There Is a There in Orange County : To Twentysomethings, the Fashion, Club Scene Is Way, Way Out Here in Suburbia

Platform Patty puts it in park and steps out of her Toyota at Planet Polyesterin Garden Grove. The chronicler of Orange County’s club scene, she is here for opening night, starring the Village People.

She tugs at her loud Spandex hot pants and surveys the line outside the disco. It stretches down the strip mall past a laundry and a Vietnamese noodle counter. She adjusts her neon pink feathered cap and navigates through the sea of hip huggers and bell-bottoms. Her look is Phyllis Diller on brown acid.

By 10, the raging crowd of disco dancers--”very Red Onion,” Patty says--is restless for the campy band of gay singers dressed like he-man cliches. Instead, they get a single go-go dancer resembling Sly Stone. People are still waiting to get inside by midnight, when the group finally takes the stage.

After a lip-synced medley of two songs--”YMCA” and “Macho Man”--it is hard to say what is weirder: hundreds of twentysomethings on a school night streaming into a club to see the Village People, or that half of them indignantly demand back their $5 cover. Only two of the original four band members performed! By God, they are not real fakes!

OK, so it isn’t New York. No haute couture first families, famous models and the children of the Rolling Stones partying among the offspring of Diane von Furstenberg, young glitterati popping up at Versace runway shows and Madonna photo shoots.

And this isn’t Los Angeles, which also isn’t a mecca but at least counts on movie and recording stars to roam the social landscape from Spago to the Hollywood Athletic Club.

Here, the Shark Club is the hippest pool hall. Here, fashion dynasties are born of the beach culture. And Roxbury, a spinoff from a club in L.A., is perhaps the hottest disco. Coffeehouses are blossoming, but the local club scene is disjointed.

No matter what it is, most every place has a social circuit for its young, but in Orange County, like other suburbs, it is diffused and fractured, and defined as much by place as by the personalities who hang out there.

“It’s not rural here, but it is still suburban-like . . . so things are spread out,” said restaurateur David Wilhelm, an investor in the new Roxbury. “Orange County has a different feel than a city, but people who live here prefer that.”

What defines Orange County’s scene for the 20- to 30-year-old set and makes it ripe for a club like the one-stop Roxbury--and its restaurant, disco with deejays, live music stage and private rooms--has everything to do with money, he added.

“I think there’s a level of affluence here at a younger age, where the 20- and 30-year-olds drive cars that people in a lot of other areas wouldn’t drive until they were older and more established,” he said. “People moving into this area and (who grew) up here are not wanting to drive to L.A., so it’s great to have something here.”

Sam Lanni, owner of the now-defunct Safari Sam’s, tried during the mid-1980s to foster an intellectual, bohemian scene at his downtown Huntington Beach club, where you found live performances of punk rock, classical music, a Samuel Beckett play, poetry and original operas. Lanni thinks Orange County is still lacking his kind of social scene for the 20-through-30-year-old crowd.

“We live in a very fast-paced society in Orange County; there really isn’t any time to have a ‘social scene.’ Social scene connotates Henry James, sitting around talking intellectually about life’s problems.

“I do think there is a marketplace here for a good intellectual-based social scene,” said Lanni. “It just hasn’t really happened yet.”

Which doesn’t stop Platform Patty and me from looking.

Although I usually prefer the atmo of velvet paintings and the Stag pool hall and am old enough to have worn Chemin de Fer jeans the first time around, I went hunting for the young social scene, and quickly saw need for a tour guide. Enter Patty, 25, a free-lance writer who met her fiance at an El Grupo Sexo show and gives new meaning to electric blue go-go boots and polyester anything.

“It’s easy to dump on Orange County,” said Patty, “but there are things happening here. Some people think you have to go to L.A. or San Francisco for fashion and music trends, but I think that’s a myth. The surfwear, music and fashion scenes are all intertwined, and the companies are mostly owned by people in their 20s.”

*

It’s early Vegas meets “Grease” inside Mantrap, the industrial office and home to fashions by Heathyr-with-a-Y Lawrence. A Corona del Mar High grad, she is starting to find success with her sassy-to-naughty clothing line, characterized by pink top-stitching and heart pockets, which were featured in Seventeen magazine.

Neon pink fur upholstery covers the chaise, a pink cat-litter bag is tacked to a door, and bolts of fabric are strewn about piles of her finished fashions, which range from denim bell-bottoms to oversize overalls to slinky dresses and T-shirts named “Carmen the opera singer.”

She personally favors wigs. Pink wigs, humongous wigs, wigs of feathers, Marie Antoinette wigs, one of which earned her a photo in a local society column for the opening of Roxbury.

The women who model her fashions are draped in beauty pageant banners that read Pleasure Unit.

Her 1990 wedding to skateboarder John Lucero was such an event that tickets were issued to keep party crashers out. Guests had their stubs ripped at the door. “Entertainment Tonight” even threatened to show. The dollar dance was done to bands like the Vandals.

Dressed down in work clothes means a backward baby-blue baseball cap with her Mantrap logo on it, a full-length gingham check dress and a pair of black and white Converse All-stars worn like mules.

One of eight children, Lawrence spent her early childhood in Orange, then at age 13 moved with a sister and her divorced mother to Corona del Mar. She has been sewing since age 9, when she started with doll clothes.

Graduating a year before and a year after her at Corona del Mar High were Sean Stussy and Mossimo Giannulli, local designers with international urban wear markets. But even at a school that would seem to nurture creators, Lawrence earned bad grades in home economics for sewing without a pattern. For her prom, she made her own dress: cone top and a skirt of window screening, decorated with flowers, pink of course. When she graduated, she took her $300 in gift money, bought a bunch of T-shirts, cut them up and re-created tops and dresses that she then sold.

“I’d have Tupperware parties, but with clothes,” she said. “I’d do the cheese and bread party bit, go to the swap meets. I was poor as hell in school, but I didn’t work so I could be a straight-A student.”

Like many designers in the Orange County-dominated action sports wear field, she has moved around, starting at Vision Sportswear upon graduating from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles.

Success has come slowly, but it’s hers alone. Lately, it has included Vogue magazine’s request for Mantrap’s denim bell-bottoms and a matching vest in which to photograph singer Tina Turner. Locally, her outfits are sold at the hippest boutiques, such as Electric Chair in downtown Huntington Beach and Psyclone in Costa Mesa.

Her idea of fun is having a couple of designer brothers called the Swank boys “cherry out” a Stingray bike for her, in pink, of course. After work she roller-skates at the beach, works out and discos on Thursday nights-- the club night--in wacky ‘70s get-ups.

She sees no reason to move out of Orange County to stay on top of the hip curve.

“You can always go to L.A.--if you want to--and I sell my stuff there, too, but I mean, look how beautiful it is out here!”

Fashion seems to be the axle of of the social scene, driving the quest to see and be seen in the latest incarnation.

The problem in Orange County is that there is no gossip sheet outside the society set, no regular observers of the local “McJobs” generation, and therefore you have a situation much like the tree falling silent in the forest. Are there scene-setters here if nobody says there are?

“To have a scene and for people to know what’s going on, you have to have a gossip page, an organ for it,” pointed out Platform Patty. “That’s what really builds up status: They get reported in the press, and people start to get to know who they are.”

*

The walls are red and covered with tall moony-eyed nudes on cardboard. Blue velvet couches and chairs hold readers, writers and coffee sippers. In L.A., Leonard Cohen would be singing about how they don’t let a woman kill you in the Tower of Song. Here Elvis Costello sings that he used to be disgusted, now he tries to be amused.

Here we are at Rock ‘N Java, home of $5 sledgehammers and one of the most popular hangouts in the county for Generation X-ers and boomers alike--not to mention 12-steppers. Opened two years ago by a pair of ex-drinking ex-construction workers, this and other coffeehouse brethren are the Orange County singles bar of the ‘90s.

At least, that is the vision of Chris Stevens, 29, who co-owns the cozy coffee den with Harley Hall, also 29.

Both natives of Orange County, they grew up partying with the rest of the teen-age wasteland in places like Huntington Beach, Buena Park and Costa Mesa. The punk-rock night life captured Stevens. Hall raced on the professional motorcycle circuit until “several lifestyles I had going on at once” crashed, sending him for help.

Both quit drinking and began looking for new places to spend time. They liked the coffee pubs of San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and shopped for two years for the perfect location. They found it in the former quarters of a patio furniture store fronting Newport Boulevard as it heads for the ocean.

It is one of several coffeehouses, like Diedrich’s and the Blue Marble, that make up a social circuit for the caffeine crowd. But clubbers also drop by before, during or after their rounds to the movies or other nightspots.

“The Shark Club in Costa Mesa, Metropolis in Irvine, those are majors,” Stevens said. “But when you’re at a bar, you’re either going to dance or get really drunk. But you’re less likely to be able to strike up a conversation at a bar. It’s almost impossible.”

And he should know. He met his wife at Rock ‘N Java, and most of its employees have met their sweethearts there, too. They think the variety of people their shop attracts--from bikers and the elderly to one guy with flames tattooed on his chin who appears to be doing kung fu movements during an entire conversation--makes the place a big draw. But the partners view their own lives as pretty routine.

“What I do is kind of boring,” says Hall. “I ride motorcycles, I golf, I go to work.”

Tommy Dougherty III, artist and self-published author of “Beautiful Women and Other Terrible Things,” one of Rizzoli’s best-selling poetry books, perches on a couch most nights and writes poetry on a note pad he carries in the pocket of his overalls. He believes this place is this decade’s answer to the 1950s malt shop.

“It doesn’t carry the same negative connotation as a bar,” he says. Women and men have the freedom of visiting alone and not feeling uncomfortable.

“And you know what’s weird? I wonder what future Bob Dylan might be playing on open-mike night, or what (Jack) Kerouac are you talking to over there?”

But he recognizes Orange County in the main is not much like this scene. “The coffee shop is anti-here, but not in a negative sense. It’s just not what typically goes on.”

*

In the purple and steel interior of the Shark Club, a 2,000-gallon tank of predators steals the attention. In this swankiest of pool halls, where parking is by valet, its look, its owners say, is “industrial renaissance.”

On Friday and Saturday nights there is a five-hour waiting list for a gold-felt billiards table, and it can be impossible to squeeze into any of the intimate side rooms with plush overstuffed couches and grand-looking mirrors.

The crowd is a mix of yuppies, a few older short-sleeved office workers, and, mostly, young singles.

A group of lawyers from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher are shooting pool and sharing pizza after another big day on a $2-billion American Airlines lawsuit. Visiting attorneys from other law firms on their side of the case are drinking that clear malt beer called Zima and don’t know that all of Orange County is not like this.

Gregg Goldman, 27, a second-year associate at the Irvine office of the state’s largest law firm and graduate of Arizona State University, says Laguna Beach is the only place in Orange County where he would live. He has the sweet car, the big salary, the fiancee and the house at the shore. But he says there is no real social scene here and wonders if he wouldn’t be happier living in a wood house somewhere like Seattle, writing his own Generation X book and practicing law on a smaller scale.

He and his girlfriend go clubbing in L.A., but they also go to places here like the Sandpiper in Laguna Beach and Studio Cafe on the Balboa Peninsula. Still, they find Orange County’s social landscape for the young very different.

“UCI is not a university; it’s like an industrial park, there is no sense of campus,” Goldman observed. “There’s no scene here. There’s a really-rich-kid-driving-around-in-a-Porsche scene, but what’s that?”

*

It’s smoky and crowded, and the band, Sol, is two hours late at Lord Nelson’s, a Laguna Beach pub with a British accent. Word has spread that it’s a trippy acid jazz band, though the leader later says it’s more funk than anything else. So this has been deemed the place to be on Friday night.

Looking for the fashion elite was an exercise in feeling old and cliched. This seems less style, more Hussong’s Cantina Tecate flashback. It’s the droopy drawer/chained wallet look, guys in thongs with baggy-behind pants that brush the knee, and women in combat boots and dresses.

In fact, this might have been the largest collection of action sports and counterculture retail players in one place since the huge annual trade show in San Diego. There’s platinum-wigged Kim, a co-designer of Eat At Joe’s, a division of Freak Show; World Jungle owner Jack Denny; regular club trolls Sean Barger and Chris Martin, whose streetwear line, Swank, uses graphics that are inspired by 1970s black exploitation films and TV shows like “Starsky & Hutch,” and Tiffany, the vogue buyer at Electric Chair in Huntington.

That it was one bartender’s birthday only added to the frenetic mood as his friends swarmed around him smoking and dancing in the low-slung room. It was so warm the bass player and drummer--a former Visionwear designer himself--played bare-chested.

Platform Patty observed the room and paid the ultimate compliment: “This is a very hip crowd. It could be anywhere in L.A.”

*

Even if you don’t sport Dittos, Disco 2000 is one of the hottest parties around. Every Thursday night, promoters take over a generic bar called Club 5902 in an any-city strip mall in Huntington Beach. Deejays and the best ‘70s dance tunes are brought in by promoter Gary Blitz, one of the first people to bring raves to Orange County.

At 28, he has grown up here and now lives in Fullerton. With his loose waist-long brown hair, he doesn’t look disco, but there are about 750 people here on a weeknight, and the drinks are not free, so he’s figured something right.

“Addams Family” and “The Jeffersons” reruns play on all the bar televisions, and dancers are free to go-go on stage before the pros arrive. The pool tables are busy, and the clothes range from urban-look threads to a T-shirt that announces “I (have sex) on the first date.”

Talk in the women’s restroom is the best entertainment, though, highlighted by a graphic discourse of near-reproduction of the species on the dance floor. How did that slip by me unnoticed?

Model Brian Lovely grew up in Huntington Beach dreaming of endless summers as a pro surfer. At 23, he lives in Westminster and will spend part of the month in Milan for a fashion shoot. “Toot toot, yeah, beep beep,” goes Donna Summer, as Lovely defends Orange County as a fun place to club, at least on Thursday nights. He is wearing a polyester Hawaiian shirt and Navy bell-bottoms. “It’s nice not to have to drive all the way to L.A. like I used to.”

Despite its reputation for white-bread conservatism, John Dole, 22, a beefy football player from Long Beach, said he liked how well the races mixed in Orange County clubs he had visited, Disco 2000 included.

“L.A. is too rough,” he said. “It’s kind of a racist thing.”

He liked the service, he got no attitude from anybody, the music was choice and “I’m hoping to go home with somebody,” he said with a laugh. “But there’s not enough girls.”

*

The front entrance is reminiscent of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion--in a classy way, of course. The paintings there are signed in the artist’s blood. Ew, neat! And throngs of people think so, because Roxbury in Santa Ana, like the mother ship in Los Angeles, packs them in.

A dancer gyrates inside fluorescent Hula-Hoops in one room. Upstairs are the V.I.P. room and the disco dance floor. A 1959 stretch limo purrs up to the entrance to deposit people carrying cellular phones.

But this is Orange County, where a lack of a recognizable jet-set means how you look is more important than who you are. Why, international designer Sean Stussy was turned away week before last because he was wearing tennis shoes. Maybe if he’d had a ponytail . . . .