Hippocratic Oath : Fixations: A couple of Orange County women discover that they both think big--and that each owns hundreds of items sporting their favorite animal.

Move over Siskel and Ebert, here comes the Myers and Schlarb criteria for moviegoing.

Like many folks, Jacqueline Myers and Therese Schlarb hadn’t heard much good about the film “Indecent Proposal” and its “women as a commodity” theme. They evidently couldn’t give a hang even that the ever-charming Robert Redford is in it.

But just mention that there’s a three-minute hippopotamus-related scene in the film and color them there. “Maybe I could time it to go in right before that part, and then leave afterward,” suggested Schlarb.

Hippos don’t often make it to the big screen. The only other filmic moment Myers could recall was “some movie where teens are sunbathing on a roof and one has a hippo towel.” After hanging out for a while with the two, it’s difficult to imagine any corner of the Earth that isn’t populated by images of hippos. Schlarb’s Buena Park apartment and Myers’ Mission Viejo home each house huge collections of hippo items. There are hippo shower curtains, mugs, figurines, music boxes, books, candles, stuffed animals, jars, wallpaper, teapots, tureens, spoon rests and gum savers.

“If I have anything that’s not a hippo item, I take care of that with my hippo rubber stamps,” said Schlarb, who also sports a single hippo earring.

*

Our Fixations mailbag turns up people with some pretty curious interests, but they nearly always are singular ones, people who are the only ones to hear their different drummer. It was a special occasion, then, to receive two letters from people who collect hippos. It was even more special to find that while both Schlarb and Myers had spent most of their lives in Orange County, each amassing collections of nearly 400 pieces, they had never heard of each other. They’d never even heard of there being any other hippo collectors.

It seemed a natural idea to stage a hippo summit, to bring the two together, compare notes on their motives and techniques, and, in general, just see what happens when hippo collectors collide.

The first thing one learned when they met at Myers’ house last Saturday was that it’s hard to get a word in edgewise.

Pulling pieces out of a box Schlarb had brought, Myers exclaimed, “I have a magnet with the same hippos on it, but it’s a rectangle.”

“Do you have these books?” Schlarb asked.

“I don’t have ‘Pretend You’re a Hippo.’ I have a George and Martha one.”

“I have the whole series of George and Martha. This one’s really cute: He forgot to feed his hippo, so his hippo goes looking for food.”

“I have three photo albums full of hippo newspaper clippings!”

“Do either of you have tattoos?” I asked.

They don’t, at least not yet.

*

Though the two had never met, and are 13 years apart in age, they had so many things in common that it started to seem like one of those creepy lists of Kennedy-Lincoln coincidences: Schlarb drives a Tercel. Myers used to. Myers has a cat called Kitty. Schlarb had a dog named Puppy.

And when Schlarb pulled her first hippo out of the box--a faded, mangy stuffed toy she’d named Henrietta when she got it 23 years ago--Myers exclaimed, “I have one just like that, except green with pink feet, that I named Henrietta!” That toy, it turns out, was Myers’ first hippo.

Schlarb got her Henrietta when she turned 17, along with some hippo stationary. Speaking in her apartment two days before meeting Myers, she’d related, “I realized how cute they were--hippos just don’t look like they should be real--and started collecting them. There was just something about them.”

There are things about hippos she can relate to.

“They’re aquatic, and I swam in high school. They usually stay fairly quiet during the day, and, like me, are more nocturnal. I hate mornings. They’re very resilient, and they have a very simple existence. They don’t need a lot, and I’m basically like that too--very simple. I’ve never been much for making the big bucks. I want a job where I can be challenged and where I’m valued, which I have, and to have enough money to be able to get a hippo if I want it.”

Meanwhile, Myers’ Henrietta was part of a collection of stuffed animals she had in her youth. She got rid of all the other stuffed toys when she was 16, after being taken with a fuzzy ceramic figurine of a hippo. She thinks they’re cute, though she doesn’t feel she has too much in common with them, outside of being vegetarian.

Because hippos weigh in at up to five tons and are illegal to own, the two collectors content themselves with having representations around the house. Both have spent a lot of time at zoos. Myers and her husband based a vacation around a trip to the Toledo Zoo in Ohio, which boasts a “hippoquarium.”

On a trip to Africa, Schlarb made her family take a long detour on safari to see hippo ponds, where her siblings weren’t as taken as she with the scant view--just eyes and wiggling ears--that could be seen of the submerged animals. Both donate to wildlife causes.

Both also were big fans of Orange County’s most famous hippo, Bubbles.

In the ‘70s, Bubbles was a resident of the now-defunct Lion Country Safari theme park (next to the current Irvine Meadows), and on three occasions when the mood took her, Bubbles would crush her fence and go wandering off to sample the local foliage.

“She got out the first time and came back on her own,” Schlarb recollected. “The second time she ran away, she took her daughter, and they had to use a skip loader and a dump truck to get them back. The third time she ran away was when they couldn’t find her for days. She was in a lake in Laguna Canyon.

“A motorist was driving down Laguna Canyon Road and saw her in his headlights. So he drove to the Laguna PD and said, ‘Look, I’ve only had a couple of beers and I saw a hippo out there.’ The whole place mobilized and they finally found her. The ranger camped with her and they tried various ways of catching her, and the last way killed her. They tranquilized her, but their heads are so massive that when hers went down it pressed against the lungs and she asphyxiated. It was so sad, but she was out free for 17 days, and that was great.”

*

In collecting hippos, Schlarb and Myers have each become experienced in such arcane arts as how to pack a huge stuffed hippo for a transatlantic flight or how to carry one down the street without attracting too much notice. The latter is an impossibility, Schlarb found. The best one can do is just wave one of its legs back at all the honking passersby, she said.

Being single, Schlarb can buy and arrange her hippos as she sees fit. While some people have found that marriage can curtail their collecting, Myers has no complaints.

“It’s actually become easier,” she said. “My husband buys them for me now. He bought one just last weekend. And he always knows what to buy me for my birthday. It doesn’t bother him, maybe because he has a whole room that’s all computers.”

She has a room devoted entirely to her hippos, including a hippo-shaped hamper full of stuffed ones. “I got that in Hawaii on my honeymoon. It was, ‘OK, honey, lets go buy a hippo.’ While they didn’t get any hippo wedding presents, she does recall receiving cards with sayings like, “We wish you much hipponess.”

At their meeting Saturday, Myers gave Schlarb a couple of duplicates from her collection, and they exchanged addresses.

“I think it’s neat to find someone else who likes and collects them as much as I do,” Schlarb said.

“I think we should stay in touch,” Myers said. “We can be hippo pen pals.” “I can use some of my stationary!”

“Say, did you see my 22 different coffee mugs . . . ?”