Garden City - The rambling discourses of radio monologist Jean Shepherd failed yesterday to survive the move from New York to Garden City. Shepherd, who delights in sharing interminable reminiscences, arrived her to deliver a talk at a geranium and bridge dessert luncheon. But before he was on long enough for a commercial interruption, he cut it short because of competition from the audience of more than 400 women. After barely 20 minutes of trying to talk over the hubbub, Shepherd called it quits and remarked, "Wasn't this a strange crew? I couldn't get 'em to listen for anything." Before leaving the geranium decorated Georgian room of the Garden City Hotel, where the card party was held, Shepherd lectured the organizers of the benefit on how to set up their next function. "Of course they wouldn't listen," he told the women, members of the Women's Club of the Cathedral of the Incarnation. "There was too much going on. They were playing cards. The waiters were moving around. The bar was open. I should have been asked to speak first. If Oliver had been up there playing Hamlet, they wouldn't have listened." Something Different A spokesperson for the women's club said Shepherd had been invited because the group wanted to provide something different in the way of entertainment. The day started off well enough for WOR's master of the stream-of-consciousness monologue. All was quiet as Shepherd mounted the low dais and began to speak, but the silence lasted a scant five minutes. Then something began to go wrong and the noise mounted, beginning at the back of the large room. One woman said afterward, "I couldn't see him, he wasn't up high enough." Maybe it was just the wrong kind of audience for his offbeat humor. Or maybe it was his opening remarks: "I could hardly believe my ears when I heard the name of this luncheon," he said. "Combining geranium and bridge was a stroke og genuine genius." And, "This is the first town I've been in that really fits its name. Now, I've also been in Flushing. But I guess you know about that. . ." Shepherd lost his audience shortly after going into a rambling explanation of where he got the idea for his novel, the recently published "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash." "I had just come home from the Army." he said. "And I wat sitting at the kitchen table. I could smell the meatloaf cooking and the cabbage. And my mother was hanging over the sink. She was wearing her chenille bathrobe with the petrified egg on the lapel. And her hair was up in curlers. All through my childhood, my mother's hair was up in curlers. She used to tell me, "You never can tell, we might do something." "Anyway, I looked at my mother living in this world of radios on top of refrigerators. Radios in white plastic cases, the kind that are cracked when you buy them. And I looked at my father, who spent all of his life thinking in terms of used cars. He'd look at a new Chevrolet in a window and he saw it two years hence, with a dent in the fender and a dirty word written on the side. And I thought to myself that people like this are never put between the covers of a novel." Only a few women laughed. So, trying another tack, he called for questions from the floor. Given such an opportunity, another audience wouldn't let him off the dais. This one asked less than a dozen questions. Obviously miffed, Shepherd managed a thank you and left the dais. He wasn't being paid for the performance, he said later. He was there to promote his book, which was on sale in the lobby. So, in spite of everything, he obediently moved to the back of the room to autograph copies for the guests.