Homefront : Good Fences Make. . .

Patsy Barggern has flouted the law, spent tens of thousands on lawyers and nearly wound up on jail-all for a fence.

A tall fence. A fence her next-door neighbor hated because it blacked his view of slme shrubs. A fence she love because it blacked his view of her.

Barggern says her neighbor, 79-year-old George Boucher, often watched her as she puttered around her Long Beach back yard, an accusation the retired doctor flatly denied. “She keeps saying I’m sexually attracted to her,” he says. “It’s impossible to know the truth, but in any case, Barggern built an 8-foot-tall fence three years ago to ensure her privacy. That’s 18 inches higher than city ordinances allow, just enough to se tin motion the wheels of justice-and folly.

Boucher complained to the city, which ordered her to lower the fence. She refused, the city prosecuted and she was convicted in September. Even though she faced six months in jail, she refused to lop off the offending foot and a half-until the very day she was to have been sentenced. the judged dismissed the charges, and she was free.

Free to come up with a new plan: she’s strung a 10-foot high canvas tarp from her back-yard trees.

Before the fence flap, Barggern and Boucher were on friendly terms. But in three years of squabbling, the two have developed a nutural enmity, repeatedly accusing one another of indiscriminate acts, including poisoning each other’s shrubs. They’ve even obtained temporary restraining orders against each other.

It should be no surprise, then, that they’re feuding over the tarp. He says it’s an eyesore in their Bixby Knolls neighborhood, a tree-line encalve where half-million-dollar homes are nestled quietly around a private golf course. Barggren, an actress whose resume includes a sting on “General Hospital,” says the tarp is a must to keep Boucher from harassing her. “I’m not going to let this man stare at me, no matter what I have to do.”

City official say the tarp does not appear to violate any city codes. Whew.