A ‘Big, Beautiful’ Night : For those attending this Valentine’s Day mixer, fat is not a four-letter word. Thin is.

Pamela Lynn, 400 pounds and swathed in purple, works the room: “How’re you doing tonight? Having fun? Hi, guys!”

Red and white balloons float above. The deejay’s music is loud, the lights dim.

We’re at a Valentine’s dance at a hotel on the Westside, by definition a place where one can’t be too rich or too thin, where the pinch test is the true test of one’s worth. But here, most of the women are big-- very big. Most of the men are thin.

Think “My Funny Valentine,” with a “figure less than Greek.”

Lynn, a 30-year-old onetime nanny and founder of party sponsor the Big Difference, surveys the room. She is pleased. Almost 200 men and women, mostly women, have come to her mixer “for big, beautiful people and their admirers.”

No need to beat around the bush here, to search furtively for euphemisms. “Fat is what I am,” Lynn says. She and others like to say that fat is not a four-letter word. Thin is.

Still, Lynn knows only too well, it’s tough to be fat in L.A. You can be a closet drinker, but you sure can’t be a closet fat person. She’s tried it all--yo-yo dieting, stomach-stapling. Now, she just wants to be accepted.

Hostess Connie Matus, a brunet from Whittier, is getting guests to mix and mingle. She says: “I stayed home for seven years with my mother, which is a story you’ll hear a lot. I was afraid to go anywhere.”

She introduces her boyfriend, Alan Towar, a slim, bespectacled man in a look-at-me print shirt. He lives in Ventura and is in computers. They met at one of these dances. “I’ve always been attracted to big women,” he says.

Dee Davey, a customer service rep from Long Beach, explains the thin man syndrome: “We call them FAs, fat admirers. Myself, I have a preference for the average size male, but I say thank God for the FAs.”

Davey is a pretty 33-year-old with long, wavy, brown hair and 350 pounds on a 5-foot, 9-inch frame. Her see-through burgundy lace number reveals glimpses of black lingerie. She is sitting in an armless chair, she says, because “I can’t fit in those booths. I drag the tablecloth along with me.”

Through the National Assn. to Advance Fat Acceptance, she’s been trying to stamp out discrimination. She’s come to believe that she’s OK, fat or not.

Before discovering the Big Difference and another group, More to Love, Davey struck out socially. Even a man who seemed attracted to her wouldn’t ask her to dance for fear of his friends’ ribbing. But here, she says, “I feel attractive and popular.”

Hers is a story echoed by others. “Everyone expects you to be one (small) size,” says one. “I refuse to compete with girls who look like Playboy bunnies,” another says.

Across the room is Kevin Lacy, 30, of Mar Vista, a college student and bouncer at House of Billiards. Since October he has dropped 70 pounds on the Scarsdale diet and--at 6 feet, 2 inches--weighs in at 320.

Before Scarsdale, he says, he wouldn’t go out socially and face the sneers and snickers, the “What’s she doing with him ?” looks should he even get a girl to dance with him.

Lacy likes “women who look like women. Very, very large women, personally I’m not physically attracted to, but I prefer women who have a shape.”

The music stops. Time for the lingerie show. Karen Clark, a blaze of red sequins, is describing the lace things and leopard things and fringed things being modeled by large and lovely ladies. Clark, who runs a home party lingerie business, is saying she can fit hips and busts up to 80 inches.

Later, Clark, who describes herself as a “super-size woman,” bemoans the paucity of sexy unmentionables to fit women like her. Admittedly, she says, only 20% of men are turned on by dimpled flesh in come-hither scanties--”The other 80% will be repulsed.”

But, hey, look around. Check out all the thin men. “These men aren’t perverts,” Clark says. “They have a thin woman for cover, but they want to date a fat woman on the side.”

Like most of the women here tonight, she prefers a man “with a waistline under 40 inches.” And, in this cocoonishly comfortable atmosphere, she is no wallflower. Once, she says, “I was always the fat girl holding the purses while my thin friends danced.”

Surveying the scene is Shasi Kumar, an engineer who lives in Hollywood. A slight man, he likes his women big. In India, where he came from, “We were taught if somebody’s big, they’re eating good and having a good life.”

Somewhat coquettishly, Orrette Biro of Maywood, a size 28, is showing off a sparkler on third finger, left hand. She and beau Frank Gorton of Hawthorne, a fairly average-sized man with “a bit of a bulge” at the midriff, are celebrating the first anniversary of their meeting--at last year’s Valentine dance.

“Women are meant to be soft,” says Joyce Best of Temple City, a big, beautiful, brunet construction worker. “These men just take that to an extreme.

“One guy told me, ‘If I wanted just the bones, I wouldn’t order prime rib.’ ”

Returning a Favor--With Many Thanks

AU-Haul truck rolled into Venice late last week, bringing more than 3,000 pounds of food, water and other basics to victims of the Jan. 17 earthquake.

At St. Joseph Center, workers unloaded boxes hand-lettered “Frijoles” (beans), “Tomate Olido” (canned tomatoes), “Botes de Sopas Cambles” (Campbell’s soup).

The benefactors? Field and cannery workers in Watsonville, a community devastated by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

“It’s so touching,” said Rhonda Meister, executive director of St. Joseph, which, with the Westside Food Bank, is distributing the food. “People with very little managing to pull together for people who have even less right now.”

It all began last month when Angeleno Suzy Marks went to a reunion of women who had visited Central America under auspices of Capacitar, a Watsonville-based hands-across-the-border women’s empowerment group.

One of the women, Teresa Padilla, a former strawberry picker who now runs a day-care center in Watsonville, was there with her husband, Camarino, a onetime picker now working in a processing plant.

Camarino, who emigrated from Mexico 21 years ago, told Marks that his people wanted to help people in Los Angeles. He understood the pain; the Padillas lost their home in the 1989 quake. Back in Los Angeles, Marks set the wheels in motion.

Meanwhile, Camarino asked his parish priest to spread the word at Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s. He was overwhelmed by the response: “People came to the church bringing beans, cereal for the kids, potatoes.” About 300 people pitched in.

They remembered the help that had come to them from neighboring cities in 1989. It was time to give back. Some gave money, which paid for a driver to bring the U-Haul to Arroyo Grande, where it was handed over to a team from St. Joseph.

“The poor give and don’t ask, give without limit,” said Pat Cane, director of Capacitar. Teresa and Camarino Padilla, she added, are “two really beautiful people.”