When Home Improvement Meets the Golden Girls

WANTED: Female senior to share cozy house in Arleta with professional female; will have own room and bathroom. . . . Must be friendly, an animal lover, clean, quiet, financially responsible and nonsmoking. . . . No others need apply.

*

Remember “The Odd Couple”? In that movie and the TV series it inspired, Oscar was slob personified. Felix was a certifiable clean freak. Perfectly mismatched and inhabiting the same apartment. And for years America laughed at their bumbling attempts to coexist--in spite of themselves.

Living together is no easy task, even when the roommates are more compatible than Oscar and Felix.

That’s probably why the writer of the above want ad made no bones about the qualities she demands in a housemate. Still, lots of people who once hadn’t thought of sharing the place they call home are willing to think about it today--and it’s easy to understand why.

For starters, living together is often cheaper than living alone. In a city where rent can devour a month’s pay in one gulp, this is no small matter. Then, of course, there’s strength and comfort in numbers. Sometimes when you live alone, every creak and bump in the night is magnified. The nights can be very long.

“Since the earthquake, we’ve had a large increase in the numbers of adults who no longer feel comfortable living alone,” said Joan Bauer, who’s in the business of roommate matches. “They want to share, just to know somebody else is in the house.”

But where do you start? There’s always the bulletin board approach at senior citizen centers, churches and college campuses. And there’s the classified ads. But sharing a home is an intimate thing, and it might be worth your while to turn to a higher source for help.

It’s not exactly heaven, but some wonderful matches are made by the people at the Valley Storefront Jewish Family Service. The Shared Housing Department that Bauer runs does at least some of the work to make sure the roommate you wind up with is not Felix to your Oscar.

Actually, compatibility cannot always be determined by sameness. Sometimes people who on the surface seem to have little in common can live together in bliss. The result is an interesting intersection of lives.

“What works well is matching a younger person with an older person,” Bauer said. “We put an ad in the paper at CSUN to see if we can have intergenerational matching.”

An example is banker Joyce Maize, who over the years has opened a room in her Encino home to two college students and three older men. Maize, who travels often, likes the idea of having someone there while she is gone--and the company when she returns is an added treat.

But what does a 50-something banker have in common with a 20-something music student?

“The kids were great,” Maize said. She enjoyed seeing the world “through their eyes,” hearing about their daily lives and experiencing again “the freshness of discovery” vicariously.

She found her most recent roommates with Bauer’s help, and although it was not a prerequisite, all have been older men who supplied good food and good company.

“It was like coming home to Mr. Mom,” Maize said of her first older roommate. “This man liked to cook, and I had the most wonderful meals on Earth.”

He even had a 75-pound black poodle that struck up a friendship with Gahloo, her 21-pound cream-beige poodle.

“They were like Mutt and Jeff,” she laughed.

Next came the retired maitre d’ who regaled her with more wonderful meals. Then came Barry Ashley, her current roommate, an aspiring actor who moved here from Toronto.

He’s handy with tools and, you guessed it, loves to cook.

“How I lucked out with all these cooks I have no idea,” she said.

In Ashley’s words, the arrangement works out “quite well.” Sure it’s a lot different from what he had before: a 3,000-square-foot house of his own. But a desire to act, and a divorce, pushed that into his past.

“It was like starting all over again,” he said.

Bill Geminder rents out a room in the North Hollywood house he has lived in for 30 years. For this 84-year-old World War II vet, whose memories are more interesting than most action movies, the arrangement brings more than just added income.

“It’s nice to have some people around to talk to,” he said. “After all, I’m not a young man.” And for his roommate, who is young but has no family in the area, living with Geminder means having a home and a place to spend Passover.

Eileen Dresner didn’t want to live alone after the earthquake, and neither did Helene Taber--which was enough to bring them together.

“I wasn’t looking for a friend,” Dresner said. She was slightly hesitant when she heard about the woman who ended up sharing her Sherman Oaks apartment.

“It just happened that we became friends,” Dresner said. “She’s incredible; she’s not like anyone you would ever meet. . . . She’s very hip, dresses fabulously.”

Dresner’s initial hesitation, based on Helene’s blindness, flew out the window. The two are no longer roommates, but they are still friends, living across the hall from each other in the same apartment building.

Dennis Musicus, 70, wasn’t looking for a wife, he just needed a place to live. With Bauer’s help he found a room in a North Hollywood house. Donna Breslau, 56, was renting another room, and along with the owner and a dog named Brutus, they all got along just fine.

Then the owner of the house became sick and needed the extra space for a live-in nurse.

Breslau had no place to go, Musicus said, but he had a line on another apartment in Phoenix. “About three or four months later, we got married.”

Not every arrangement will end in marital bliss or even friendship. There are, of course, the clunkers, the ones that just don’t work.

But things happen when people live together: They learn to live together. In spite of their bickering, Felix and Oscar balanced each other into a mythically perfect friendship.

And that isn’t very odd at all.