As Sun-Lovers Fret, Weather Stays Wet

Sweaty babies, wilted hairdos, deodorant that goes on wet and stays that way. Don’t you just love the Deep South in August--or can it be . . . L.A. in July?

“This is supposed to be summer! Where’s the sun?” fretted 10-year-old Amanda Konis on Monday as a warm fog hovered oppressively over Santa Monica beach.

And downtown, where Skid Row was even more fragrant than usual, Thomas Woods, 66, brandished a black umbrella he had picked up on a bus.

“Found this three days ago, been carrying it ever since,” he crowed, rattling his treasure at the milky sky. “You never know when He is going to let loose with some more rain. He’s in control of it all, you know. Heaven and earth . . . “

Sidewalk preaching aside, Woods isn’t the only Southern Californian wondering whether Somebody up there has it in for us.

July is supposed to mark the beginning of true summer in Los Angeles, the time when not even a morning haze upstages the California sun. Tradition demands that this be a month of soaring mercury. Of hot, dry breezes that tickle the bougainvillea. Of Stage 3 smog alerts.

Instead, courtesy of the dregs of former Hurricane Darby, this has been the wettest July in half a dozen years. Half an inch of rain fell on Pasadena during the weekend, sending shoppers scurrying for cover in cappuccino bars all over Old Town. At Dodger Stadium, a tepid, on-again, off-again drizzle on Sunday soaked fans all afternoon.

And Monday brought more mugginess. Working men rose to ready themselves for the office, only to find that electric shavers don’t cut it against moist skin and damp whiskers. Babies went down for naps, only to rise within minutes, sticky and out of sorts.

Ken Borgers, a disc jockey on jazz station KLON-FM, summed up the atmosphere nicely by airing Anita O’Day’s languid “It’s a Lazy Afternoon”--first thing in the morning. Paul Snowbeck--whose Santa Monica bike-rental business was, like the beach itself, bereft of customers--took advantage of the drop-off in business to replace the bearings on his Rollerblades.

By midafternoon, with the Civic Center thermometer topping out at 80 degrees, the humidity downtown stood at a tropical 65%, a figure that Rick Dittmann, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., described as “very unusual, highly unusual--extremely unusual, in fact.”

In fact, it was sticky and warm all day, with humidity ranging between 64% and 87% and the thermometer never dipping below 71 degrees.

However, Dittman said weather patterns are expected to return to normal by the end of the week as the remnants of last week’s hurricane continue to dissipate.

By that time, of course, vacation time will be over for 11-year-old Alison Miller, whose family came all the way from London this week in search of the sun.

“We did see it once, briefly,” said the girl’s father, Jonathan Miller, who confessed that he had pumped up the children for weeks prior to the trip by playing and replaying Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.”

They were particularly fond, he said, of the part: “everybody’s very happy/’cause the sun is shining all the time.”

Unfortunately, the place where the sun is shining this week is London, where the Millers’ friends report the skies have been unseasonably clear.