A Look Back : Lively Year in the Arts : 1991: Lancaster gets a new concert hall, Grove School of Music is still afloat and a Hollywood cash calf grows up. : GREENER PASTURES

“Norman the Cow, you’ve just co-starred in a major motion picture with Billy Crystal. What are you going to do now?”

A little more than a year ago, Norman was just another pretty face in the herd at a Tulare auction. That’s when he was purchased by Jack Lilley, who furnishes livestock to the movies and television. Young Norman soon found himself at a cattle call for the calf’s role in Crystal’s “City Slickers.”

“We don’t know from calves,” Crystal told The Times last January. “And then you meet them and they’re kind of ugly. Big pink eyes and that face. They’re, well, cows. But off in the corner was this little fawnlike creature and he’s, he’s different. Like Bambi, very different and very vulnerable.”

Norman won the role. During the movie--which portrays three New York yuppies on a cattle drive vacation--Crystal helps birth the calf. A paternal attachment forms and the actor--the human one--eventually plunges into a river to save the calf.

“City Slickers” became one of last summer’s biggest hits and Norman became a hot property. Offers flooded in from state fairs and dude ranches across the country. Carol Sonheim, who trained the calf and eventually bought him, shipped her star pupil off to--where else?--Walt Disney World.

Norman spent almost three months on display at the Magic Kingdom, returning to his Canyon Country home in November. He’s been resting over the holidays, waiting for his next role. Trained to come on command and climb hay bales, he possesses all the tools of a classic bovine thespian.

Of course, being that he’s grown to about 600 pounds, he’ll have to make the often difficult transition from child actor to adult celebrity.