Romance instruction is a steady gig.
Somewhere on the hills over Chatsworth last night, a coyote howled. Maybe it was lonely. That quivering wail is a romantic sound which the anthropomorphically inclined can interpret as a call for a mate.
Perhaps that works. Just climb a hill and cry.
The coyotes, however they find each other, clearly have a workable system, since there are more coyotes by the year. Humans have bigger problems. If they can’t figure out the secrets of romance during adolescence, it can be costly.
Once the fortress of fate and garden of gamblers, love has become a learned skill. There are lessons in how to find it, even in the San Fernando Valley.
The Valley needs the help, peopled as it is with those whose imaginations picture romance as something that happens along the bank of the Seine or in little cafes in Greenwich Village. The L.A. River, which resembles the Maginot Line more than the Left Bank, is little help. Du Par’s has an inadequate wine cellar.
Enter Phil Miller and Bob Badal. They teach classes in romance, sort of “Theory and Practice of How Not to Spend Next Saturday Night Sharing a Pizza With Your Cat.”
Both lecture on other subjects, but romance instruction is a steady gig.
Miller taught a one-class special session recently at Pierce College. It cost $16. Badal gave a seminar beside the pool at the Registry Hotel in Studio City this week. It was free for corporate clients of the hotel, but costs from $45 to more than $100 when he appears elsewhere, like The Learning Tree in Chatsworth.
They are not alone. Valley astrologers have a meeting planned for next month on the soothsaying of sexuality for those who believe the planets care whether they get lucky.
Six women and eight men, from mid-20s to mid-50s, attended Miller’s lecture. It would be impossible to summarize all the lessons of his three-hour presentation, but they included:
For women:
If you’re going to flirt, shoot to kill. “Most men are so insecure that when you make eye contact with them, they figure ‘Hey, I’m not that lucky.’ You have to make eye contact three or four times before they believe it.”
For men:
To meet women, scout ticket lines at movie theaters. Line up behind the target, tell her you have to make a phone call and ask her to hold your place. People are more likely to like you if they do you a favor than if you do them one.
For both:
Men decide whether they are sexually attracted to a woman within 50 seconds of meeting her. “Women decide in about three.”
The best place to meet single people is anywhere there’s a washer and dryer. Social climbers from Simi Valley drive to Laundromats in Encino.
“All women are unhappy with their figures, no matter how great they look. Men fall into one of two classes--either they’re convinced they look terrific, no matter what, or they simply don’t care.”
If a classified ad in the matchmaking columns describes a tall, blonde, blue-eyed athletic type, seeking same, and you’re dark and dumpy, “go anyway. They don’t really look like that either.”
Miller is a jowly, 57-year-old former career Marine officer and political campaign manager who looks like he ought to be chewing a cigar. “I usually set up and leave the room until it’s time for the talk to start,” he said. “Otherwise the audience gets a look at me and figures, ‘That old guy? What does he know about this?’ And they leave.”
His own marriage ended in divorce and he jumped into the mating pool at a comparatively advanced age, he says. But he got a girlfriend “out of this very class” and is still dating her four years later, proving that at least it works for the teacher.
Badal, by contrast, is a muscular male-model type with curly ginger hair, guardsman mustache, teeth that reflect light and a traffic-stopping girlfriend, an elfin belly-dancer. His lectures are punctuated by sudden bursts of rhyme or song and staged madcappery, like throwing members of the audience into the pool. (They turned out to be his girlfriend and a business partner).
The hotel’s sales manager, Lana Ashford, said she organized the evening because of all the lovelorn yuppies and “yuffies” (“young urban failures”) and “Splrs” (“single person lacking romance”) she encountered.
The listeners were mostly 30ish executives, women outnumbering men 4 to 1. They drank champagne and ate Peking duck. Badal, who chucked a career as a commodities broker to live by his wits, primarily urged them to be uninhibited and passionate.
His practical tips included:
For men:
Don’t take her to an expensive restaurant on the first date. Pick someplace “funky and funny” so she will think you’re that kind of guy. Leave room for expensive dining if you need a dazzler later in the relationship.
For women:
Get him to take you hiking “because every man wants a woman in little khaki shorts with mud on her legs. Remember Kathleen Turner in ‘Romancing the Stone?’ Well, get the little shorts and the boots and get mud on your legs and you’ve got him in your hand.”
Badal wound up the evening reading a Shakespeare love sonnet in a duet with his girlfriend (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds . . . “).
The freeway traffic murmured through Cahuenga Pass like distant surf. The aqua light from the hotel pool bathed the darkened palm trees. Couples leaned closer together.
A quivering wail floated through the darkness.
Two beepers going off simultaneously.