Movable Feast

The journey from the sands of Morocco to the sands of Malibu took fewer than a thousand and one nights. In fact, in this Arabian fantasy, a 747 provided the transportation, and a charming restaurateur named Michel Ohayon played the role of genie. Spend a few minutes with Ohayon, the optimistic owner of Koutoubia, a West Los Angeles restaurant, and he'll have you believing that anything is possible.

ANNE WILLAN is shopping at the Santa Monica Farmers' Market when out of the blue an attractive young woman comes up to introduce herself. "I met you at a Les Dames [d'Escoffier] dinner," she says earnestly. "I just wanted to say how glad I am that you joined our market."

Before going on stage, six nights a week, dressed in drag as Joan Rivers, Frank Marino painstakingly applies his own makeup for an hour in his star dressing room. As producer of his own show, Marino keeps a chart on the dressing room wall he checks nightly giving the audience counts. "It is color coded red or green to show if I went up on that day from last week. " Translating the chart, he says, "We currently average about 400 tickets a night. To be honest I would like to get that up to 600. " Marino arrived in Las Vegas as an unknown in 1984 to star as the Joan Rivers impersonator in the drag show "La Cage" at the Riviera.

MANY insist that L.A.'s finest taco is the carnitas taco dispensed by Roast to Go, a stall in downtown's Grand Central Public Market. Succulent pork (the meat is fried, then shredded to make carnitas), crisp lettuce, sliced green onions and a dab of incendiary red-chile salsa are piled generously into two soft steamed corn tortillas ($1.40). There are beef and chicken tacos as well. Roast to Go, Grand Central Public Market, stall C7-8, 317 S. Broadway, Los Angeles.

"Do your homework" is advice that I often give fellow travelers. But last spring, on a drive through southern Colorado's San Juan Mountains, I didn't follow my own advice. As a result, I sped right past the turnoff to Clear Creek Falls, later learning that they are among Colorado's most spectacular. Such missed opportunities are bound to happen if you don't put thoughtful planning into a summer drive of America's byways. Yes, planning can be tedious.

The first impression of life in China's cities is that they are crowded, polluted, noisy and chaotic. Masses of busy people bustle about making a living at a frenetic pace in the face of formidable obstacles. China's population doubled to 1 billion between 1950 and 1985. As agricultural mechanization proceeded and fewer hands were required in the fields, the cities became magnets for China's hundreds of millions of peasants.

As public transport, the No. 4 bus bears little relation to A Streetcar Named Desire. More like A Bus Named Banal. That's on the surface. Underneath, there's a network of niceties. No. 4 is the bus that bisects Los Angeles as neatly as a demographer's ruler. There are no classes in America, or so the Founding Fathers decreed, but there are differences, mainly economic. By and large, the No. 4 line, rumbling east to west and vice versa, divides L.A.'

USC football fans were in peak party form last Saturday as evidenced by the First Annual Trojan Tailgate Competition sponsored by the school's Department of Athletics. Although both the Coliseum's Exposition Park and the USC Campus are always filled to overflowing with pregame picnics on most fall Saturdays, the festivities were much enhanced last weekend by the contest's beach party theme.

"Aaarrrggghh ... " was the last sound I heard before Hans, my skiing companion and guide, slid over a lip of drifted powder and disappeared from view. My first concern at this development was the loss of Hans' rucksack, which contained a loaf of brown bread, a slab of smoked ham, two blocks of Swiss cheese and a bottle of Gewurztraminer. This was to be our lunch.