ART: STUDENTS : Dream School : Eight Ventura County students find that there’s a summer school resembling the movie “Fame.”

Their time has not quite run out, but already you can hear Danica Rinaldi, Pablo Weiss and company slipping into reminiscence about this dream summer of 1990: school, six days a week, in Oakland.

“It really surprised me,” said Rinaldi, a 17-year-old who usually does her studying at Simi Valley High School. “Everybody understands you. It’s not like regular high school, where people say, ‘Art--is that the only thing you have to talk about?’ It’s going to be really sad when we leave.”

She spoke from Mills College, where the final days of the California State Summer School for the Arts were drawing near. So did Pablo Weiss, an 18-year-old June grad from Chaparral High School in Ojai.

“The only assignment we had was to make a cup,” he said wistfully of his ceramics class. “No boundaries, no limits.”

The four-year-old program, which offers hands-on instruction from professionals in the visual arts, music, dance, theater and writing, is staged by the state and supported by student fees and contributions.

The faculty includes such working professionals as actors Charles Haid and Beau Bridges and contemporary California artist Gilbert Lujan, who teach under a program that is less formal and has longer hours than are found in most public schools. Students pay up to $1,000 each, but many this year were subsidized by $110,000 from the private, nonprofit California State Summer School for the Arts Foundation.

This year, said Director William Cleveland, the school attracted 1,000 applications and, after interviews and evaluations of work samples, accepted 395 students.

Eight of those came from Ventura County. Beginning July 14, they heard lectures and hammered together self-portraits. They jammed around a piano just like the kids in the movie “Fame.” And they pondered the ins and outs of censorship, just like those grown-ups in Congress and at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Melanie Okamura, 17, of Rio Mesa High School in Camarillo, came to study visual arts.

“In my sculpture class, they gave us three hours to construct a sculpture, a self-portrait,” she said. “I had to stumble through all the castaway materials in the studio and put together something that said something about myself. So we were scrambling and hammering and burning ourselves with glue guns.

“I found the seat of an old chair, with a screen on it, and I nailed it to a triangle piece so it had a tilt to it. And to the chair piece, I nailed these green berries. And I painted on the screen. And behind the screen I put an oleander flower. On one side of it I wrote Ignore This and on the other I wrote Pay Attention .”

The piece, she said, is about “the way I feel masked by ideals that society has kind of brainwashed everyone about.”

April Shafer, 14, from Redwood Junior High School in Thousand Oaks, came to study dance--and her fellow students.

“The creative writers, like, are very different from the visual arts people,” she said.

“The creative writers are more into school,” she said. “The visual artists are more withdrawn and they have more of an artistic temperament. It’s a good experience, so we’ll know what other people are like.”

Shafer, not quite five feet tall, said she started taking dance when she was 4, as therapy for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

“It really helped my joints, and after that I just got serious with it. When I decided I really wanted to take my dance seriously was when I was about 8 or 9,” she said.

“I think I’m the second youngest one here, but age isn’t that important. I have a couple friends from dance, one from theater and one who’s a singer and we just sort of hang out at this place called The Grill. It’s where a lot of the kids hang out. There’s a piano there, and some of the kids play, and some are singing, and some of the dancers make up dances.”

Theo Rubinstein, 16, of Thousand Oaks High School came to study theater.

“I had to start with a clean slate, trust my teachers, and let them lead me. It was hard to trust them at first. But it was one of the best acting classes I’ve ever taken,” Rubinstein said.

He studied stage combat, physical comedy, storytelling and movement, and came away, he said, with a new view of himself.

“I’ve found out a lot of weaknesses I have,” he said. “I speak too fast, I have what they call happy feet--I have trouble finding strength in being still, as they say. I have good comic timing. I think I’m extremely good at improvisations. And I found out that I’m a lot better at serious dramatic scenes than I thought I was.”

And, as seems inevitable in the arts these days, there was politics. Pablo Weiss and classmate Mike Schiller, a 17-year-old ceramist from Davis, set up letter-collecting boxes so students could write government officials to oppose artistic censorship in the distribution of National Endowment for the Arts grants.

But summer school ends soon--the last day of the program is Saturday--and all that may soon fade. The artists of summer last week were laying plans for the coming school year and speculating about colleges and jobs. Several were thinking of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Pablo Weiss was talking about working in an Oregon firefighting camp to make some money.

And Theo Rubinstein, aspiring actor, had career considerations in mind. He’ll be getting an agent in the next few months, he said--as soon as the orthodontist takes his braces off.