"I'm a virgin!" shrieks Randy in a paroxysm of glee while blazing tracks along the San Francisco waterfront. He's referring to the fact that this is his first Friday Night Skate, and he's obviously enjoying himself. "This is great!" he whoops. "Did you catch those two Brazilian twins up there? Wow!" His pace quickens.

Make way, Marina Safeway, Randy and the Friday Night Skate are coming through, supplanting you as the supermarket of choice for meeting people. On any given outing you'll have a chance to bump into and grind with an eclectic group averaging over 600 strong --30% of whom are first-timers -- as you tour the streets of San Francisco by night.

Meet Satomu Shimomura, Internet Security Guard, who jets up from San Diego every Friday night just to experience the rush of the night skate. Allow me to introduce you to Mme. Perney, a French siren who'll tell you wistfully that she comes to the night skate for "the atmosphere." Shake hands with Bernard Rony, former skate shop owner, always game to race you to the top of the hill. Make the acquaintance of Lioudmila Golynskaia, computer programmer, whose smiling aura is ambrosia to the eyes. Come into association with a totally stoked Phil Dephterels, who swears that "the night skate makes me feel young every Friday night, like going to the high school dance."

The Friday Night Skate is no ordinary meeting place, because it has none of the scary vibes of a club, where everybody who comes up to you inevitably is after something. Not so at the night skate. The Friday Night Skate is simply the largest mobile party in the country. David Miles, the Cal Ripken Jr. of the night skate, has been around long enough to know what it's all about. "When you have skates on, you let people come a lot closer to you than you normally would," says Miles.

For many the Friday Night Skate fulfills a need. It means family, a feeling of belonging to something. "For a lot of people, without the Friday Night Skate there's something missing out of their lives," says D, as Miles is commonly known. "This skate fills that void."

With so much talk about positive people going somewhere in their lives, I feel starved for some good old fashioned gossip. "Has this skate turned into a singles scene?" I ask D, obviously fishing for trouble. He flashes me his Machiavellian grin and chortles. "You know, you can easily meet your boyfriend, girlfriend, or any type of situation you're looking for." He points out the two skaters who recently conjugated their Friday Night Skate romance last April 26. A good 600 people saw them swap vows just as the clock bells in the Ferry building struck 8 o'clock.

For some, however, the Friday Night Skate has grown too large and impersonal. Kelly McCown, a fervent organizer of social and competitive events for women skaters, says she only skates it "once a year for good measure, because I always end up losing my friends and wonder why I'm doing it." Perhaps McCown can hook up with Gary Agan, who solves the problem of getting lost by wearing glow in the dark antennae "so my friends and I can find each other."

The founders of the Friday Night Skate, the Midnight Rollers, have yet another way of keeping the Friday night skate intimate - bringing up the rear. The Midnight Rollers consist of about 40-50 diehards from the old days who form the nucleus of a new, hip, straggler subculture. The stragglers purposefully lag behind the main group at the start of the skate in order to recapture some of the night skate's original flavor. At a time when there are rumblings of the night skate being "overcrowded" or "too touristy," the stragglers have managed to preserve the cozy dynamic of skating in a small group.

"You've got to be on the end at the beginning" states Dorota Trczynska categorically. Dorota embodies the inimitable straggler style,unpredictable, improvisatory, irreverent. Wrapped in an oversized fleece jacket, she hangs at the top of The Steps with old-timer Johnny Mack, who points out for the record that Dorota is what's known as a fair-weather-Friday-night-skater. "This isn't some contest," she retorts. "It's a big party!"

The Friday night skate is full of feisty, international flavor. Take Carlos Paz for instance. Carlos is the Salsa King on skates, lively and free, flowing quickly quickly and slowly, waltzing his partner Amy around in huge, happy loops that give you a buzz just watching. Or what about Tom Pai? Tom's a cookie cognoscente, who mostly makes miraculous recoveries from near falls, but won't hesitate sacrifice his body if it means keeping the cookie he's eating from crumbling.

Like Tom Pai, the Friday Night Skate is a tough cookie too, withstanding the ravages of fog and the vagaries of police directed action. The skate owes its existence to the capriciousness of Mother Nature. Shaken out of commission by the Loma Prieta earthquake of '89, the Embarcadero freeway beckoned skaters, who clustered like aftershocks every Friday night thereafter. The condemned complex of on-ramps, off-ramps and double decker sections was heaven on skates, (unless of course the police got aggressive). Ultimately, when the wrecking balls and bulldozers moved in, heaven just took to the street.

Some people think heaven is clear sailing on a smooth, open stretch of road. Others think heaven is a scantily clad ship on wheels slicing through the crisp evening air. At Aquatic Park I caught Dennis Cummings' gaze turn from one well-built ship to another. One ship, a stately Clipper, had its anchor thrown in the Bay, while the other was freely floating temptation itself, a real steamer. I tried to pin Dennis down in a moment of weakness by asking him why he was so religious about doing the Friday Night Skate.

"It's the mother of all skates," he said in a voice that didn't waver. " I do it for the training, the sprints . . . ." His voice trailed off as he squinted hard towards the horizon. Perhaps his teenage brain was confused whether to stay focused on the piece of heaven that was receding from view, or whether to resolve on the next one coming in. My tape recorder was running, and it seemed as if he was about to sing, so I popped the question:

"Do you think this Friday Night Skate is a meet-market Dennis?" Eyes fixed on the horizon, Cummings answered in his usual whimsical manner. "Ah, no, I'm a vegetarian, so I can't comment on that" I chuckled, then zeroed in for the kill. "I'm talking meet, Dennis, 'm' double 'e,' 't'. " Cummings, the Perpetual Teenager, giggled and shook so hard he could barely get the words out. "Yes, it is," he managed, "Yes it is."


The 5 W's of the Friday Night Skate
What : The Friday Night Skate, a roaming tour that's San Francisco's hottest new attraction
Who : David Miles and the Midnight Rollers (a core group of about 50 regulars)
Phone: (415) 752-1967
Web Page: HTTP://www.cora.org
email: CABLADER AT IX.NetCom. com
Where : meets at the foot of the Ferry Building, follows a mostly flat course -- thanks to two tunnels en route -- around San Francisco. Highlights include Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf, Fort Mason, The Marina, Palace of Fine Arts, Union Street, Broadway Tunnel, Stockton Tunnel, Union Square, South of Market club scene
When : 8 p.m., but later is hip too.
Why : I asked as many people as possible, and the two most popular answers I got were "fun" and "meeting people"