Photo by Dave Allen

Darlena (center): “I go out just about every night.”

In November of 1991, after 19 years of married life in her native Chicago, Darlena's husband died, leaving her with little more than the house they had shared. “Because I didn’t have a job, I had to sell my house,” she explains. “And if I couldn’t stay in my house, I had to get out of there.” By August of 1992, she had sold her home and set out for a new life in our sunnier clime. “I had a girlfriend in Encino who was moving down to Rancho Santa Fe. She said I could come live with her in her ‘small’ 16,000-square-foot home. I had my own little room.”

What she did not have was a job. A couple of months in town had found her some girlfriends, also Chicago transplants, one of whom took her on as a roommate. But it had not found her an employer. She recalls that “Eleven years ago, there were no sales jobs. My girlfriend said, ‘Maybe you’ll have to create your own.’ After my husband died, I had gone to a couple of singles’ parties on Sunday night in Chicago. I had been to the Del Mar Hilton, so I went to the manager there and said, ‘If I can bring you some business, can I have a singles’ party in your lounge?’ He said, ‘Fine.’”

By “single,” Darlena does not mean simply “ unmarried,” a category that takes in the hordes of fresh-faced youngsters who generally make up San Diego nightlife. “When you’re in your 20s, you can walk into any bar. There are all kinds of places. But if you’re older — say, 35, 36 — and you’ve been married, that puts you in a different class. Where do you go? You can go to church, that’s fine. You can take a photography class. But if you want to dance and have fun and meet people, a bar atmosphere is still the most fun. You don’t have to drink — I have alcoholic friends who just drink Perrier or orange juice. It’s just a question of holding something in your hand and being sociable in the bar atmosphere.” The difficulty comes in finding folks like yourself amid the unlined twentysomething revelers and at the same time not looking like a midlife loser trying to recapture lost youth by simple proximity to it.

Where do you go? For the next five years, you went to the Derby Lounge at the Del Mar Hilton. “I started November 1, 1992. I did six parties and decided I’d stop for the holidays. At the sixth party, I had laryngitis. A guy came up and started hitting on my sister, who was visiting. Then he told her, ‘I used to do singles parties in Boston. Tell your sister to call me when she gets over her laryngitis, and maybe we can talk.’ Darlena called the man, whose name was David, and they teamed up in January of ’93. “He had a marketing technique that I didn’t have,” says Darlena. “We opened on a Sunday night, gave away free admission, and we had hundreds of people. I had been getting only 30 or 40.”

You met Darlena at the Lounge entrance. If you had been there before, odds were she knew your name. You paid your admission — less if you arrived before 7:30 — and got a coupon good for a discount off next week’s ticket. Inside, “right in front, there were two tables. Women would get there early and sit at the tables, so they could see who was walking in. Past the tables, in the middle of the room, was the bar. More tables stood off to the left; back and to the right, you found the dance floor, the DJ booth, and, in the back right corner, the buffet bar. “That’s why it was so great. You could walk in and walk to the left, see who was there. You could walk to the right and go get some food.” And you were always circling the bar. “People love to hang out at bars. I know when I go out, I like to sit at the bar. That’s the first place people look.”

Besides the bar, the dance floor was crucial. The Derby Lounge wasn’t a singles’ bar; the Derby Lounge hosted singles’ parties. And because the dance floor was crucial, so was the DJ. A DJ’s success lies in “mixing the music, being able to read your crowd. If you play a song and everybody walks off the floor, you’ve got to know to switch. You have to know what kind of music people like. I don’t know names, I don’t know bands, I don’t know what works; that’s why I’m hiring them.” Her first DJ was already working the Derby on Sunday nights, “doing country western or something like that. We asked him to play for us, and he was good.”

On top of the excellent layout and the music, says Darlena, “It was Del Mar. Del Mar has that draw; everybody wants to live in Del Mar. It’s the place. Del Mar drew from all over; South Bay, Chula Vista — they would come from any place.” Business was good. Before long, “ We were running four parties a week,” including one on Tuesdays at the 94th Aero Squadron on Balboa Avenue. Then the bomb hit — the Del Mar Hilton came under new management. “You know the saying, ‘A new broom sweeps clean’? They wanted to show the big boss what they could do. ‘Well, we’re only getting so much revenue from the lounge on Friday and Saturday. We can do better with a conference room.’ ” Out went the Derby Lounge. In went the conference room. “The hotel has been dead ever since — not that it was busy to begin with. I had people who stayed at the hotel who used to come back every year because they knew I was there. It was a fun thing, and I brought in business. Maybe not a lot, but I was a good $50,000 a-year customer. It was great; people could meet, and there was a hotel right there. They were old enough.”

Friday and Saturdays at the Hilton were no more. David and Darlena were down to Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Then David decided he didn’t like Darlena’s style. “He told me, ‘You don’t know how to run parties. You don’t work hard enough. You’re rude to your customers.’ I said, ‘You don’t need me as a partner.’ ”They broke up and split the parties between them; she kept Tuesdays at the Aero Squadron. He did Wednesdays for a while, then moved to Saturdays at the Acapulco in Miramar. Eventually, he sold that party to his DJ. Today, the Acapulco is gone, and David has returned to Boston. “I’ve had more people coming to my parties since we’re not partners,” says Darlena. “If I don’t know how to run a party, how have I been doing it five years without him?” Recently, she welcomed more than 200 singles in a single night, with more ladies than usual in attendance. “It was such a fun party. It was hot, every body was dancing; it was good energy.”

But Tuesdays were not enough. Darlena had bought a townhouse in Del Mar soon after starting her business. “I needed my own place. I had sold my house in Chicago, and I needed to reinvest. A realtor showed me this house, and I wasn’t crazy about it but the fact was it had three bedrooms and two and a half baths and an ocean view. God took care of me to see that I bought this house. I had just started my business, and basically, I didn’t have any money. They said, ‘Oh, you won’t get a mortgage.’ I said, ‘Yes, I will,’ and I knew why.” The street shared a name with her grandmother, “and I knew she was going to make sure I got the house. I knew the second day here that I was never going to leave.” But houses mean bills to pay, and Darlena started looking for other venues, other nights. She ran a party on Saturdays at Jared’s. “It was great; I was getting a nice crowd — 125 people in a small room. It was so romantic on the water. Then they said they needed the room for other things and they couldn’t have me every week.” Now, “That place is empty.” Before the Jared’s gig ended, it garnered her an invite to do Friday nights at Viejas’ Dreamcatcher Lounge. “It was a great room, great food, great dance floor, and I had a great DJ. Nobody came. It was too far away.” Too many marrieds in East County.

Finally, the food and beverage director from the Four Points Sheraton approached her at a Tuesday party and asked her if she’d like to take Thursdays at the hotel’s Skies Lounge. She took it, until the manager handed Friday and Saturday to another singles’ party, causing her to leave in protest. “Then, I was doing better and better at the Aero Squadron, so I decided to call the Four Points. I knew the girl who took Thursday, Friday, and Saturday was getting around 20 people. I said, ‘I think I can bring you a lot of business.’” The management bit, and at long last, Darlena got her Saturday party back. She started with a bang, saw the crowds diminish, and recently offered a free-admission night to get things hopping again.

“I need the income,” she says, and besides, “I’m single. I have no place to go on Saturday night. You can go to Humphrey’s, where there are five men, ten women, and couples. Saturday is date night. You can hang out at a bar where there’s music, but where else? I’m not going to the movies, because you can’t get in — again, date night. I’m not going out to dinner.” Better to bring in paying customers — at similarly loose ends — to the Skies Lounge, which she advertises as “the classiest weekend party in town.” The ad requests “dressy attire.” “Del Mar people got dressed up, but it’s very casual at the 94th. Saturday night, we’re trying to get them to dress. The men are California” — meaning “stubbornly casual” — “but I tell them, ‘You have only one chance to make a good first impression.’ ” Dressy means “no jeans. Wear a nice, crisp shirt and tie. Don’t wear a golf shirt. Jeans can be all right — I’ve seen guys come in white shirts, jeans, and a camel hair sport coat and look great — but I’m talking about scruffy, like you’d just been out in the stable. The women dress, so why shouldn’t you? I tell the women to dress cute. ‘Men look at what you wear. They might be dressed more casually, but the fact is, they like sexy clothes. Wear something low-cut and tight,’ I tell them.”

Darlena does not scorn her own advice. She wears miniskirts, tops that dip into revelatory territory. She wears eyeshadow in eye-catching shades and gives her nails a similar treatment (when I met her, they were purple, a favorite color of hers). “It’s amazing how much I’ve changed since before I came here. I used to dress very conservatively. I don’t do that anymore. I went to my chiropractor and he said, ‘You look like you’re going to a party.’ I said, ‘Life’s a party.’ He loved that.”

Of course, for Darlena, there is a measure of literal truth to that claim. Parties make up her professional life. And she happily attests that most of her friends are people she met at her own events. She rarely dances with her patrons — if she danced with one, she might have to dance with them all — but she has made many friends, male and female. And those friends make up the bulk of the 14 or so guests at the Sunday brunch I am attending in her home.

“People come in and say, ‘Wow,’” Darlena tells me. After I’ve entered through the bright red exterior door and had a look around her living room, it’s easy to see why. When she moved in, every thing was Arizona White, a shade actually closer to beige than white. The carpet in the living room, which abuts the white tile of the entryway, was blue. “I changed it all to white, and I put in light-gray carpeting.” And so it stayed for the better part of a decade, not a wow in sight.

About a year ago, “My neighbor broke out the wall between the kitchen and the living room. It looked so great that I wanted to do it, too. I had my friend Gary knock out the wall” — or at least the portion of it between countertop height and the ceiling — “and do something with the electrical. I bought a hood,” a sleek, rounded stainless-steel model from Pacific Sales in Rancho Bernardo. “People come in here and say, ‘Oh my God! You just put that in here for decoration. You don’t cook!’ I say, ‘I do cook!’ I bought my refrigerator and stove there, too.”

She ripped out her “cruddy, dirty, filthy” tile countertops and put in Formica in a black/white/ gray granitic speckle. “I would have loved granite, but I never would have gotten my money back.” She kept her old wood floors but replaced her cabinet doors and hardware — now white and brushed nickel, respectively. Now, the somewhat triangular kitchen is mostly pale gray and white; the monochromatic scheme highlights the row of glass jars containing brightly colored candies. It is an awesome array. “That’s me,” says Darlena. “I love my candy. I want it when I want it. Sometimes, I might want a Gummi bear or a Jelly Belly. Every once in a while, you need a mint. My favorites are the fish, and I go for the red licorice and the Trader Joe’s semisweet chocolate with almonds.” Besides these, I spot Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Hershey’s Kisses, butterscotches, Brach’s Treasures, Tootsie Rolls and Tootsie Pops, Gummi worms, Gummi straw berries, bite-sized Snickers, Baby Ruths and Butterfingers, Riesens, Bit-O Honeys, and more.

Darlena met Gary at a church she attended with a girlfriend. She met Al there as well — he did the painting in the kitchen. After the kitchen was finished, she found that the remodeling urge was still upon her. “I had a red brick fireplace in the living room; it was yucky. I said, ‘Al, would you paint it black?’ ” He did, and he smeared a metallic gold wash over the black to boot. “I was so thrilled. I said, ‘Oh, I know; I want a metallic gold wall’ above the fireplace.” Al complied again, this time flecking the gold with tiny sprays of black and red. Again, Darlena was delighted, but now she had a gold wall in the middle of a white apartment. “It was awful.” More gold went on the opposite wall, the one Gary had broken out to expose the kitchen, and over this, Al rolled a silver pattern. “He paid $10,000 for this German invention. You put the paint in and you get the rollers going,” and you can roll on a repeated pattern that looks for all the world like wallpaper. Sadly, the silver pattern “was horrible. He started rubbing it off, and I said, ‘I love that!’ ” The kitchen beyond “is the silver room, so it blends, and you can see some of the gold underneath.”

The roll-on patterns we re far more successful on the remaining two walls, which Darlena did in inverted tones — dull mustard with a wheat-brown pattern on one, wheat with a dull mustard pattern on the other. The patterns resemble bound bunches of twigs and have an Asian air. Darlena laid in new, much darker carpet, but she let the white tile in the entry stay. The room offers a busy, engaging variety that you don’t often see in these days of multitudinous whites.

Today the room is dominated by a long table under a black tablecloth; between the table, the couch, a writing desk, and Darlena’s workstation (partially obscured by a Japanese screen), the space is filled to bursting. Add a dozen guests or more, and it’s easy to miss the side table of beverages by the entrance: Vendange Chardonnay, Barq’s root beer, Chandon sparkling wine, fresh orange juice, water, Kenwood Sauvignon Blanc, and sparkling cider. Darlena pours me a mimosa, and I am underway.

While the guests mill about — most people seem to know each other — Darlena gives me a tour of the upstairs, noting her newly painted bathroom — blood-red and cream walls, both overlaid with a pink roll-on pattern, with towels, bathmats, and accessories to match — the pattern painting in the guest room, and finally, her own room, as yet unrepainted. “I want my room to be grape and green; I love purples.” She intends to use her bedspread as a guide. She shows me her jewelry collection: many chunky belts and bracelets, hung on randomly placed nails in the bedroom wall to create their own sort of décor when not in use — plus great stores of earrings. Outside the bedroom is her balcony, with its view and its plants and its electric lights in plastic containers fashioned to look like brown paper sandwich bags. A painting on the wall shows Darlena 13 years ago; a friend painted it in exchange for a custom sweater knitted by my hostess.

Back downstairs for brunch. The layout is like the candy, beverages, and décor — varied and plentiful. There are sliced onions soaked in balsamic vine gar and water to take the sting out. Darlena has bought and steamed tamales from a good local provider, some flavored with jalapeños and cheese, some with pineapple, raisins, and brown sugar.

She has made kugel, sweet and rich, dripping with sour cream, raisins tucked in among the noodles. “It’s kind of like a dessert. My girlfriend gave me the recipe. I have thousands of recipes. I’ve been collecting for 20 or 30 years from newspapers and magazines — The Chicago Sun Times, Bon Appétit. Some I’ve never cooked. I’ve finally straightened them out into categories. I don’t know why I keep collecting them. I do cook, but I don’t have anybody to cook for.” Except on Sundays, her day to play the hostess at home. But then, “I stick with what I know. Every once in a while, I’ll look to see if there’s something different I can make.”

She has made salad — “The salad is never the same thing twice. This one has artichokes, hearts of palm, cheese, carrots, no tomatoes, no cucumbers, no onion, and honey roasted sesame croutons.” There are three dressings from which to choose. There are two cream cheeses for the bagels, along with lox, lemon slices, basil, tomatoes, scallions, tuna, and cilantro — plus a generous mound of sliced avocado. There is hot sauce for the tamales and an egg and-rice dish brought by one of Darlena’s friends. I fill my plate and my cup and find a seat near the end of the table, across from Arnold.

Arnold is 62; I wouldn’t have put him past 50. Tall, trim, broad shoulders, firm grip, big rough voice that can easily drop into quieter tones of can did explanation. He is a widower and is happy to enlarge upon his situation. “A lot of people don’t realize that people get older, but they’re not dead,” he says, taking pleasure in the line. “We want a place to go. We don’t want to go home at the end of the day and turn on the TV. Sometimes, we want to go out and dance. Other than bar rooms, where do you go?”

An English accent breaks in at the mention of bars; it belongs to the curly headed woman across the table. “I’m not a drinker, and to tell you the truth, I don’t like people who do drink. And a bar is just like a pick-up place; somebody just wants to pick somebody up. At the Hilton, if you just wanted to have fun, you could. If you wanted to pick somebody up, you could do that. I made some amazing girlfriends there — just quality people.”

“When you first get divorced,” says Darlena, “it’s very difficult to meet single people, and especially women to women. If everybody [you know] is married, they don’t want you in their circle. But women know that girls have to have girlfriends. If you have a couple of girlfriends, you can do any thing, go anyplace.”

Arnold disagrees with the woman’s distinction about pick-up places. “Everywhere you go is a pick-up spot. You go to church — pick-up spot. You go to a funeral parlor, it’s a pick-up spot. You see somebody that you’re attracted to, you’re going to go for it. But where do you go, when you’re in a certain age bracket and you’re active, where you have an opportunity to pick and hope that they pick you? There is no place. So what happens? You end up being with younger women.”

No doubt there are some men who would, upon hearing that, cock their heads, give Arnold a quizzical look out of the tops of their eyes, and ask, “And the problem with younger women is...?” But he is serious. “Most of your young girls, they’re looking for security. They’re looking for a sugar daddy. It’s like, ‘What kind of car do you drive?’ That turns me off. My answer to that is, ‘You ask me what kind of car I drive, but you’re not interested in where I live. I don’t sleep in my car; I sleep in my house.’”

“People in our age bracket are more mature and secure already,” agrees the woman.

“I think they’re looking for companionship more than anything else,” continues Arnold. “We’re not meant to be alone. I have my guy friends, but the greatest joy and the greatest pleasure is to have a woman you can do things with. Sex is like, this is this, but when you go beyond that, you’ve got to have a friend. I think that’s what a lot of people don’t understand.”

Arnold loved the Del Mar Hilton parties. “Friday and Saturday night, it was the place to be. The music was good; you met a lot of people. It was the place; it jumped. It was your nightclub. It was people over 40 enjoying each other.” Older people “are getting more active in San Diego, but when the sun goes down, what do you do? The Hilton was a place you could go and meet people your own age. It was E Street, it was Johnny Love’s, it was all of the above.” And the crowd was precisely to his liking — older, professional, “people who have achieved their goals and are looking for somebody to be with.”

Apparently, Arnold is not alone in his preferences. “I’ve got one guy who’s been looking at a girl for a couple of years,” says Darlena. “She’s with another guy. The one guy has got a beautiful girlfriend, but she’s very young. He’s been eyeing this other girl, who has a bit more maturity — so they’ve got something to talk about. He finally did talk to her, and she said that the guy she’s with is going to be leaving soon, and when that happens, she’ll call him. I know all this is going on, and I know both couples, and I don’t say a word. Everybody tells me stories; I’m the mother confessor. They tell me, and they know it doesn’t go any place. But I want to know what’s going on, in case there’s something bad.”

Something bad can mean simple social discomfiture. “One guy who comes is a nice guy, but he’s wacko. I sort of call him my mascot. He doesn’t mean any harm, but he’s scared a couple of the women away. I’ve told the women, ‘If he’s bothering you, just tell him, “I don’t want to dance with you. I don’t want to talk to you.” ’I tell him, ‘You’ve got to give them 15 minutes! Don’t pounce on them!’ He says, ‘You’re like my sister. I listen to you.’ Somebody said, ‘He shouldn’t be here.’ I can’t tell him not to come. He has no place to go. He’s not a bad person; there’s going to be somebody for him.”

“That’s what’s happened — we’ve become this community. Some people come and say, ‘I was here five years ago, and it’s the same people.’ That’s not true. But there are certain men, we call them ‘rounders’ — they hang around. It’s like a Cheers bar; these are their friends. If 30 people out of 200 are the same, that’s not a whole lot. But thank goodness for those regulars.”

It can mean misleading propositions. “One Tuesday night, two girls came in wearing red dresses. You don’t see too many girls in red dresses — sometimes, a red top. I said, ‘Oh, two girls in red dresses — you’ll have fun tonight!’ Later on, some body came and told me they were prostitutes. I wish I would have known earlier, not that I would have kicked them out — though that’s not what I want and not the kind of party I run — but I would have watched who they were talking to. Finally, I did see they were talking to a fellow who’s been coming to my parties for years. I called him over and I said, ‘Hey, listen, this is the deal.’ He was a little pissed.”

And once, it meant something genuinely awful, though Darlena didn’t know it until it was too late. “This one girl, I had known her since the beginning. Her name was Nadine. She was a very sweet, very attractive lady, and she was looking for somebody to take care of her. She met somebody through the personals, and she knew that I knew him, because I had gone out with him. And he knew that I knew her, so they both called me up to find out about each other. They wound up getting married.”

“But remember what he had said in the paper?” chimes in another woman. “‘Retired doctor, loves to dance.’ They had really taken away his license.”

“They were married April 10. April 25, my girl friend calls me to say, ‘Nadine is dead. He strangled her!’"

The conversation settles in among the guests; it has the feel of familiar ground, though perhaps not traversed for some time.

“She probably said she was going to leave him, because she found out he was a liar. He was supposed to buy tickets for Paris for her birthday, and he never did. She never should have married him.”

“She wasn’t going to marry him. Remember, they broke up and he went after her? He almost stalked her.”

“She was there a lot of times by herself. She came by herself, and he showed up.”

“She was still living there because she couldn’t move out. She didn’t have any money.”

“How did she get in that predicament?”

“A lot of women fall for physicians, because they want the status.” Arnold concurs. “The security that comes with money.”

“That’s the lesson of Nadine. Never sell your soul.”

“She loved to dance; she was there a lot.”

“She was evidently a gold-digger.”

“He had a summer home, and he helped her out a lot. She just kind of used him.”

“When your life becomes like that, some thing is going to happen, and it’s not going to be positive.”

“She had lost it. She didn’t have anything, so she was grabbing for what ever. I don’t know what she did for work.”

“I guess I can’t relate, because I’ve always been self-sufficient. I really think that when you’re destitute, you’re going to do what you can to survive. I’m not a good judge, because I’ve never been in that predicament, but I think looks can sometimes run against a woman, because if she uses them to capture some one, a lot of bad comes...”

“If she were going to school or doing something creative because she knew she didn’t have those looks, she probably wouldn’t be dead right now.”

“I don’t think she was relying on her looks. It was that she was looking out for anybody that could satisfy her.”

“Why couldn’t she have gotten a job?”

“But she loved to dance...”

Darlena does not take part in the talk of Nadine. Bu t the subject of financial independence does come up later, when she shows me what was to have been her wedding hat. The hat itself is creamy straw, but it is almost entirely obscured by a bunched pile of white netting that drapes down into a veil. A cluster of purple flowers on the brim provides color. The hat is fabulous.

“I was on a mission to get married, and I found somebody to get married to. I wanted to get married in this hat. I met somebody, and a month later I got engaged. And a few months later, I said, ‘No, it’s not right.’ I think I wanted to just be married because I’m getting older, and you know, when you get older, it’s real tough. I said, ‘I’ve got to get married.’ And I changed my mind. I have a beautiful house, I live by myself, I can do whatever I want. When you need somebody financially, that makes a difference. You want to be married. But I don’t need that. I decided I want a boyfriend on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday night, and that’s it, you can go home. I don’t have to get married anymore.”

I mention Nadine. “Absolutely. Being needy puts you at somebody’s mercy. I mean, what’s the big deal? You go out and you get a job. See, women don’t have egos most of the time — I can go out and get a job at 7-Eleven or Sav-On and work a double shift. I come from the Midwest; I have a different work ethic. You just work. I’m not going to expect somebody to take care of me. My girls are independent. They take care of themselves, and they know it. Neither one of them is married.”

Darlena says her children — two girls and a boy — are almost as old as she is. She smiles when she says this. Her son lives in Las Vegas; one daughter is in L.A., and another is here in San Diego. “I always told my kids, ‘Don’t worry about me or your father. You go live life and do whatever you want. Don’t feel you have to stay close to us.’ ” They heeded her advice and headed west. She sees her son, who recently went through a divorce, several times a year. She sees her San Diego daughter least of all. “She never asks for money, but I’ll see her when she gets into trouble with a boyfriend. She’s just been laid off, but she always seems to find some kind of job.” The L.A. daughter is making a go of it in the music business.

Of course, not everybody in Darlena’s world feels that same love for the independent life. She estimates that some 200 attendees have gotten married, some of them at her parties. One fellow got married, was divorced after seven years, and is now back in the mix on Tuesday nights.

The wedding hat hangs in her bathroom now. “I used to have it in my bedroom, in my love and relationship corner.” The corner is part of the feng shui bagwa, “which is an eight-sided figure that gives you specific corners for specific fields.” Generally, the far left corner from the door is for prosperity. Darlena keeps a fountain there — “You keep the water running so the money will keep coming in.” But because her bed room ceiling slopes upward, peaking above the prosperity corner, “the energy could run up. So I hung some Chinese firecrackers from the ceiling to dispel some of the chi, the energy.” There are other feng shui elements to her home, but right now, she says, “All I care about is my prosperity corner.”

Brunch rolls on, and the air gets a little blue as one woman, a nurse, tells of her adventures working in a Vegas emergency room. She also talks about buying a whip in a thrift store for a lion-tamer Halloween costume, and the various men who consequently expressed an interest in her plans for the evening. Story follows story until Darlena calls out that it’s time for dessert, and we all head back to the kitchen counter. Again, a parade of choices: mud pie, peach pie, strawberry pie, cantaloupe, honey dew, watermelon, and four flavors of ice cream — coffee, vanilla Swiss almond, dulce de leche, and butter pecan, all from Häagen Dazs. “We’ll be dragging each other out of here,” comments the nurse. “We’ll have Häagen-Dazs on the back of our buns.”

Darlena looks happy; she looks as if she is enjoying the company. She doesn’t have too many visitors during the week — but then, she’s not often home to receive them. “I go out just about every night,” she tells me. “When I’m out, I meet people that have never been to my party, so I tell them about it. Or I meet people who haven’t been to my party in a long time, and I’m a reminder for them. I mean, I have to do that. I’m probably out six nights a week — two for the parties. During the day, I go to lunch. I’m out constantly. Wherever I go, I find people I know. I know thousands of people in town now.” She favors Patrick’s II in the Gaslamp for its music, and since she took up West Coast swing dancing, she is looking for dance clubs other than her own. “Sometimes it’s at the Elks’ Club once a month, and then I understand the Belly Up has dancing on Sundays from 3:00 to 6:00. Sometimes on Friday nights, the Mar Dels are there.” Though she owns a television, she does not watch it. “I have no time for it! I’ve got books I’d like to read. You live in California, you could be out all the time! Who has time to watch TV?”