PLAY IT AGAIN: Rancho Santiago Chancellor Vivian...

PLAY IT AGAIN: Rancho Santiago Chancellor Vivian Blevins’ play about struggling Latino women, “Voces” (“Voices” in Spanish), has been getting national attention since its Orange County debut earlier this year. . . . It’s already played before an education group in Washington. Next week, Blevins, who directs, and her actresses--three students and three faculty members--perform it before the Hispanic Assn. of Colleges and Universities in New York. Blevins calls it a lesson in “accommodating in the classroom the different cultures of our students.”

A MUST BUY? Maybe it’s not bestseller material, but the first book to come out on the Orange County bankruptcy has a catchy title: “Big Bets Gone Bad.” It’s written by UC Irvine science professor Philippe Jorion. It includes lots of heavy talk about derivatives, margin calls and inverse floaters. . . . But it also includes a preceding blurb by economics Nobel laureate Merton Miller of the University of Chicago, who calls it: “A must read for taxpayers all over the country.”

SACRED PLATE: Baseball author Mike Blake of Brea has his own theories for the demise of the California Angels--now on the edge of elimination from the playoffs (C1). . . . Blake devotes a chapter in his latest book, “Bad Hops and Lucky Bounces,” to what he and others call the “Curse of the Angels.” Anaheim Stadium, he writes, was once the site of a burial ground of an 18th-Century Native American tribe. . . . “The burial ground was right about where home plate is,” says Blake, 45. “The spirits don’t want anyone playing there.”

GRADE-A TEETH: If some youngsters can’t make it to the dentist, maybe the dentists can go to them. . . . A new dental program kicks off today at Las Lomas Elementary School in La Habra, with a dental clinic right on the campus, sponsored by PacifiCare, with X-rays, teeth cleaning and fluoride treatments available. Says school Principal Mary Jo Anderson: “A toothache is very painful. And it keeps you from learning.”