MASTERPIECE THEATER : Long-Lost Rembrandt or Worthless Junk? Fortune Hunters Put Heirlooms to the Test

The treasures of Sierra Madre . . . the tchotchkes of Encino. Out they come, twice a month--unearthed, unwrapped and set before the judges.

To those who contend that Los Angeles is as deeply rooted as a tumbleweed--true. The ponderous burdens of history have not stayed this city from plowing under, paving over, knocking down and digging up some of its finest monuments, which is why we must now resort to slapping landmark designations on coffee shops hardly older than I am. The Franklin Mint has issued a commemorative plate for the old boarded-up McDonald’s in Downey.

But L.A.’s portable, personal history--that you can see the first and third Tuesdays of every month, hauled into the Sunset Strip auction house of Butterfield & Butterfield for free expert appraisal of--oh, what’s the technical term for it?--stuff.

Once I hauled in some of my stuff, too, my 19th-Century dust-catchers among the game-show serendipity of Biedermeier chairs, paintings wrapped in polyester bedspreads, Jazz Age lamps, Oriental rugs slung over men’s shoulders like fur pieces.

The enticing rustle of bubble wrap and old newspaper sounded like Christmas and, like kids at Christmas, we each furtively compared our stuff to everyone else’s.

A house painter with an ivory-headed walking stick was telling the man next to him: “So I found the stick behind this lady’s dresser, and I said, ‘Hey, lady, I found this stick behind your dresser. Will you take 20 bucks for it?’ Heck, the ivory is worth 20 bucks.”

From a floor mike, appraisers summoned numbers like bingo callers. “Prints, number 17, prints.” And number 17 hefted his stuff to a table at the front.

As with compulsive channel surfing, I never knew how any story ended. I only caught glimpses and murmurs from the black-cloth-covered tables, where an adroit hand and eye assessed some domed object: “This is an example--usually they’re English--of what they call a Gladstone warmer.”

Any survivor of an undergraduate art history class would recognize reproductions, however elaborately framed: a detail from a Velasquez painting, another from “La Grenouillere.”

One disgusted woman carried off her framed nothing, muttering, “Well, at least they didn’t say ‘Sucker.’ ”

“I’m trying to put this delicately,” struggled Jon King, Butterfield’s executive vice president. “Even if someone has a teacup and saucer that might be worth a dollar to a dollar-fifty, you cannot tell them their item is not worth much at all. You can turn it around and give them the history of the piece. That’s what people like to know: what they have. And if you couch it in historical terms instead of just a monetary figure, they leave happy.”

Oscar Wilde’s cynic knew the price of everything and the value of nothing; this was not the cynics’ clinic.

“It’s had a rough life,” one appraiser was saying comfortingly of a battered saxophone. “It’s quite a nice . . . poster,” another said in oncologist’s tones.

Every clinic is like opening the prize in a box of Cracker Jack: 10 years of plastic whistles and then, wham , a Faberge egg. After a while, even the incredible finds get a “little sickening,” King said--all the top-this tales of garage-sale innocents:

A Grueby Arts and Crafts pot, $1 at a garage sale, $6,000 at auction; a pair of filthy-black wine coolers, $10 at a sale, $11,000 at auction. They were English Regency silver.

A Frank Lloyd Wright urn, one of only a dozen known to exist, found in an L.A. dining room with a plant stuck in it, $104,000. A mate had turned up in San Francisco, cradling a lank rubber tree, and it is now on long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That’s in New York. Where they preserve cathedrals, not McDonald’ses. But where their stuff is no better than ours.