Rick McCay of Santa Monica was cruising...

Rick McCay of Santa Monica was cruising through West L.A. when he saw a sideswiped driver lose control of her car and crash into a flower shop.

McCay, who was speaking on his car phone to a friend, hung up and dialed 911. Paramedics asked if there were serious injuries.

“I wanted to keep the paramedics on the line so I left the keys in the ignition,” McCay said. “With my car phone, you have to leave the ignition switch on in order to talk. By this time, there was a crowd of people. As I got up to look in the (store) window, I heard people yelling, ‘Your car!’ ”

He turned around to see someone driving off in his 1986 Porsche.

Just to add to the insult, McCay’s friend called back a few minutes later and reached the thief, who laughed and informed him that the car had been stolen.

Still, McCay says he has no regrets:

“I had to do it--metal’s metal and people are people,” he said. “Luckily the people in the car weren’t hurt.”

Any motorists on the Pasadena Freeway who feared that they must still be feeling the effects of weekend partying should be excused--that wasn’t a hallucination they saw. That was a 23-foot-long Wienermobile parked on the shoulder, next to a CHP car.

What happened was that Oscar Mayer employee Erin O’Shea, 22, had just been rear-ended in heavy traffic.

“We were sandwiched,” quipped alternate driver Brian Soifer.

Ironically, O’Shea had just renewed her license minutes earlier. Doing a little hot-dogging, she took the driving test in Hollywood while behind the wheel of the Wienermobile.

The fender-bender was no publicity stunt, however. Fortunately, there was no damage to the bun.

While a Wienermobile was loose on the local roadways, there were nearly 100 Northrop vans grouped in the outline of a B-2 bomber in a Pico Rivera parking lot. The formation was flanked by hundreds of riders. It was a not-too stealthy demonstration of the impressive extent of Northrop’s van-pooling program.

September has only 28 days on Purina’s 1991 calendar, which was good news for Joyce Clark Shults of Chatsworth (she had a dental appointment on the 30th).

Shults thought at first that Purina had made a gaffe, but now she’s not sure. After all, the calendar’s Cat of the Month for September is owned by jokester Jay Leno.

Phil Klinkner of Westchester couldn’t help but think of the old saying in snooty South Bay coastal communities that there’s no life east of Sepulveda Boulevard. His neighborhood was hit by a brief rainstorm coming in off the coast the other day. “The rain stopped at Sepulveda,” Klinkner said.

Hooray for Holly-, uh, Dayton:

The winner of the World’s Best Shopper competition over the weekend, outspending 28 other contestants at the Lakewood Center Mall, was Debbie Reynolds . . . a 30-year-old Ohio housewife.

miscelLAny:

The walls of Ye Olde King’s Head pub in Santa Monica are covered with the photos of visiting personalities, including an ex-governor whose picture is next to the entrance to the men’s restroom. Hence, the unofficial name for the facility: The Ronald Reagan Loo.