TRYING HARDER: Thousand Oaks may be No....

TRYING HARDER: Thousand Oaks may be No. 2 on the list of safe large cities (B1), but the city’s top cop, Cmdr. Kathy Kemp, isn’t resting on her laurels. She’s alarmed by a frightening drug making inroads with young people. . . . “It’s getting so you can buy methamphetamines cheaper than you can buy a six-pack of beer,” Kemp says. “And if we don’t get a handle on it, we’re liable to see our statistics go right through the roof in 1995.”

RELIEF NURSE: Before Ventura nurse Elisabeth Anderson flew off for three weeks of volunteer work along the flooded Mississippi, she got lots of training here in Ventura County. First the wildfires, then the Northridge earthquake, the January floods and the La Conchita mudslide. . . . She worked them all for the American Red Cross. . . . Anderson, 55, doesn’t spend all her volunteer time as a nurse. She makes sandwiches, fills out forms and comforts victims. “The worst off were the people in the Ventura River,” she says. “They were wet and bedraggled.”

PICKERS PICKET: As thousands turned out Sunday to celebrate Oxnard’s favorite crop, the workers who actually pick the fruit staged a weekend march (B1). “As the strawberry festival highlights the growers and the product, we highlight the worker,” says Mario Brito of the United Farm Workers. . . . The union members argue that the new Republican majority in Congress and local agricultural leaders are stripping benefits from laborers.

MEN IN TIGHTS: Supervisor Frank Schillo didn’t hoist any ballerinas on his shoulders. Thousand Oaks City Atty. Mark Sellers didn’t do a pirouette. But they were among half a dozen community leaders who served as “gentleman of the royal court” in the Conejo Civic Ballet Company’s performance of “Sleeping Beauty” on Sunday. . . . The question on the tip of every tongue: Did they wear tights? “That was their stipulation, that they would do it if they didn’t have to wear tights,” says company director Gloria Connolly.