FIXATIONS : Mover and Shaker : Tambourine-Touting Gloria an O.C. Club Regular

“O h, hey, Mrs. Tambourine Lady, play a song for me . . . “ If only Bob Dylan had changed the gender of his “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he could make a claim at true prescience. There is a tambourine lady, and Orange County’s got her.

On a typical night in any of a number of Balboa Peninsula nightclubs, a group might break into Van Morrison’s “Gloria” as a band member shouts, “Gloria’s in the house!” Most club regulars know whom the commotion is about. For others, though, it’s hard not to gape at the sight: Isn’t that someone’s sweet old grandmother up there dancing and shaking the maracas on “Do Me, Baby” with a soul band?

For 12 years, Gloria, her tambourine and bag of assorted percussion have been a regularly irregular presence on the Peninsula, as she walks a circuit between the area’s live-music nightclubs.

Three or four nights a week she sits in with rock bands, reggae bands, blues bands, Latin bands and jazz big bands. With her layers of frilly clothing, cascading necklaces and gray ponytail twisted into a bun held in place with her trademark chopstick, she’s entered into local legend, and even found a place as a character in Joseph Wambaugh’s Orange County-based crime novel “The Golden Orange.”

Rumors abound about her: She’s a homeless person who lives on cocktail olives; she’s loaded, a dame of one of the county’s old monied families; she’s crazy, give her a wide berth; no, she’s strangely gifted. No one even seems to know her last name.

The real mystery is that there’s so much mystery about her. All anybody had to do is ask her. Gloria Mathews is only too capable, emphatic even, in talking about why she became the most memorable guest star of the coastal music scene.

“I just love music; I think I was always meant to play it,” she says, “I’ve been a late starter on everything. That’s why I’m doing it now.”

We met at 21 Oceanfront near the Newport Pier, down the block from where she and her family live above a couple of waterfront shops. Neither rich nor poor, she and her husband, Jim, a retired Navy lieutenant commander, have had the property since 1959. And if she’s a crazy person, the world could use a few more.

She’s never shy or self-conscious about getting up with the bands, she says. Indeed, part of the point to doing it is to jolt audiences out of their own inhibitions.

“They don’t realize, so you’ve got to hit them on the head. And I do. I get them into the music right away. It makes them listen, then they get up and move and dance and enjoy it.”

She was born in Alberta, Canada, in 1928. Two of her strongest memories come from when she was 11: standing at attention with her schoolmates as King George and Queen Elizabeth drove past in a Rolls convertible; and one night happening to turn her family’s DeForest radio to a German shortwave station and hearing the guttural impact of a Hitler speech.

Usually the radio was tuned elsewhere: Gloria has been a music fan for as long as she can remember. While she enjoys classical, opera and ballet, her chief loves are blues and jazz. Over her lifetime, she’s seen Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, Coleman Hawkins and a host of other greats. Her biggest musical thrill was at the Newport Red Onion, though, when the late Los Angeles blues guitar great Pee Wee Crayton and then-Mighty Flyers’ guitarist Junior Watson played their solos directly to her.

“Yeah, Gloria was a trip,” says Watson, now co-leading his own band with Lynwood Slim. “Pee Wee was big on her, because she loved the music and was so positive about life.”

She went from listener to player a dozen years ago, when the rocking Katzenjammers encouraged her to sit in. Their singer, Greg Carroll, gave Gloria her tambourine, and she’s been jamming ever since.

One of the first bands she played with in the late ‘70s was the Mighty Flyers. Watson recalled, “Usually she’d ask before she sat in, but sometimes the music would just get too good to her and she’d suddenly jump in.”

Over the years she’s played with everyone from Bill Medley to Barbara Morrison. Her current favorites to perform with are the 14-piece Don Miller Big Band and Derek and the Diamonds.

According to the Diamonds’ Byron Bordeaux, “Her timing is great, perfect, no matter what you play. You can play ‘Manic Depression’ and she’ll be on the one, buddy. She’s real cool.”

When asked where she gets the energy to keep pace with musicians less than half her age, she said: “I just have it. I’m open . I do healing. I meditate. That’s why you sense me around you so heavily. When people see me, I know they don’t forget.”

Gloria does rather give the impression that she’s an age or two ahead of the new-age consciousness. Bordeaux said, “Somebody told me she has magic powers: If she touches you, you’ll get money or healed, something like that. So every time I see her, I’m like, ‘Hey, Gloria!’ and hugging her and stuff.”

“I wouldn’t put nothing past her,” the Diamonds’ Venson Quarles said. “This is the honest-to-God truth: One time I had a cramp in my back, she looked at me and said, ‘Venson, you look like you’re not feeling well, turn around.’ Gloria put her hand on me for about three minutes, and by the next set, I had no problem, and I’d been hurting for two days. I don’t believe in that hocus-pocus mess, but it happened.”

Gloria doesn’t feel any distance between her and the rock groups she plays with.

“I never have any communication gap with age. They accept me,” she says. “They just pick up on my energy and play--they double-play when I play. I’m meant to communicate with almost anything and everything. In fact, I do communicate with everything.” Take her bag of tambourines and other things that go thump, for instance: “They’re like magic, they really cooperate .”

If there’s a message in her tambourine playing, it’s “to be open, to be halfway decent, to set a standard. There’s not too many now, I’ll tell you. You need to have respect for what’s around you. To me, music is the basis to everything: You’re competing, you’re connecting. I don’t care who on Earth, you all interconnect ,” she said.

Gloria walks to nearly all the gigs she plays, from the Studio Cafe near the Balboa Pier to Cafe Lido near the base of the Peninsula. She doesn’t foresee a time when she’ll give up her musical night life.

“Not now. I want to play more. I also love piano. I have to get a hold of one and start because I know that I can do it.”

“Gloria ain’t old,” the Diamonds’ Quarles maintains. “Have you seen her move when she plays? There’s nothing old about Gloria.”