Incorporation

The wealthy folks of Whispering Palms want in. The wealthier folks of Rancho Santa Fe want to keep them out. On Wednesday, the two sides took their local fight 500 miles north to the state capital, where Whispering Palms won, at least for now. Assemblyman Robert Frazee's bill to give the proposed city of Rancho Santa Fe veto power over any attempt by Whispering Palms to become part of their town was rejected by the Assembly.

Although cityhood will not be on the ballot anywhere in Orange County this year, civic leaders in Leisure World in Laguna Hills and Rancho Santa Margarita say their incorporation drives are on track for a March 1999 special election. Both communities hoped to get cityhood on the November ballot, but the morass of financial statistics needed for their incorporation applications slowed the process.

Hours away from a crucial deadline, supporters of cityhood for Calabasas on Monday urgently lobbied officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento to salvage their 2 1/2-year-old incorporation effort. Incorporation committee leaders asked members of a Los Angeles County agency that oversees the creation of new municipalities to preserve the basic boundaries of their tentatively approved 14-square-mile city when a final vote is taken Wednesday. They also urged Gov.

Calabasas incorporation leaders, anxious to protect the boundaries of their proposed 14-square-mile city, have challenged a developer's bid to cut out the community's 1,300-acre heart. Cityhood backers said Friday that the Irvine-based Baldwin Co. has no right to request removal of steep ranchland because the firm does not own it--and the actual landowner is not seeking exclusion.

The Gloria Newman company's 25th anniversary performance, Friday at Cal State Los Angeles, strikingly confirmed the qualities that have made Newman so important to the Southern California modern dance scene. Based in Orange County (and still curiously neglected by its cultural Establishment), Newman is a pioneer and a force for excellence.

Your editorial reaction (July 11), "Ignorance in High Places," to the recent address by Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III before the ABA House of Delegates is puzzling. The accusation that his remarks reveal his ignorance of "history as well as of law" undoubtedly will strike those who have read his prepared remarks as well as those who heard the speech as unfounded. It seems only fair to balance your account by recourse to the text. The attorney general prefaced the portion of his remarks touching upon the doctrine of incorporation.

Advocates of a move to incorporate a nearby suburb, seeing that the elderly residents of a retirement home were so disabled that they could not fill out their absentee ballots, took the ballots in hand and completed them. Another campaign worker hand-carried other absentee ballots to the county clerk's office. As it turned out, the absentee vote made the difference, swinging the 1983 election in favor of incorporating East Palo Alto, a working-class area 25 miles south of San Francisco.

Two women gradually shuck the gauze cocoons they have wrapped themselves up in, step forward boldly and begin sowing imaginary seed, as if enacting American Indian rituals. So ends performance artist Yen Lu Wong's two-act work "Shi-Me," which was given its premiere by Wong's company, TNR, Thursday at the Japan America Theatre.