Helping Those Who ‘Have It All’ : Support: The diverse Orange County Women’s Conference mirrors the multifaceted lives of attendees.

Karon Kaelin, a single working mom, said she’s learned to keep her household chores to a minimum so she has time for more important things. But she still likes to feel as if things are clean and orderly. One solution: When Kaelin has no time to wash her dirty car, she washes the windows so it looks clean from the inside.

Kaelin, a Pacific Bell manager whose half-joking story brought laughs from her audience, led a seminar on survival skills for working mothers Monday morning to kick off the Orange County Women’s Conference in Irvine.

Superwoman--an ‘80s myth of the perfect woman who can ideally balance work and kids and relationships--was not invited.

“We are having it all, we are doing it all--and we are pooped,” said Kelly Lange, co-anchor of KNBC’s Channel 4 News in Los Angeles, a midday conference speaker. Lange’s message-- women now seek more balance in their lives--lent as good a theme as any to the gathering, which was a hodgepodge of career tips, false fingernails, child-care advice and financial planning.

The conference attracted 400 women, allowing it to break even with revenue of $250,000, said Jacqie Ellis, president of the Irvine Chamber of Commerce, which co-sponsored the event with the Irvine Valley College Foundation. Organizers had hoped for 1,000 attendees.

Ellis said they began publicizing the event too late.

Vivian Hall, a feminist in Irvine, said conference organizers did not attempt to include local women’s organizations and that could be the reason for the low turnout. She said Orange County chapters of the League of Women Voters, the American Assn. of University Women, Women Four and the National Women’s Political Caucus were not invited to help organize the event. Hall is a founding member of the latter two groups.

“We were really outraged,” she said. “Some of it can be attributed to ignorance, and some of it is reprisal because we were actively involved in exposing Sen. Campbell.”

The conference was designed to fill a void left when former Sen. William Campbell’s women’s conference, which ran for six years in Anaheim, closed in 1989 amid charges that he had overpaid his wife and staff to organize the event. Directors of the Irvine conference have insisted that it is strictly nonpolitical.

Kathleen Held of Laguna Hills said she was attracted by conference seminars that offered practical advice. She attended seminars on public speaking and mentoring.

Held wants to serve as a mentor in her capacity as president of the Federal Women’s Programs Managers Council for Los Angeles and Orange counties. She recruits women and men who are interested in working for the federal government and teaches them how to get through the maze of paper work.

“My clerk, for example, is someone who is going big places,” Held said. She said she learned that a mentor should be an open, nurturing person. “You can’t be negative,” she noted.

Carol Hoffman, who spoke on mentoring, described the people along the way who helped her get back on track when her career seemed to be going astray. She is one of 30 vice presidents with the Irvine Co., only three of whom are women.

“There are no formalized programs,” Hoffman said. So the protegee “needs to have a willingness to reach out, to ask for help.”

Five or six seminars met concurrently throughout the day. For conference-goers who wanted to see it all, videotapes of the seminars were on sale. Exhibitors in a separate hall were selling diet plans, cosmetics and jewelry. In equal measure were representatives of health care and financial companies that specialize in serving women.

One of the more popular exhibits was a computer that displays a picture of the client’s face with different hair styles and colors.

Critics have questioned the frivolity of some of the exhibits. Equally disturbing was some of the advice. Ellen Kreidman, who has written a book about relationships called “Light His Fire--How to Keep a Man Hopelessly and Passionately in Love With You,” suggested using some of the same techniques at work.

She advised women to compliment a male boss, to tell him a shirt brings out the color of his eyes, for example. “Men are starved for compliments,” she told the group.

But some of the advice was sheer wisdom. Barbara Mallonee, a dentist who shared the podium with Kaelin, discussed her fear that her patients would believe she was not committed to her work when she decided to have a child.

“I was concerned about how patients would view me when I went back to work” after giving birth a year ago, she said. “But I think they respect that I am doing two jobs now, and they see that I am still a professional. I have more patients than ever.”

WISDOM FOR WORKING WOMEN

Speakers offered lots of advice and tips to working women attending a conference in Irvine on Monday. Here are a few of their suggestions:

* Listen to motivational or teaching tapes while you are driving to make better use of time spent in your car.

* Bosses give promotions to people who make life easy for the boss. Demonstrate a willingness to take on responsibility.

* Perfect employees don’t go very far. Be willing to take some risks, even if it means you may make a mistake.

* Pay for as much as you can have done for you. Have milk delivered, hire a dry cleaner who will pick up and drop off at your house, find grocery stores and pharmacies that will deliver, purchase stamps by mail.

* Don’t compare yourself to your friends and neighbors because it always seems as if they’re doing more.

* One of the biggest shortcomings of people in business today is that they do not speak and write with clarity and purpose.

* Buy baby gifts, wedding gifts and greeting cards whenever you spot something you like. You’ll find a use for them soon enough.

* Set your priorities. If your most important goal is that your children be happy and healthy, and they are, don’t berate yourself because the kitchen floor needs scrubbing.

* Have an emergency backup plan. If you travel on business during the day, try to find a friend who can pick up your sick child from school.

* Don’t try to be perfect--supermoms die young.