Summer Splash : Is It Hot, or Is It Just Us? : Anyone who ever said “I’m bored” in the middle of an L.A. summer must have missed our special Splash issue. Ladies and gentlemen, start your planning.

It can’t be summertime in Southern California just yet. The wiper blades got a brief, aberrant workout just last week. They’re still skiing up at Mammoth. Some of the local hillsides still have improbable patches of brushy winter green. No sir, can’t be.

‘Tis; deal with it. For just as the Christmas season gets moved up a week every year, so goes summer, its starting point no longer demarcated by the solstice or even the close of the school year so much as the whims of the major movie studios. This year, someone, somewhere determined for the rest of America that “Crimson Tide” was the first official “summer movie”--despite its springish May 12 opening date. And so, here we are, more than a week already into the designated dog days with not even the rumor of third-degree sunburn to show for it yet.

Even if you need more time to work up to actual dancing in the streets, it’s not a moment too soon to start planning--hence, our annual Summer Splash guide to seasonal fun ‘n’ art.

Even procrastinators are never altogether without choices; this year, thanks to lingering ill will over the baseball strike, you can probably count on last-minute ticket transitions at any ballpark in the country. But ducats for most other amusements are best secured sooner, so gather the loved ones and pull up some chairs: It’s high time for itinerary-making.

*

In Los Angeles, one amphitheater is nearly as synonymous with summer as the rockets’ red glare. Besides fireworks, the Hollywood Bowl has considerable variety up its sleeve and up its hill: There’s pop, in the form of Tom Petty and Amy Grant; jazz, at the Playboy Festival and the intriguing “Young Lions” concert with Wynton Marsalis and Joshua Redman; and, fronting the house band, such classical gases as fiddlin’ Itzhak Perlman, fightin’ Kathleen Battle and, finally, Yo-Yo Ma paired with John Williams.

For a rocker’s well-rounded tour of outdoor “sheds,” you might also pencil in the Stone Roses at the John Anson Ford, the Beastie Boys at the Olympic Velodrome, Mary Chapin Carpenter at the Greek and the (w)hole Lollapalooza gang at Irvine Meadows.

Music is also a staple of some of the festivals popping up around this time, from the currently running Renaissance Pleasure Faire to more traditional fair fare such as the Orange County and San Fernando Valley confabs packed with name acts.

Is the family in the mood to seek entertainment as a reward at the end of a good, old-fashioned road trip? In that case, it’s a tough choice between motoring toward the classical siren song of the annual Ojai Music Festival, the loud lure of Pearl Jam at the Del Mar Fairgrounds or the cuddly curiosity of Kato Kaelin’s comic stint at Bally’s in Las Vegas.

Then again, all that pavement between you and your destination could be boiling hot come June. And, as Raymond Carver once put it, there’s so much water, so close to home.

Specifically, there’s Six Flags’ splashy new Hurricane Harbor theme park, opening in June right alongside Magic Mountain. This watery world is not to be confused with “Waterworld,” the extremely major motion picture, which is spawning its own “sea war” stunt show at Universal Studios.

Even the legitimate theater is getting wet, or close to it. The Euripides tragedy “The Trojan Women” will be staged this summer at . . . the CBS Studio Center lagoon. (Helen, Shamu. Shamu, Helen.)

But all this splashing about is washing off our sunscreen. Let’s move indoors, shall we?

*

Hope you’re not allergic to musicals. Those of us of a certain age may remember the famously amended graffiti: “Jesus Saves Souls From Hello Dolly Revivals.” Well, not this summer, he doesn’t: Carol Channing is baa -aack. So are “Man of La Mancha,” “The Music Man,” “I Do, I Do,” “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” “Cats,” et al. If Southern California truly is the land of the endless summer, shouldn’t it make sense that we’re the summer-stock capital of the world too?

And yet reputable drama does find a place in the sun, too. The post-Broadway return of the epic “Angels in America” at the Doolittle is perhaps most anticipated. And, after the Trojans take leave of their lagoon, there’s more classicism to be found down south, in the form of the Old Globe’s “Henry IV,” with no less towering a Falstaff than John Goodman.

Serious music lovers with no inclination to dodge stray wine bottles and aircraft fumes at the Bowl do have indoor alternatives: “Porgy and Bess” graces both the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

In the art world, the L.A. County Museum has Kandinsky, MOCA has Oldenburg and the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum has the exhibitory equivalent of a heat stroke.

At least, the Hammer’s next exhibition, titled “Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957,” promises the late summer’s safest way to experience a delirium without passing out. For more realist heat, head to the same museum a month or two sooner for the already-running “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.”

Speaking of representations of masculinity--basic Anglo variety--there’s always the vast, mindless majority of summer movies, needless to add. But we trust we’ve turned up some suitable live-action alternatives to the action-hero glut. Or, you can just resign yourself to the beach with a good read and wait for the first feminizing flush of fall. Which, at the contemporary calendar’s accelerated rate, should arrive in early August or so.*