'Good Evening, Friends…'

    The TV cliche file is overwhelming again so let's drain off another batch.

    Irene McCroskey of Burbank shrinks every time she hears the line, which she contends is in every British film, "Darling! It must have been awful for you!"

    Nancy Cooney squirms when she hears the villain who is on the lam tell his girlfriend, "I thought I told you not to call me here!"  Also when the innocent victim is caught leaning over a body with a gun in his hand and says, "Are you going to call the police?"

    Al Sisto cringes when he hears a cowboy say, "Now you listen and listen good!"  And more so when the other cowboy retorts, "Now you listen hard!"

    Melissa Caron winces at the sequence in which the girl learns that her father, husband, brother or boyfriend has been shot and insists on riding with the posse.  That sheriff says, "I'm sorry, it's too dangerous for a woman."  The next scene shows her leading the posse.

    Fred Beck quivers when el hero, surrounded by gunslingers who say he has to slay the sheriff or else, says, "I guess I don't have much choice."

    The scene that jars Betty Buras is the one in which the pathological killer is clutching her two children with one hand and brandishing a machete with the other, meanwhile telling her savagely what will happen if she doesn't obey his instructions.  To which she wails.  "What kind of an animal are you?"

    Of course, take away these cliches and most whodunits, sagebrush or motel variety, would fall apart, like a termite-infested house.  They're all that holds them together.

    A MIDDLE-AGED couple stood on Hill St. near 6th, nervously watching the traffic go by, afraid to step into the mid-block pedestrian zone.  Finally the man said, "Come on.  California law says they have to stop for pedestrians."  The woman, glancing at an oncoming car, held back and said, "Yes, but that one has a Wisconsin license."

    LESS THAN an hour after the census taker visited the home of a man named Bill in the Beverly-La Cienega Blvd. area, a young woman appeared at the front door and said she was making a market survey. She asked where he shopped, where he kept his money — in a bank or savings and loan company — and his approximate income.  Bill said, "My close friends don't know some of the stuff you're asking, why should I tell you?"  He asked if she had some identification.  She didn't and became vague about her employer.

    It may have been coincidence and she may have been okay but Bill, who is still baffled, didn't cooperate.

    THIS IS TO allay any notion that the three cars which stalled yesterday on the three-quarter-mile stretch from the Pilgrimage Playhouse bridge to Barham Blvd. had any seasonal significance.

    Don McDonald, who patrols Vaporlock Ridge, as he calls this roadway, for this corner, says yesterday's sampling merely represented Little Vaporlock and any conclusions which might be drawn thereof would be premature.  When Big Vaporlock hits the line-up will resemble the traffic tie-up in Brookside Park after the Rose Bowl game and it will then definitely be summer.

    AT RANDOM — The way Leon Luk hears it, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union is going around asking friends if they know what ACLU means — in the hope someone will answer, "Not a clu" . . . Overheard in City Hall, one man to another, commenting on the abrasive act of a public official, "He's standing pat on his stupidity!" . . . Message on a  postal card signed Pistol Pete:  "I've been hoping that just once the papers would refer to the recently deceased bookie Jack Whalen without the parenthetical phrase 'The Enforcer' but I guess I'm just a dreamer.  Do you have to do it?"  Pete, the fellows on the copy desk always speak well of the dead.