DRAMA LESSONS: Starting college once meant wardrobe...

DRAMA LESSONS: Starting college once meant wardrobe shopping. It’s different now. About 100 incoming Cal State Northridge freshmen gathered with their parents to watch older students stage instructional skits on homosexuality, race relations, date rape, sexual harassment and other highlights of a college education in the ‘90s (B3) . . . Complained a mother of the gay skit: “It is almost like it’s pushed onto them.”

THE END, MY FRIEND: For youngsters from big farms and ranches where animals are numbers in a register, livestock auctions may be routine. But for kids who raise an animal or two in the city, parting means sending a pal to the sausage works . . . Around the Valley (B5) visits the Valley Fair as a boy and his goat say goodby.

SMOKING DANGER: Sneaking a smoke got four children held at a school for troubled boys in far more trouble than they could have expected. They accidentally set off the biggest brush fire of the year in Lancaster, authorities said, a 1,500-acre conflagration (above) that consumed two houses and several barns and vehicles (B1) . . . The boys, ages 8 to 10, face arson charges.

GOLDEN AGE: Other javelin throwers may be ready to hang up their spears and turn to coaching at 30, but not Donna Mayhew of Glendale. Mayhew, 33, one of the world’s best women javelin throwers for years, appears to be on the verge of even greater accomplishments (C8). . . . She plans to compete through the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

CRUEL OR KIND?: Just how much work can an unlicensed employee perform around a veterinary clinic? That’s one of the issues in the case against an Agoura Hills man whom authorities accuse of posing as a vet and stringing out the life of a dying cat. But he says the 42 charges against him and his father, a genuine Chatsworth vet, are bogus (B1) . . . His father protests he’s so soft-hearted he can barely put down incurably sick pets.