Buzz:  The City Observed

Between Trains

DOING DOWNTOWN WITH FAIRUZA BALK By ARIEL SWARTLEY

THE EVENING TRAIN FOR Newport Beach is boarding, and commuters striding through the deco splendor of Union Station's waiting room do not give a second glance to the young woman in the skimpy skirt receiving a stylist's ministrations in one of the oak-and-leather seats. Not so the pair of teenage boys who break stride so suddenly their sneakers smoke. "Hey, The Waterboy," one hisses through his braces. He's referring to comedian Adam Sandier's geekmakes-the-tearn flick in which the young woman, Fairuza Balk, had the mixed blessing of playing Sandier's girlfriend. Balk, who is currently starring in Personal Velocity, the Sundancewinning film aboutwomen grabbing the wheel of their lives, throws the pair a conspiratorial grin-"love those pass-and-tackle jokes," it beams.

The 28-year-old actress turns back to the stylist's sponge. "I've been telling people I'm going to leave film," she mutters, her voice still husky from a recent flu. "They don't believe me." She pulls ENCOUNTER her face into the

wide-eyed glare that's become her trademark since 1996, when, as a teenage witch in The Craft, she used it to lob a randy high school football jock out an upper-story window. Suddenly she seems to have gained six inches and 20 pounds.

An hour later Balk, back to her normally delicate proportions, hesitates at the station entrance, zipping her jean jacket against the fog. Olvera Street, her next destination, lies directly across Alameda. "Should we take the car?" she asks. After seven years living in Venice Beach, she has moved into a downtown loft and is only now discovering Los Angeles's oldest streets. Most of the stalls selling Mexican blankets and sugar skulls have put up their shutters for the night, but Balk strolls the cobbles transfixed. "I've never seen anything historic in this city," she says, pausing to read the plaque above a moldering stone trough.

Her own history is more elusive. "I was born in Point Reyeseither there or Cloverdale, I'm not sure, but up north," she says. "I was born on someone's bed. My mom is a very firm believer in those things." She means certain stances popular in 1974, like not registering newborns with the government and avoiding antibiotics like the

plague. Imparted among Olvera Street's painted booths and crooked doorways, the additional fact that she was conceived at a Renaissance Faire where her mother was a belly dancer seems peculiarly apt.

She "sort of spontaneously" got into the movie business after the family moved to Vancouver, landing the lead in Disney's 1985 Return to Oz. The film, in which Dorothy, repatriated from Emerald City, suffers post-traumatic stress disorder, was made in England, so the family moved again. Balk interrupts her account to read aloud from an Aztec astrology card. "I'm a lizard?" She sounds less than thrilled. "What does it say about me? Deliberately introverted;'- I am. I'm insanely obsessed

with privacy. Dogmatic to the extreme?" She returns the card to its rack, uncharacteristically subdued. "I'm a Gemini," she insists after a moment.

The center of the market is livelier. Balk stops in a leather shop, smitten with the holsters carved with flowers. "How much is it to take a photo of me on the horse?" she asks the owner, catching sight of the full-size plush stallion at the rear of the store. "Ten dollars?" She digs the cash out of her purse and hitches up her skirt. Once astride, Balk turns to look at the wall-sized photo behind her. A mounted and bandanna-ed Henry Fonda returns her gaze. "I want this in our house," she gushes-as a new loft dweller, she's learning to think big. The proprietor hands her a cowboy hat and drapes a Mexican flag below her knee. "Look into the camera," he advises Balk unnecessarily She grins and brandishes the gun.

Two minutes later the process is complete. "Beautiful," the proprietor says, but he doesn't mean the print. Balk glances down at her pallid, blurry image, her mouth briefly registering disappointment, then meets his eyes. "Gracias, senor she smiles.

In Personal Velocity Balk plays Paula, a runaway struggling to articulate her own ambitions. The same cannot be said of the actress, who is voluble about the threepart solution she's learning to use in her oil painting and the drummer she envisions for her nascent rock band, G13. "I want a cross between Bonham and Moon," she muses. As members of Led Zeppelin and the Who, respectively, both were tossing drumsticks into the crowd the year she was born. Like Paula, though, who's left stranded at films end, Balk finds herself temporar- between trains. The band, in which she sings lead and cowrites the songs withher roommate and guitarist, Steve Gilmore, has just completed a demo. Meanwhile, she hasn't found a movie role that's tempted her in more than a year.

Balk has reached the darkened plaza at the top of Lovera Street. "Oh, this is so old," she says, taking in the giant gray-trunked trees, the empty bandstand. Her group, she says, mixed its demo "the organic way," using a vintage sound board from the Zeppelin era

and old-school analog recording techniques. The result, she hopes, is a sound that's live and raw. A

from the tourist lights th sleepers curled on the sidew homeless are a feature of the hood that Balk's familiar with near Box City and has thought o oing volunteer work. Still, she flares, "you know what makes me sick? People who give to charities and let everyone know."

In the hour since she left, a crowd has formed at Union Station. Balk approaches it curiously as she finishes her news: Already more than one major label is interested in G13. There could be, happy thought, a bidding war. "People know," she hazards, "if you're for real or not." Near the station entrance a police radio squawks; a guard explains that a suspicious suitcase has been found, the t building cleared. Balk turns back to her car. The waiting passengers, she observes, look tired. Some trains are better to be between than others.