Sunny Dispositions : They Secretly Say Rain, Rain, Stay Away

A woman with blond hair and pink shorts spent one afternoon this week smoking long, thin cigarettes on the Santa Monica sand with her mother. They, along with countless other Southern Californians out there, are harboring a nasty secret: They like the drought.

They enjoy 80-degree days in February and the money they’ve saved on roof repairs. They can let their lawns turn brown and look like people with a social conscience. In Los Angeles, a dirty car is a badge of honor.

“Look at this,” the woman said, turning her face to the sun. “Every day people drive around in their convertibles. We’re all in a good mood. There are no bad traffic accidents. No homes are sliding off any mountains. There are a lot of up sides to this.”

It isn’t that these people would turn down a good rainstorm. But let’s face it, there isn’t much any of them can do about the weather, so why not bask in it?

Tennis players secretly pray it won’t rain so they can get in a couple of sets on Saturday. A homeowner in Woodland Hills says he needs a $12,000 roof job, but what’s the hurry? It isn’t even spring yet. Meanwhile, scads of people are hitting the beaches and planning outdoor weddings without giving the weather a second thought.

At the Griffith Park parking lot the other day, there were plenty of license plate holders that said, “I’d Rather Be Golfing.” Not a single one said, “I’d Rather Be Schlepping Through a Thunderstorm.”

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” former NBA star Walt Hazzard said with a look of guilty pleasure as he whacked one across the driving range. “My rain gutters need repair, but I’m in no rush. When I stepped off the airplane in 1960 and saw these palm trees, I said this was paradise. And it is.”

In Southern California, working up a case of guilt about sunshine is about as easy as finding a sale on Rodeo Drive. This is a town, after all, that chortles when people from Chicago call 50 degrees “warm.”

“We don’t want a drought, but we don’t want it to rain either,” said the woman in the pink shorts, who thought it best to remain anonymous because she was playing hooky from work. “We want to keep stealing the water from Colorado.”

Now in its fifth year, the drought is making life in some places tough. Towns like Goleta have been forced to import water at outrageous prices. And Los Angeles, which is about to embark on rationing for the first time in 14 years, is thinking about helping to build a $2-billion desalination plant off the coast of Tijuana.

To be sure, even hard-core sun worshipers seem extremely concerned about the drought and are taking shorter showers, teaching the kids to turn off the faucet when they brush their teeth and practically never watering the lawn.

Still . . .

“How can you not enjoy this? There’s no one in the whole United States who wouldn’t enjoy a day like this,” Stephen Placial rejoiced after hitting a bucket of balls at the Griffith Park Golf Course, the sky a glimmering blue above him.