile away? How?

Making It or Forsaking It?

The health hazards of the ‘80s have thrown a curve into the dating game, creating some self-imposed lonely nights but scarcely making a dent in some deeply ingrained sexual habits.

Celibate by choice: Have you given up on sex, permanently or temporarily? Why? Does it seem worth the sacrifice?

Love addicts: Do you ignore the warnings and continue to pursue multiple relationships at the same time? Are you hooked on one-nighters? Is the body count more fun than the thought of a one-and-only? Tell us about your experiences and how you feel about them.

Send your comments to Single Life, Orange County Life, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. Please include a phone number so that a reporter may contact you. To protect your privacy, Single Life does not publish correspondents’ last names.