WAS THIS ANY WAY TO START A DECADE?

You didn’t hear an awful lot of Sinatra crooning “It Was a Very Good Year” in the past 12 months. For good reason. Oh, sure, things weren’t too bad at the start, all that warm and fuzzy feeling for a new decade (despite the whiners who kept complaining that 1990 was really the last year of the old decade. Go figure!) The Dow Jones average, Orange County’s most widely watched measurement of happiness, hit 3,000. People bought the new Mercedes convertible. Donald L. Bren spent $9 million for a Harbor Island tear-down. Alas. President Bush changed the writing on his lips. Saddam Hussein remembered that Kuwait was really a province of Iraq. The Dow traveled south faster than the new Mercedes. The Rams played as poorly as the Angels. Milli Vanilli appeared in “concert” in Irvine. What kind of a year was it? Consider these items assembled by...

AND WITHIN MONTHS, MARGARET THATCHER LOSES HER JOB. JUST A COINCIDENCE?

It was the most hyped event in British history since the war with Argentina.

In Orange County, it started, of course, at a mall. For weeks they flew the Union Jack over South Coast Plaza in formations denser than any since the Redcoats marched on Valley Forge. All sorts of events got pulled into the summer’s Britfest: concerts, dance shows, restaurant meals. The Brits sent someone with a title, but it wasn’t anyone we had ever seen in People Magazine--not the jug-eared princeor his leggy missus. Stores across the mall had tie-ins, featuring British this and British that. Everywhere you went you tripped over people named Felicity and Nigel. We didn’t buy it. Despite favorable reviews, the D’Oyly Carte troupe was unable to sell out its performances of “The Mikado” and “Pirates of Penzance.” Instead, the color red went from the British flag to the Performing Arts Center’s bottom line: a $14,000 loss.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T TAKE THE CELL NEXT TO THE OFFICE AND NEVER, EVER, GO IN THE BASEMENT.

Lots of folks couldn’t even get arrested in Orange County. The unlucky few found that they could steal a car at night and still be home by breakfast. The reason? Jail overcrowding. With county supervisors dithering over where to put a new jail, only the baddest of the bad managed to find housing at the Gates Motel. Sheriff Brad reported turning loose burglars, prostitutes, druggies and drunk drivers because the “no vacancy” sign was flying from the jail. All those folks were released, of course, only after promising that they would show up in court on the appointed day.

‘WHAT IS DANCING BUT MAKING LOVE SET TO MUSIC’ Cole Porter 1893-1964.

Whatever happened to the classic dances? The Stroll; the Twist;the Frug; the Watusi; and perhaps the greatest of them all, the Locomotion. This time it was the Lambada. Also known as “The Forbidden Dance.” Forbidden to anyone in full possession of his or her senses, anyway. Done correctly, it was the sort of dance that would force a lot of shotgun weddings. Hollywood made not one, but two movies about it. Alas, the Lambada craze lasted about as long as the minute waltz. In fact, it disappeared right around the time they started teaching the dance at the Arthur Murray studio in El Toro.

CAN SOCIALIZED MEDICINE BE FAR BEHIND?

To start the decade, Orange County taxed itself. Can the big earthquake be far behind? On the same day the county passed a tax increase, a Democrat won office in the county. No, it’s true. No, really. Hey, we don’t make this stuff up. His name is Tom Umberg, and he ran on a classic Democratic platform: I’m tougher on crime than the other guy; there are more Democrats than Republicans in the Legislature and I’m a Democrat. I’m tougher on crime than the other guy. Did I mention that I used to be a prosecutor, putting bad guys in jail? Also, I’m tougher on crime than the other guy. Opponents put out posters urging voters to stop “Tom Umberg and Tom Hayden.”

AND SPEAKING OF HAYDEN . . .

Gil Ferguson, the former Marine, former Irvine Co. official, current assemblyman and opponent of Tom Hayden since the first day he heard his name, got a small measure of solace. Ferguson for years has been trying to get his colleagues to throw Hayden out of the Assembly for treason, stemming from Hayden’s trips to North Vietnam during the war. (No, the OTHER war; the last war; the Vietnam War). Over the years even the Republicans have turned away from Ferguson and held their noses. This year, Ferguson’s feud turns a milestone: His time in the Assembly has outlasted Hayden’s marriage to Jane Fonda.

PARIS, SCHMARIS. THE GUY DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO WORK WITH BEIGE.

Sure, sure. He designed the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, he designed the “dolphin brow” for the newly launched cruise ship Crown Princess. But Italian architect Renzo Piano won’t design the Newport Harbor Art Museum. He was hired in 1987 as architect of the Corona del Mar building, and the trustees spent about $1 million developing his design. Last July, he was fired, replaced by the firm that built the Procter & Gamble building in Cincinnati. But in the end, the trustees blew a wonderful opportunity: You put a bar somewhere in the museum and then you can call it . . . (drum roll, please) . . . The PIANO BAR!

OH, DID WE SAY DEMOCRATS? MUST HAVE BEEN ZIEGLER MISSPEAKING HIMSELF AGAIN. WE MEANT TO SAY TORIES, MUGWUMPS AND BULLMOOSERS.

Days before the Richard M. Nixon Library opened in Yorba Linda last July, the library director said researchers hoping to use the archive would be screened for suitability. He also said that while Republican groups could meet there, Democratic groups couldn’t. The pronouncements stirred a “firestorm” of controversy, to borrow a Watergate term, and the edicts were soon rescinded.

OH, WELL, THEY JUST WOULD HAVE CALLED IT THE CALIFORNIA BLADES ANYWAY

Let’s see now, the professional baseball team that plays in Anaheim calls itself the California Angels. And the professional football team that plays in Anaheim calls itself the Los Angeles Rams. Any chance of a team playing in Anaheim actually admitting it? In a bid for such quasi-fame, Anaheim city fathers broke ground on the county’s first mega-million-dollar arena. The original plans would have opened the arena in time for the 1992 hockey season. But a change to save money pushed opening day to 1993, one year too late for an expansion hockey team.

OUR NAME’S O.C., WE’RE TOUGH ON CRIME, BUT THE JAIL’S ALL BOOKED, COME BACK ANOTHER TIME.

2 Live Crew played the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim, graced only months earlier by Tom Jones, and stirred up just about as much controversy. After being carted off to jail in Florida for singing selections from their album “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” and having sellers of that album taken to the pokey in Florida, it turned out the crew couldn’t even get arrested in Orange County.

AND ALL THIS HAPPENS JUST ABOUT THE TIME MARGARET THATCHER LOSES HER JOB. THIS IS GETTING EERIE.

They did find room behind bars for Charles H. Keating Jr., though, even if it was in Los Angeles. The former chairman of the company that owned Lincoln Savings & Loan--headquartered right in Orange County’s own Irvine--was charged with securities fraud. Keating eventually got out on bail, and there was a silver lining in his gloomy year: The Mitchell Brothers theater in Santa Ana closed. Located across the street from a Lincoln branch, the theater that featured XXX-rated flicks was a target of Keating for years, as he poured thousands of dollars into a legal battle to force it out of business. He lost, and when the theater finally closed its doors, it was because its lease had expired.

WHERE’S WARD CLEAVER NOW THAT WE NEED HIM.

“Twin Peaks” blazed across the television screens. The quirky, sometimes coherent show from David Lynch spawned fan clubs, a Fullerton-based newsletter, oceans of blather in magazines and a surge in sales of videotape. Lots of us wondered who killed Laura Palmer. Our attention span being what it is, by the fall most of us didn’t care who the murderer turned out to be, unless maybe it was Saddam Hussein. And they shifted the show to Saturday nights, when lots of us are out. Those who stayed home to watch remembered the annoying little thing about television programs seen in “real time” instead of on tape with a fast-forward remote control device: TV shows have commercials. Lots of commercials. Sometimes there were so many commercials that when the show resumed you couldn’t remember who Laura Palmer was, let alone who might have done her in.

OH WELL, AT LEAST THE ‘BABY ON BOARD’ THING SEEMS TO HAVE SUBSIDED

Talk about Milli Vanilli and Phony Baloney! There you are, rolling down the Santa Ana freeway at speeds up to 15 m.p.h., and you spot the guy behind you talking on his car phone. Where does he find the time--or the hands--you wonder. After all, he’s shaving too, and sipping coffee, and combing his hair, and reading the paper. But there he is, phone to ear, antenna sticking up from the rear window. Except . . . Turns out that phony car phones are becoming an increasingly popular item. Why pay hundreds of dollars a month for static and conversations that end in the middle as you go under a bridge, when for a couple of bucks you can pick up a toy phone receiver and phony antenna and impress the get-out out of friends, neighbors or just plain strangers? Also creeping up in popularity: window stickers warning of your car’s sophisticated security system, when you don’t even have one. Not yet seen in Orange County but sure to come if many more New Yorkers move in, window signs proudly proclaiming: No Radio in Car.