Cloudy Plans : There’s Confusion in the Air on a Day Fit for Umbrellas and Sunglasses

Thirteen more days until Christmas and Los Angeles is a real winter wonderland all right--everybody’s wondering if winter is ever coming to this land.

The stockings are hung by the chimney, the tinsel’s on the tree. ‘Tis most certainly the season, but what season? A couple of weeks ago there was frost on the lawn, last weekend you could have roasted chestnuts on the sidewalk and today they say it might rain.

“It’s so cold in the morning and cold at night and in the daytime it’s hot. They say it’s going to be 65 and all of a sudden it’s 80. You don’t even know what to wear,” Ani Sinanian of Glendale muttered while her 7-year-old daughter, Stephanie, waited in line at the Beverly Center shopping mall to visit Santa, who looked decidedly overdressed.

The weather has been anything but predictable. And if clothes make a statement, then confusion reigned Tuesday.

There was fake snow in the window of Ed Debevic’s restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, but the customers were in tank tops. Russ Giguere, a middle-age rock ‘n’ roll singer, was shopping in his tennis togs while Steven Webb, a Beverly Hills attorney, turned out in a wool cap, wool vest and tweed coat so he could buy a couple of wool shirts.

“I think it rained once when I was 5,” Giguere recalled. “I run and walk and ride my bicycle whenever it isn’t raining--which is all the time.”

The publicity department at Columbia Pictures in Culver City decorated its Christmas tree Friday night. By Monday morning most of the needles had fallen off.

“We came in and the thing was dead,” one secretary noted. “It looks like a broom.”

At the Mr. Green Trees tree lot in Beverly Hills, which sells Christmas trees to the rich and famous, tree keeper Troy Startoni was going to great lengths to keep fresh the $350, 11-foot noble fir on layaway for Bruce Springsteen, not to mention a $300 model personally picked out by Mitzi Gaynor, along with $70 worth of garland to grace the staircase in her Hollywood penthouse.

It was at least 10 degrees cooler under the red and white striped tent Startoni uses to feign winter for his trees, handpicked from Oregon, watered three times and sprayed at least twice a day. Asked if he felt a twinge of guilt, considering California is in a four-year drought with no end in sight, the 26-year-old part-time actor replied: “What drought?”

The word went out Tuesday morning--30% chance of rain. But anyone who has spent more than five winters here would read the forecast this way: 70% chance it won’t rain. After all, that wasn’t Jack Frost nipping at their noses last weekend, it was the Santa Anas, chapping it.

“I am seriously considering doing a rain dance,” gray-haired Sid Davis said to her husband, George, over tuna fish sandwiches at the Beverly Center.

Still, meteorologists are talking scattered showers by this afternoon. OK, so it probably won’t be more than a quarter-inch. Diana Thompson will take whatever she can get.

“Oh please, please,” Thompson implored, confessing that the last time it rained her entire family lit a fire in their Anaheim den and stayed up all night, savoring the sound of every drop that bounced above their beamed ceiling.

“It’s hard going Christmas shopping when you have to stop for water to avoid dehydration,” she said.

Rain or no rain, Lynzie Flynn-Zimmerman, born and raised here, is getting out. She and her husband are heading north, “where they have seasons,” she said, stopping to purchase a beige, fur-trimmed parka rated for 70 below. They were marked down from $425 to $339.99 at Eddie Bauer’s, where they weren’t exactly having a run on sub-zero parkas.

“I’m probably the only one buying this,” Flynn-Zimmerman said disgustedly. “It’s summer here all year around. If I wanted that, I’d move to Tahiti.”