When Boy Loses Girl : Ah, modern love! He saw, he <i> connected</i> --now he just has to find out who she is.

He saw her in the parking lot next to the Cirque du Soleil tent when their cars pulled up in tandem. Their eyes locked. It wasn’t the usual she’s cute/he’s cute thing: There was a connection.

After the performance, they spied each other again. He was with a friend but didn’t feel comfortable pursuing the stranger. He never asked her name, her phone number, didn’t see the license plate number.

And he can’t forget her.

What’s a ‘90s hopeless romantic to do? The Cirque du Soleil fan put an ad in the L.A. Weekly’s “Chance Meetings” column, where at least 20 people each week (mostly men) appeal to the classified ad gods to find their nameless love in a city of 3.5 million. The odds are depressing, but miracles have been known to happen, even in a world where appearing on “Studs” is considered an acceptable dating practice.

* “You--blond--wearing an oversized black cardigan, looking like Princess Buttercup--me--breathless, enamored, parked next to you! Please call!”

* “Feathered mask beauty at Day of the Dead ball--your eyes stunned me with their passion. Tall grim reaper (death). Call.”

* “Big Red: Ed Debevic’s. Me: Banana cream pie, big tip. Can’t forget you.”

While personal ads are voyeuristically entertaining (“Good breath . . . no ring or anything else hanging from my nose”), chance meetings are sweetly compelling. In one or two abbreviated sentences, lovelorn souls pine for the ones who got away.

Fred, 28, saw his Princess Buttercup on Nov. 12, when he and a female friend went to see Cirque du Soleil in Santa Monica.

“As soon as we parked next to each other, we became instantly aware of each other’s presence. It was like . . . ‘the one’ kind of thing. It was amazing.”

Fred’s deep-set brown eyes open wide as he tells of the mystery woman who stole his heart.

He wrote a poem the day after he saw her. “Do you want to hear it?” he asks eagerly and reads: With a single glance, have you set my mind and my heart on fire . . . .

“What did she look like? Well, have you ever seen (the movie) ‘The Princess Bride?’ Princess Buttercup? She was like that, but sweeter. She had light blond hair, and she was wearing a black or blue oversized cardigan and a pair of jeans. Very simple.”

Sitting at his dining room table in front of a huge mural he’s painted of Renaissance-style cherubs, Fred recalls how he schemed to get on KLOS’s Mark & Brian show to share his tale. But that brought no response from the Princess. So he sits and waits, hoping she’ll see the Chance Meeting ad and call his voice mail box.

But reality cuts a deep gouge into hope, and as the days pass, he knows his chances are dwindling.

“I think I have a better chance of pulling a royal flush out of a five card draw,” Fred says, laughing. “But I’ve had a lot of fun along the way.”

He brightens a bit: “If I find her, and if she even measures up to half my expectations. . . .”

He’s on a romantic roll again, talking until you feel yourself really wanting these two to be reunited so they can have their happily-ever-after TV-movie ending.

And what if they do meet and she doesn’t live up to his expectations?

“I’ll be disappointed, but I don’t think I’d be crushed. I mean, you have to be realistic about these things.”

*

Alan Locke cuts an imposing figure--all 6 feet, 3 inches of him--with his long, straight, black hair and dark eyes. Dressed as the Grim Reaper, he would have been hard to miss at the Day of the Dead ball in October at the Park Plaza hotel.

But of all the people who stared at him that night, the only one who made an impression was a woman in an elaborately feathered mask.

“I noticed during the course of the night . . . this woman who had an outrageously nice costume. She had taken the moment to give me eye contact and make herself known to me. But I was with somebody, the circumstances of which were a little bit undefined, and I’m not the kind to go and pick up somebody when I’m with someone else.”

Locke, 32 and an art director, recalls that they exchanged glances throughout the evening.

“I never talked to her,” he recalls, “but after the party, there was sort of this memory of having made contact with this woman who was intriguing in her own sort of way. I thought I’d take the effort to see if there was a possibility. I’ve never done anything like this. You kind of made a connection with someone, but it’s so ephemeral. I thought putting the ad in would just be fun. It seemed intriguing to me, and I’m at a point where I need a little intrigue in my life.”

*

Ron Hogan is tall and lanky in a Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Los Angeles kind of way. The 22-year-old USC graduate film student doesn’t walk: He lopes, subtly stooped over, hands in pockets.

You wouldn’t think he’d fall for someone like Big Red, the chatty, effervescent waitress with the oversized auburn wig who works at Ed Debevic’s on La Cienega Boulevard.

But after dinner and banana cream pie with a friend from school in October, Hogan was curious about who was really under the cat’s-eye glasses and beehive hairdo.

“It was the first time I had been in a restaurant where the waitresses are that outgoing and dazzling, and I was really kind of impressed by her personality,” he says with a hint of a Jimmy Stewart twang. “But I grew up in a very reserved kind of atmosphere, where you just don’t ask your waitress out after she serves you dinner.”

A week later, though, Big Red was still on his mind.

“I decided the easiest and least forward thing to do would be to put the ad in, figuring that if she didn’t see it, somebody at the restaurant would. And if she was interested, she’d call.”

No confrontation, no face-to-face rejection, but something a little different.

“I kind of have that romantic sensibility at heart,” Hogan says. “There’s a little cynicism creeping in there that I try to push back as far as I can.”

Someone did point the ad out to Big Red--real name, Kathy Jensen. She called, and the two met for coffee at the Living Room on La Brea.

Their meeting produced no major sparks, but, as Hogan puts it: “It was a really nice kind of blind date sort of thing. When I was putting the ad in, I thought that even if she calls back it’s going to be a plus, so however the date turned out, it was going to be great. It was a really fun evening.”

“I was really flattered,” Jensen recalls. “When we met, he brought me a rose, and I brought him a banana cream pie. He was nervous. I told him he really made my day, because when the ad appeared, everybody was coming up to me, asking me who it was. It was kind of exciting. I really mostly wanted to thank him.”

Although there was no second date, Hogan has no regrets. Instead, he talks about how hard it is to meet people in Los Angeles, especially for a graduate student from Boston who’s only been in town since August.

He thinks for a minute and says: “There are so many times when you meet somebody like at a party or a restaurant, and you just leave. And you think, ‘What if I had said something, what if I had asked her out?’ So instead of just sitting around moping, I thought, ‘Why don’t I just, like, ask her out ?’ and settle that question once and for all, instead of wondering what my life could have been like. That’s pretty much my philosophy about a lot of things in life. Don’t sit around wondering what it’s going to be like. Just do it.”

Why not? Miracles have been known to happen.