Exit a Party Animal

I was sitting in a cocktail lounge in Beverly Hills the other day, waiting for my wife, when I heard two men at a nearby booth talking about Trisha Roth.

One of them, who looked like an old-time press agent and was drinking Scotch on the rocks, described her as a pain in that part of the body we do not write about here at the Newspaper for the ‘90s.

The other, a fussy man who was drinking something pink with a tiny paper umbrella in it, said he felt she was barking up the right tree.

I was attracted to their conversation because I had talked to Trisha Roth that very day and because I had never heard the phrase barking up the right tree before. I suppose, however, if you bark up a wrong tree, you can bark up a right tree too.

“She’s one of those tense, skinny vegetarians who wants everyone to eat alfalfa sprouts and drink rainwater,” the old guy was saying.

“That’s not it at all, Max,” the younger man replied with strained tolerance. “She’s simply trying to raise the consciousness of people when it comes to alcohol.”

“Next thing you know she’ll be trying to regulate our toilet habits,” the older man said.

“If it will save lives,” the fussy type said tightly, “I think she should.”

Then the fussy person, who had quite obviously had enough of the conversation, remembered an appointment and hurried off.

Max watched the door close and said mostly to himself, “You forgot your little umbrella.”

Not since Zsa Zsa Gabor whacked a cop has a woman been the subject of so much discussion in Beverly Hills. Trisha Roth is running for City Council on a temperance platform in a city that loves to party, and no one knows exactly what to expect.

There are 117 drinking establishments in Beverly Hills, and I’m sure Roth is a topic of conversation in most of them. She sure was in mine.

“People think I’m a little weird,” she had said to me earlier in the day. “I make them uncomfortable. When I challenge the issuance of a liquor license until the applicant agrees to a designated driver program, he asks, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ ”

Good question.

She is doing this to you, bucko, because Roth wants every watering hole in Beverly Hills to adopt a designated driver program and to post warnings about the dangers of alcohol.

She also wants everyone to know that liquor ruins your health, hampers your sex life, imperils your career and makes you a menace behind the wheel.

No one is safe from Roth’s anti-drinking campaign.

She once ordered her elderly father from his own car because he’d been drinking. On another occasion she asked the district attorney to investigate 38 establishments that did not have liquor-warning signs, including her own synagogue.

As if that weren’t enough, Roth is also striking at the very heart of the city’s social life by challenging the use of celebrity bartenders at charity parties. She believes that because they aren’t trained to pour booze, they over-pour.

“I’m not out to shut anyone down,” she said to me in the living room of her Rodeo Drive home. “I just want my city safe.”

A 44-year-old pediatrician, Roth has none of the wild-eyed characteristics generally associated with someone running on a temperance ticket. Carry Nation she is not.

When we met, she was wearing jeans, sneakers and a sweat shirt with Russian lettering that said something about the evils of vodka, she wasn’t quite sure what.

She became an advocate for teetotaling when she discovered that her daughter, then 15, had attended a party where hard liquor was served. She decided to become a role model for her four children by giving up drinking herself and by advocating temperance through whatever means available.

That she makes people uncomfortable in Beverly Hills is an understatement. Happiness flies out the window when Roth walks into a cocktail party.

“I try to be good-natured about it,” she said. “When I’m invited to a dinner and the hostess confides that wine will be served, I ask if she has a designated driver program and alcohol liability insurance.”

Roth is a candidate who was bound to happen, and she is going about her campaign in a calm and logical manner. That annoys hell out of me. I am torn between public good and a personal preference.

But as long as she isn’t chopping up bars, her efforts make sense. Keep the kids off booze, the drunks off the road and pregnant women out of bars, I say.

Just be sure the tree you’re barking up isn’t mine.