THA-A-A-A-T'S ALL, FOLKS! : A former mayor seeks the White House. A home paint job had officials seeing red. A jail where it was harder to break in than out. A giant, walk-through colon? It could only happen here.

By STEVE EMMONS

Dec. 31, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Where are we going in the ‘90s?

If it wasn’t clear at first, it’s obvious now: We’re going ‘round the bend.

How else can you explain Orange County in 1991, when so many events seemed to include a Looney Tunes soundtrack.

Oh, come now, you remember . . .

Well, we couldn’t get Wayne Newton, and Liberace’s dead

What does this tell you about ‘90s culture in Orange County?

The Performing Arts Center, celebrating its fifth anniversary with a glittery, gala fund-raiser, booked as its headliner Roger Miller, singer of such hits as “Chug-a-Lug” and “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd.”

Ten days later he was working the Great Temecula Tractor Race.

Hey, they’ll come around. That actor did OK in the White House, didn’t he?

Gene Autry, Orange County’s favorite singin’ cowboy, admits he spends way more time on his baseball team than on his music. In 1991, it finally paid off; he was honored by the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

But Autry’s Angels crashed and burned again, going from first to last in three months. Yet another manager (Doug Rader) was executed, and yet another fans’ favorite (Wally Joyner) jumped ship.

If there was a bright spot for the Angels, it was the Rams. Soon after the dismal baseball season concluded, the Rams deflected fans’ anger upon themselves with loss after ghastly loss.

It got so bad that Rams owner Georgia Frontiere took a night job singing in Chapman University’s production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” She did better than her players; she fumbled only once.

Larry Agran, the defrocked mayor of Irvine, is running for president

He complains that people are ignoring him.

You want a suite? When the armed robbers convention’s in town? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Orange County’s most exclusive hotel for the ‘90s?

The Ritz-Carlton? No. The Four Seasons? No.

Try checking in at the Orange County Jail. Regardless of money or influence, you don’t get in unless you measure up.

Driving drunk, stealing a car, even running off with the cash box won’t assure you a bunk. And even if a judge gets you in, a crack dealer can bump you out on the street again.

What’s the solution? Easy--build more jail space. Except that after 13 years of waffling, the Board of Supervisors waffled again and un-adopted its Gypsum Canyon jail site. There were too many upset voters nearby--that is to say, there were more than none.

Perhaps somewhere near the Horsehead Nebula would be OK. Has anyone considered just renting rooms at the Marriott?

Larry Agran wanted to join the presidential candidates TV debate

They turned him down.

A case of sour gapes

The Leer and Drool Award this year goes to the Townsquare Owners Assn., which showed that condo associations can be a bit too vigilant.

This one publicly posted a notice that the doorman had spied Santa Ana condo resident Kim Garrett “parking in circular driveway kissing and doing bad things for over 1 hour.” (He watched for more than an hour? They must have been reeeeeealy bad.)

Anyway, turns out the association got the wrong person--and by plenty. Garrett is a 51-year-old grandmother and devout Tennessee Baptist. Beg your pardon, said the association. Like hell, said Garrett. She called a lawyer, who said things like “defamation,” “invasion of privacy” and “unspecified compensation,” and presto, the association had its checkbook out and was asking how much.

Garrett won’t say how much money she got. And the condo association, admitting no wrong, says it will continue to enforce its “parking regulations.”

OK, but don’t even ask about wind chimes!

Among the taste police in Orange County, the toughest are apparently in Laguna Beach. Forget blacks and browns, these guys are careful about which whites move into the neighborhood. They kept a young couple out of their new house because the stucco was “shell white” instead of the washed-out beige specified in the house plans. But, hey, this is still America, so the couple defiantly painted their house a garish red, white and blue. Let them try to make those colors run, pilgrim. The whole dopey squabble was settled in the true American way: compromise. The city let them paint the house “cottage white,” which is a little beige-er than “shell white,” so everybody’s a winner. Or loser. Or something.

Larry Agran invited David Duke to debate

Duke didn’t respond.

And don’t miss our collection of canine art, but be careful not to step in it

This was the year we learned that the graffiti spray-painted on our walls, sidewalks, curbs, fences, windows, signs, pillars, poles, bridges, stairways, doors, benches, cars, buses, levees, lavatories, trash cans and whatever are--ready?--”aerosol art.”

“One of the most vibrant and interesting art forms in Southern California,” wrote one critic.

UC Irvine went along with a straight face and invited a “graffiti artist” to help decorate stage sets. Rancho Santiago College went along, too, inviting the artist to lecture. “If you call it art, it’s art,” he declared.

The Huntington Beach City Council was relieved. For years it considered its graffiti-covered seawall a blight, but by official vote, the council declared it an art venue.

Other problems should be so easy.

Oh, all right, you can go, but don’t come back till you wash your hands

We’re ‘90s kind of people who really know our bodies, you know? Nourished by New Wave, slimmed by StairMasters, sculpted by surgeons, there’s nothing about our bodies we don’t know and manipulate--or won’t as soon as it’s out in paperback.

And we want our kids to know, too. That’s why we took them to the Children’s Museum at La Habra for the “Body Wonder-ful” exhibit, a real hands-on look at nature’s miracle machine featuring . . . a crawl-through colon?

Yes, the kids went in one end of the 3-foot-wide “colon” and came out the other, having learned firsthand what food becomes after all the good stuff is extracted. But at what cost to their self-esteem?

Does this joke remind you of a U.S. senator from a large coastal state bordered by Mexico and Oregon who was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for taking money from Charles H. Keating Jr. and then trying to get the S&L; cops off Keating’s back and who told the ethics committee that his conscience was clear because he’d done nothing they hadn’t done or wouldn’t do?

A Chicago alderman, running for reelection, had been accused of corruption, so he called a press conference to refute the charge. “My opponent says I’m a crook,” the alderman said. “Well, I say, so is he!”

That old nuisance, water

In the middle of the worst drought ever, right after the state cut water shipments here, a late-winter storm left billions of gallons of water behind Prado Dam just upstream from Orange County.

That’s good, right?

Depends.

Prado is a federal dam. Drought is not its business; flood control is its business. And if you’re in the flood control business, you want to get rid of water, not save it.

So dam keepers dumped 6.5 billion gallons of rainwater into the Santa Ana River, sending it to the ocean so fast that Orange County couldn’t save it.

As a gesture toward sanity, officials agreed to be a little slower at the spigot in future.

Ben Franklin updated: ‘A penny saved is a penny burned’

You know hard times are getting harder when the S&L; pirates are running short of money. As recently as last year, developer Bill Walters, whose bad loans helped bring down Silverado Savings, testified he was broke, yet he was somehow able to live in posh homes in Newport Beach, Indian Wells and Laguna Beach. But this year even Charles Keating, the S&L; scandal’s poster boy, was having trouble scraping together a mere $300,000 for bail. Crocodile tears, said federal prosecutors, who suggested there’s plenty of Keating cash in mattresses overseas. Keating did make bail just in time for Christmas, but he left his son behind in the slammer. Couldn’t raise the extra $150,000 apparently.

Sit up, roll over, shake hands. . . . Now speak!

Assemblyman John Lewis of Orange, heir to a dog-food fortune, was campaigning for state Senate when he called the welfare system a “Gravy Train.” (Get it? And to make matters worse, “Gravy Train” is a competitor’s brand.)

Lewis encored with the neatest trick of the year. When his top contributors gave all they legally could to his ’91 campaign fund, he formed a 199 2 campaign fund, raked in more money, then spent it on his ’91 campaign. (Is that legal? Well, Lewis is in the Senate, not jail. But then, there’s more room in the Senate.)