For Streisand, Eagles Fans, Ticket Price Is No Problem : Music: Multitudes wait eagerly for appearances that mark the biggest week in O.C.’s pop concert history.

Frank Groff of Laguna Beach bought his $350 Barbra Streisand ticket without a qualm. “It’s a historic event, and you want to be a part of that.” He said he would have been willing to spend $1,000. He actually did spend that much once, to see her at a benefit.

Karyn Vogt of Costa Mesa vied for hours with some 300 other fans to buy an Eagles ticket and was ready to spend the top price of $115. She ended up eighth in line, but still had to settle for a more distant (though still pricey) seat. It has hardly dampened her enthusiasm: “Have I been waiting for this? You bet! I’ve been waiting since there was the first hint of a tour, but I never thought it would happen.”

Groff and Vogt are among some 140,000 fans who will hear Streisand and the Eagles in Orange County this week--the splashiest week that anyone can remember in the county’s pop music history. Streisand’s shows at The Pond of Anaheim will be part of her first tour in 22 years, a tour she claims will be her last. The five Eagles shows starting Friday at Irvine Meadows will be the band’s first live concerts anywhere since a rancorous breakup in 1980.

Not only have the ticket prices for these shows set records, but the security is out of the ordinary: Before Streisand ticket-holders can take their seats, they’ll have to pass through metal detectors.

Who are these people? Streisand and Eagles ticket buyers, it turns out, are a varied--and not mutually exclusive--lot. Some want nostalgia. Some want surprises. Some just hope that, after all the hoopla, the shows actually happen.

“I have one friend,” Vogt recounted, “who said he’s seeing the Eagles on opening night because he’s worried, ‘What if they get mad at each other again and cancel the rest of the tour?’ ”

The 36-year-old marketing assistant noted that her husband won’t be joining her at the Meadows. He’s going camping in Yosemite instead. “He said no way was he going to pay that much for a ticket. I said, ‘Fine with me. I’ll just spend all that money.’ I don’t care how much it is.”

At the Taco Bell headquarters in Irvine where she works, Vogt has been running a lighthearted contest to see who gets to use her spare ticket: “In 100 words or less, who’s the biggest Eagles fan and the most fun at concerts?”

For all the kudos accorded them over the years, to Vogt the Eagles mean fun, as if they had been the Beach Boys of the ‘70s. “I was in high school back then, and it was good partying music. We’re all going to go and pretend we’re young again. I hope I remember all the words, because I’m going to be singing along with everything.”

They make a mighty fine lemon caper charbroiled swordfish at the Cafe Zoolu in Laguna Beach, but don’t expect to eat there next Tuesday night, no matter what credit card you carry. Owner-operators Michael and Toni Leech say they’ll be hanging a “Gone to the Eagles” sign in the window.

For Michael, 45, and Toni, 42, Eagles music conjures images of the California coastline, but it also reminds them of when they were starting out together in marriage and business. “It might not sound very romantic, but we listened to the ‘Hotel California’ album all the time while were remodeling our second restaurant (the Dana Point Quiet Woman). It was right after we’d married, and we were also remodeling the apartment above the restaurant to live in. We constantly played the album, and those were great, fun times for us,” Michael said.

They have continued listening to the Eagles over the years while he has cooked and she has hosted in the restaurants they have owned.

To let off steam, they occasionally used to shell out hundreds to a ticket broker and go unwind in the front rows of a rock show--a luxury the economy hasn’t allowed them in some time. They now say they couldn’t imagine shutting down the restaurant to see anyone, short of Jim Morrison coming back from the dead. Or the Eagles.

“We’re not going to worry about the financial ramifications,” Michael said. “In the summer we don’t close on Mondays, so we’re going to work about 90 days straight, day and night. So this is our last hurrah, so to speak.”

Unlike the Leeches, Tim and Mitzi Carroll of Anaheim had not been accustomed to shelling out hundreds for concerts. They spent $700 to see Streisand, “but the last time we saw her I think it cost us something like a $6 cover charge, and that included a couple of drinks,” recalled Tim, a 55-year-old high school teacher.

“She was at the Hungry i nightclub in San Francisco, around 1963. We sat within 20 feet of her and, you know, we were impressed.”

But not so impressed that he doesn’t claim to be more of an Eagles fan these days. He and his wife (who still favors Babs) are going to both shows.

Donna Freudenberg of Orange says she and husband Jerry would like to take daughters Brandi (who at 16 has been the Times Orange County girl high school tennis player of the year for two years running) and Holli to see Barbra but they think the ticket price precludes it.

Along with the money, Donna said Jerry, 50, invested some legwork. An ex-high school coach, “he went (to The Pond) the night before, stayed all night and when they finally opened the gates he sprinted in front of everyone, running like an idiot, and was at the top of the line, little to know that it meant absolutely nothing.”

As the Freudenbergs have learned, it is a common practice at ticket sales for priority numbers to be distributed at random, removing any advantage of being first in line. Jerry’s number was so far down the list as to be beyond hope. Eventually, an older couple with a better number agreed to buy tickets for the Freudenbergs. The sad outcome, Donna said, was that the couple--who wanted tickets to celebrate a wedding anniversary--got the Freudenbergs’ tickets but none for themselves, because the $50 ones they could afford had sold out.

Frank Groff of Laguna thinks Streisand is “an extraordinary vocalist and all that, but for me it’s more what she represents. To me, and to a lot of people I think, she represents the underdog, this kid who really wasn’t very attractive (but who) made it to superstardom. It’s one thing for Paul Newman or Marilyn Monroe, these figures of beauty. But she is no conventional beauty, and she broke convention.

“I felt like I was a little different when I was younger. I wasn’t good at sports or the other popular things. And to see her kind of fight convention was an inspiration.”

Groff has been a fan ever since he saw “Funny Girl” in 1970. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, who is this bizarre woman?’ I was only 10 years old, but it spoke to me.”

Today, Groff is 34, runs a successful public relations company in Long Beach, owns a home there as well as one in Laguna, and says he’s able to afford most things he wants, including that $1,000 ticket he bought a while back to see one of Streisand’s rare, and brief, public appearances at an AIDS benefit. But if you think he’s a fan, he says you should talk to his friend Bill.

A 29-year-old fire equipment sales rep of Foothill Ranch, Bill Short also was hooked by “Funny Girl” at an early age. “I was kind of notorious for watching nothing but football or baseball. Then one year when I was 13 I was getting away from the adults one Thanksgiving, wandered into the back room and watched ‘Funny Girl’ on TV and got mesmerized.”

He was almost literally mesmerized by Streisand once, on an occasion he has related so colorfully to Groff that Groff, he now says, tells the story better than he can.

Groff recounted: “Bill went to the Broadway Grill (in Santa Monica). He loves Streisand so much he’d pick through her garbage. And he saw her in the restaurant! He tried to send her a drink, but the waiter wouldn’t. So he gave him a $20 tip to do it. So he buys her a drink, and he was all excited because she accepted it.

“He wanted a closer view so he slips a peek her way while walking to the bathroom. He comes out and she’s gone. He’s beating himself up. ‘She’s gone, why didn’t I just say something? I missed my golden opportunity.’

“And all of a sudden he feels hands on his shoulder, and he looks up and it’s her. He couldn’t get any words out. He was in shock. She starts laughing and says, ‘I wanted to thank you for the drink.’ And he’s still unable to say anything.”

Not many of Short’s peers share his interest in her. “People go through my records and see Nirvana and the Gin Blossoms and all this current stuff. Then they see this huge stack of Streisand stuff and go, ‘Where did that come from?’

“But that’s the music that defines almost every time in my life. Every time I try and relate to any experience, I always can pick a Streisand song to almost exactly describe what I’m thinking, every emotion.”

While his and Groff’s admiration for Streisand began in adolescence, Georgia Dorney’s love of the Eagles is practically a case of prenatal nostalgia. “Hotel California” came out two years before the 16-year-old Laguna High School student was born; the group had broken up by the time she was 2. Still, the Eagles’ music is some of the first she remembers hearing.

“My dad (defense attorney Gene Dorney) was always playing music and the Eagles were always on. They’re like the sounds of my childhood. It gives me a great feeling listening to them. You can listen to them in any mood: You can either dance or mope.”

She also likes Alice in Chains, Bob Marley and the Stone Temple Pilots, but it was the prospect of Eagles tickets that got her to wake dad at 7 one morning to go get tickets. She and her father, who is divorced from her mother, are going to the show together. “I’m going to be jumping up and singing,” she predicts.

* RELATED STORIES: F1, F2, F10