Although the Irish are certainly not the predominant ethnic group in America, from the Yukon to the Pedernales Valley, wild celebrations of the birth of St. Patrick are planned.

The wearin' o' the green by partyers of every origin probably accounts for the largest display of that unpopular color from March to March every year. (Sorry, Celtic brothers, but green does the poorest in retail sales of just about everything except ferns.)

St. Paddy's Day has definitely become entrenched in American tradition and green derbies and shamrocks sprout in every merchant's window as soon as the leftover valentines are warehoused.

For some unaccountable reason, though no more unaccountable than the enthusiasm for the Irish saint on the East End of Long Island, Key West, Fla., where I spend the winter, is aflutter with green. I won't be surprised to see green eggs and ham on bar menus soon.

Key West was settled by British adventurers out of the Bahamas in 1822; Bonacker country much earlier - in the 1600s - by British settlers from Connecticut. I'm not quite sure how Montauk became so very Irish, unless the Gosmans did it all by themselves.

(If there are any newcomers around, the Gosmans are an Irish-American family who developed the now-giant Gosman's Dock restaurant and fishing station, and imported quite a few Irish workers to staff their business. You'll hear lots of Irish lilt out in Montauk.)

Corned beef and cabbage is the traditional dish of March 17, with as many disagreements on how to make it as there are Irish opinions on just about everything.

Although Ireland produces a significant amount of beef - one of the Republic's chief exports - this is a fairly modern development. No sensible Irish farmer would likely slaughter a good cow, with all its dairy potential, just for the short-lived pleasure of a few meals with fresh meat (even if you could eat meat in Lent, which you can't if you're a Catholic).

But brined and smoked meats have always been popular in Ireland - terrific hams, corned beef, and, of course, the famous Irish farmhouse bacon - and they could be kept without refrigeration.

When I passed a summer in Dublin years ago, writing and cooking, I noticed one oddity of Irish cookery - a slice of ham was always served with roast chicken. It was a delicious combination. Especially complementary to the two or three different kinds of potatoes served on the same plate!

Modern Irish restaurants, I'm assured, dish up plenty of fresh vegetables and salads, but I think I need to investigate this myself.

Irish Stew, My Way

I was not thrilled by traditional Irish stew, which is plain in the extreme: lamb, onions, potatoes, and water, with a bit of parsley for daring flavor. So, as is traditional in America, I've embellished the basic formula with my own tastes - garlic, for one thing, which I'm sure no authentic Irish stew ever flirted with.

Serves eight

2 Tbsp. vegetable oil (or duck fat)

3 lbs. lean, boned lamb, cut in 2-inch cubes

Flour mixed with salt and pepper

2 medium onions, chopped

3 large cloves garlic, minced

2 cups diced, peeled rutabagas

1 quart veal or chicken stock

4 medium carrots, cut in 2-inch lengths

6 Idaho or russet potatoes, peeled and quartered

Coarse salt and pepper to taste

3/4 cup fresh parsley leaves, minced

Pat the lamb fairly dry and put it by handfuls in a plastic bag containing the flour mixed with salt and pepper. Shake well to coat and put the piece in a colander. Continue until all lamb is floured and transferred to colander. Shake the colander to remove excess flour.

Heat the oil in a wide, heavy Dutch oven or similar pot until it is almost smoking. Add the lamb, a few pieces at a time, and brown it well. Return it to the colander set over a

bowl. In the same pot, saute the onions and garlic until limp, then add the rutabagas and stir well to coat with juices. Return meat to the pot and add the stock, stirring gently.

Cover and simmer until the lamb is almost tender, about one hour if cut from the leg, longer if cut from the shoulder. If the stock thickens too much, add a cup of boiling water - you want to wind up with a thickish stew, but not a thin, watery affair such as I've seen billed as "Irish Stew."

Add the carrots and simmer, covered, 10 minutes, then add the potatoes and simmer a further 20 minutes, covered. The potatoes should be just tender, not disintegrating. Season to taste with salt and freshly milled black pepper, stir in the parsley and serve in shallow soup plates.

This recipe should provide seconds for several people. If you fear needing more, you can always toss in a few more "praties."

Wheaten Scones

These go very well with the Irish stew, or with jam and butter for "yer tay." They're similar to Irish soda bread, for which there are recipes in every magazine with a cooking section, but quicker and easier to make.

If you want to double the recipe, either be certain you have two large cookie sheets or buy a roll of baking parchment, so you can lay out the second batch on that while the first batch is baking. Do not attempt to bake two batches in the same oven one above the other, as the scones need to be situated in the center for even baking.

Makes about 20 scones

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup unbleached white flour

1 Tbsp. wheat germ

3/4 tsp. coarse salt

3 tsp. baking powder

1/4 cup unsalted butter

3/4 cup buttermilk

Pinch of baking soda

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. and center the rack. Lightly grease the baking sheet. Sift the flours, baking powder, and salt together and stir in the wheat germ. Cut the butter in with two knives; then, with a fork, blend in the buttermilk with a pinch of soda.

Turn out onto a lightly floured counter or baking cloth and roll out lightly to about half an inch thick. Cut out rounds with a two-inch cutter or juice glass and place them, one inch apart, on the greased baking sheet. With sharp kitchen shears, clip

a shallow cross in the top of each scone.

Bake about 12 minutes. Serve hot. If making two batches, arrange the second one on baking parchment (ungreas ed)

and slide this onto the baking sheet after you have removed the first batch. If you need to reheat the scones, do it in a 300 F. oven, not a microwave, which makes them soggy.

Words About Corned Beef

The "flat cut" is leanest and a bit more costly than the thick end of the brisket (which is what corned beef is made of). The thick end is fattier and tastier. Neither one should be trimmed before it is simmered or it will be dry and stringy.

New Englanders prefer their corned beef "gray," which means cured only in salt with no nitrates. However, the nitrate does turn the beef an appetizing pink.

Whichever you choose, simmer the meat tender in barely trembling water, covered, before adding any cabbage or other vegetables you intend to eat (as opposed to "pot" vegetables, which are flavoring agents, to be discarded after cooking with the meat). Cooking big chunks of cabbage to a greasy gray is what gave this versatile vegetable a bad name in the first place.

You will undoubtedly see "low fat" or "low sodium" corned beef on the market, but I doubt very much that either is any good. Meat cannot be cured properly without an adequate amount of salt, so if you're on a salt-restricted diet, it's probably best to just braise a plain, not corned, brisket of beef, which you can salt as much or as little as you please.

As they say in Ireland, raise a jar, and slainte!

Was it only a generation ago that the family doctor was viewed, if not as God, certainly as the last word in health care? Not all physicians behaved imperiously, of course. Furthermore, until the last generation, physicians often were family doctors. They knew a patient's history, both physical and emotional. They may have been authoritarian but they also often had trusted relationships with those to whom they ministered. More recently, we see numerous physicians who encourage their patients to take active roles in choosing their own cures.

Now, with the introduction of managed health care, the pendulum has swung. More and more, patients must make decisions without the help of trusted medical advises and, in many cases, risk having questionable ones made for them by doctors who have one eye on the patient's well-being and the other on the policies of the health management organizations that are paying the bills.

The pronouncements of nonmedical personnel in far-off insurance company offices and of impersonal health panels stir the already boiling pot. At what age, for example, should mammograms begin? One study found that regular screening of women in their 40s would save one life out of 2,500. Its conclusion therefore was that mammograms for women of this age should be optional. Our view is that one life matters - even if it isn't yours.

"Gross recommendations for everyone is a very crude approach," a spokesman for the American Cancer Society has said. The statement has broad application.

Under managed care, however, the best course to take for the prevention of disease and the best form of treatment for each individual have given way to cost-benefit formulas. And in many cases the physician no longer knows each patient well and may no longer even be a reliable first resource.

Some of us, of course, are fortunate to have doctors who know us as individuals and and help us make informed decisions. The rest must learn to ask hard questions, weigh the answers, and go it alone

The question is, can we find the courage to learn enough, and in time, to act wisely on our own behalf? Up-to-date data on scientific studies, physician qualifications, and hospital performance is out there for the finding. Take the time to look.

The Hamptons International Film Festival has appointed Steven Gallagher to the position of program director.

Mr. Gallagher, who works as an editor at Filmmaker magazine, served as an assistant last year to Sam Maser, the program director who stepped down "for personal reasons," according to Ken Tabachnik, the festival's executive director. Mr. Gallagher is a filmmaker himself, having served as the executive producer on two films, "Predictions of Fire" and "Latin Boys Go to Hell."

Mr. Gallagher will work for the festival full time during the June through October production period and serve as a consultant for long-range planning over the rest of the year, Mr. Tabachnik said.

Year-Round Presence

The festival's focus on international films and American independents will "continue to be the mainstays of the festival," stressed Mr. Tabachnik.

Among the festival's goals is to have a greater year-round presence, he said. He would like to see fund-raising and planning take place throughout the year and more events outside of the festival week. The free outdoor screening in summer and the fall documentary series will continue.

Bunny and Jeff Dell are artists and collectors of art by young emerging East End artists. Between their house in East Hampton and apartment in New York City, they own and display about 200 works.

Mrs. Dell's activities are prodigious and her enthusiasms contagious. She handles the sheer multitude and multiplicity of family events that crop up simultaneously, with a readiness of spirit, no matter what.

On a recent Friday night, she and Mr. Dell, a painter as well an editor of TV commercials, held a family memorial for Mr. Dell's mother, who had died a month earlier. That morning, they had visited Damon, the younger of their two sons, who was hospitalized with an infection, to make sure everything was all right before making their usual weekend drive to East Hampton.

Some Poster

A few weeks earlier this reviewer had seen each and every one of the paintings, sculptures, objects, whatnots, and whatevers, acquired over the last 13 years, now in East Hampton. The collection lines the walls from one end of their two-story house in Northwest Woods to the other and it is at the core of their daily lifestyle as well as their environment.

The collection began in 1984 when the couple bought the house and confronted a large wall in the ample living room "made for a large painting," as Mrs. Dell puts it.

"At first I was looking for a large poster. I was not thinking of anything beyond it," she said, looking at a 52-inch-by-80-inch colorful 1984 Ab stract Expressionist painting by Josh Dayton hanging there.

Mrs. Dell described seeing the painting at the Bologna Landi Gallery. "I did a crazy thing, which I had never done before. Joe Landi let me take it home without my buying it right then and there. . . . I leaned it right here. I called my friends: 'What do you think of this?' It was $2,400. I never spent so much on anything in my life."

"So everybody had a vote. At the time no one liked it except my real estate broker and the son of a friend. Suddenly I'm thinking, what am I, crazy? I'm the art person, I'm the one who likes it. I have never regretted it for one second." It was their first purchase. They now have 10 good-sized Daytons. But the first one is still her favorite.

Before they knew they were collecting, the collection had begun. They always had bought works from their friends in a show of support, particularly from Mr. Dell's fellow students at the School of Visual Arts or from Mrs. Dell's fellow students at Hunter College, where she received a master's degree in art education in 1961.

Unusual Practice

"What you see is what we've got," Mrs. Dell said. They already have added space with a second floor master bedroom as well as an enlarged dining area, and are planning another wing to accommodate the works they know they will be compelled to buy.

A photograph of the original house when it was still a single story structure hangs in the master bedroom upstairs.

"Originally it was going to have two sliding glass doors but they went because we needed the wall space for our eight-foot Josh Dayton," Mrs. Dell said.

Mr. and Mrs. Dell have no idea whether the artists they buy will become recognized and their works go up in value, which is generally why most collectors buy comparatively inexpensive under-knowns.

Slater And Lichtenstein

"My first David Slater I got in Wolfie's restaurant in the Springs. In fact I got two. The next one I bought was from a show, 'Young Artists of the Hamptons,' at Guild Hall. The last one was from the Arlene Bujese Gallery. So from a restaurant to the museum and gallery he is certainly coming up in the world. But even if he doesn't, I love what he does and I am really committed to it."

"By accident we have some Roy Lich tenstein silkscreens that Jeff and I bought in the city. We were buying frames and we paid $40 for two framed prints from a woman who had a bunch of them. I was offered $13,000. It's that girl with a tear, bright red. I don't have any feeling for that. It's in the closet in New York. As I said, out here nothing is in the closet. And I don't know how to sell anything. It disturbs me to sell anything."

Personal Feeling

"We try not to be influenced if a critic likes something or doesn't. The important thing is how we feel about it as art and artist, a daily ongoing experience in terms of the painting, the sculpture, or whatever, and we have lots of whatevers," Mrs. Dell said.

"We are not looking for names, aside from the fact that we can't afford them. As for those artist big shots who live in the region and show at galleries like Gagosian, Pace, and Robert Miller, they don't really seem to show any interest in their not-yet-famous fellow artists, most of whom don't even show as yet in the city. . . ."

"You've got everything out here - from world-class fame to community charisma. It is probably the most unique group of artists in the world with a post World War II altogether American heritage."

Agelessness

"It's so exciting to buy original art, available and affordable . . . in this part of the world where the traditions have to do with being surrounded by it daily. . . ." Mrs. Dell is a vivid red-haired, ivory-skinned, green-eyed woman who seems somewhere in an ageless span, although we know by now she is hitting 60. Mr. Dell, a round-faced ruddy man, also somewhere in agelessness, with an eager expression ready for laughter, has a surface geniality that covers an underlying shyness. He is the perfect counterpart to his wife, quiet and clearly in awe of her bubbling articulate presence. He is working on a series of monotypes in which the letters "N" and "O" appear joined either as "ON" or "NO." Most recently, he has been working with computer generated prints.

He also is the founder and director of the Shootfirst Editorial, having begun as an animator after graduation from the School of Visual Arts.

Men Came First

"I have to admit that originally when we discovered that we were beginning to have what Elaine de Kooning called an "inadvertent collection," we thought we would focus on - I'm ashamed to admit it - 'Young Men of the Hamptons.' But I met Audrey Flack purely by chance, heard her speak at a conference in the city, and suddenly my consciousness was awakened," Mrs. Dell continued.

" 'What is the matter with me; what am I doing?' I said to myself. At the time, the nonprofit East Hampton Center for Contemporary Art was here and I called its director at the time, Jennifer Cross, and said I would like to buy the work of a woman. She showed me several paintings and I finally decided on the Hildy Maze you see here. At the same time I bought a print of Audrey Flack, who was showing her still life photographs at the Vered Gallery."

Branching Out

The number of the Dells' acquisitions has increased from six in 1985 to a peak of 35 in 1992. In 1996, they bought eight paintings. "Although we are primarily committed to the Hamptons, if I see something I love now, no matter where it is, and if I can afford to buy it, I buy it," Mrs. Dell said. She notes purchases in Boston and Miami, where she saw work by the outsider artist Purvis Young, whom she now collects.

Among the artwork at the Dells' East Hampton house is a metal plaque by the sculptor Bill King. It is inscribed: "To Bunny and Jeff Dell from the Art Community of East Hampton, June 6, 1995."

Other objects include Richard Minsky's hand-bound books and 40 pieces of Diane Mayo's ceramics. There are, in addition, Bill King's pair of wooden chairs called "Kiss Me" and "Me Too" and a mosaic coffee table made by Lee Krasner.

Discovering Lau

Mrs. Dell turns her attention to a painting by Rex Lau over the fireplace. "I was in the city at a gallery on 57th Street. The director for some reason asked me, 'Are you a collector?' Of course I fell in love with it.' I said to Jeff, 'You have to go look at it,' and then I called up Rex to make sure he did live out here. I invited him to lunch and we have been friends ever since. This was in 1985." The painting is an essentialized landscape, so minimalized it appears almost abstract.

"Remember Susan Tepper who funded the nonprofit gallery the East Hampton Center for Contemporary Art and tragically died so young? We bought her portraits, oils which she turned out by the dozen. She was wonderful and we still enjoy her work. She was so excited because it was one of the few times anybody bought her work."

Talk And Laughter

Mr. Dell and Mrs. Dell met as camp counselors in 1958 in Putnam Valley. They married a year later. All their children have tried painting, and their daughter, Felisa, paints flowers. Both father and daughter exhibit at Arlene Bujese.

The Dells also have a collection of old functional handmade pottery, from England and California, purchased from small antique shops here.

"I love them," Mrs. Dell said. "I use them when I entertain." The Dells are party givers. "The two things we like to do with our friends, besides talk art, is to laugh with them and to eat with them."

It must have seemed like an inspiration from on high. Otherwise, how to account for it? Picture the long-suffering members of East Hampton Village's traffic-calming committee, brows furrowed in contemplation of yet another summer of boiling-mad drivers hopelessly orbiting the Reuterhan lot in seach of parking spaces.

Suddenly a light bulb brightens. Two arms! Mechanical barriers, one at the lot's Main Street entrance and the other on Newtown Lane, spitting out time-stamped tickets as cars approach. An ingenious way to enforce the two-hour parking limit - relatively inexpensive, logical, easily implemented! No more messy chalk on tires!

Tomorrow, in fact, barely a week after Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. first embraced the arms - "a major step, and apropos of America's most beautiful village" - the Village Board will decide whether to advertise to buy the new equipment. Since the board has deemed a public hearing unnecessary, its 11 a.m. meeting at the Emergency Services Building on Cedar Street offers residents their only chance to comment.

The East Hampton Chamber of Commerce, for one, is thoroughly dismayed by the prospect. Its members envision traffic backed up the length of Main and Newtown while drivers fumble for tickets, and fear a mass exodus of frustrated shoppers to parts west. Power failures, vandalism - almost anything could clot the arms' flow and make the village's central parking lot inaccessible.

The Chamber is right to be worried. Even should it work to perfection, a barrier like the ones proposed - albeit with the best of intentions - would be just that: another hurdle in the daily race, a new pain in the neck to have to cope with, one more reason, maybe, to think about moving to Nova Scotia.

Like gnats, it's the small things that really get under your skin. There is still time, tomorrow, to make that clear to the Village Board. What was it that the Prince of Denmark said? Take arms against a sea of troubles, and, by opposing, end them.

A spring concert on Sunday by the 80-member Choral Society of the Hamptons will feature the music of Maurice Durufl‚ and Johannes Brahms.

One of the day's choices will be Durufl‚'s Requiem. Considered the finest and most popular work of the 20th-century French organist and composer, the piece uses Gregorian melodies and harmonies. The Brahms Motet (Op.74) will be sung a cappella.

Christopher Schaldenbrand, who recently performed the Requiem at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, will be baritone soloist. Mary Ann Hart, a music professor at Vassar College and the Mannes School of Music who has performed with a number of city symphonies, will serve as mezzo-soprano. David Gifford, an accompanist for the New York Choral Society, will play the organ.

The Choral Society of the Hamptons, which has reached its 50th birthday this year, performs three concerts a year. Its musical director is John Daly Goodwin, who also directs the New York Choral Society and the Westchester Concert Singers. The concert will start at 4 p.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church. Tickets will be available at the church door on Sunday.

Dress is "festive" for the Parrish Art Museum's annual Spring Fling dinner dance, to be held from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. Saturday in Southampton at the museum.

Cocktails and a buffet dinner catered by Thyme and Again will be served. A group called Time and Time Again (the caterer's cousins?) will provide music for dancing, and there will be a 50-50 raffle drawing.

Tickets, which cost $35 apiece, can be reserved by calling the Parrish Art Museum.

Also at the Parrish, Robert Heilbroner, an eminent economist and the author of several books, will give a lecture, "Thinking About the Future," at 3 p.m. on Sunday. He will focus on how the way we ponder the future has changed since World War II.

Mr. Heilbroner was an adviser to the Parrish and Southampton High School students as they created the current Parrish exhibit, "Dark Images, Bright Prospects: The Survival of the Figure After World War II."

The lecture is free for museum members. Nonmembers will be charged a fee.

Talk about your shaggy dog story. Once upon a time the Donaldsons of Water Mill took a sheepdog into their fold. It was already 6 years old and named Jose when they brought it home from the Animal Rescue Fund's shelter in East Hampton.

Seven years passed, during which time the animal ran after the family cat, relished trips by car and walks by the ocean, and otherwise proved its mettle and devotion. When Jose died last month, Peter Donaldson wrote a letter to The Star to publicly thank ARF for "the best dog we ever owned."

Two weeks later, another Star reader responded. "That dog used to be my husband's and mine," Annette MacNiven of East Hampton wrote. Explaining how her family had come by the dog and why they had to give it up, she went on to say, "You cannot imagine the feeling we had . . . to find out that Jose had a good life with a family that loved him."

Mr. Donaldson wrote again last week to say how glad he had been to learn about the first half of the sheepdog's life. Since his first letter, he let on, his family had adopted another dog - Buddy, this time - "to allow another dog a chance at Jose's life."

Bet you know where it came from.

This season CTC Theater Live has made a bold leap forward from golden oldies like "Arsenic and Old Lace" and assorted Agatha Christie entertainments to meatier, more contemporary fare.

Last fall the company produced Noel Coward's insightful tragicomedy about retired actresses, "Waiting in the Wings," following it in January with "Bury the Dead," Irwin Shaw's powerful antiwar drama. And now we have a searing Sam Shepard play, "True West," perhaps CTC's most dynamic production to date.

Written in 1981, the play sounds two of Mr. Shepard's recurring themes: a lament for the Old West of cattle ranches, badlands, and lone cowboys - his "True West" - and an indictment of the New West of agro-industry, suburban sprawl, and Hollywood hustlers - today's "True West."

Two Brothers

Centered on two embattled brothers, Austin (John Franklin Beuscher), a screenwriter, and Lee (Evan Thomas), a drifter, the play's theme has often been compared to the biblical story of Cain, "a tiller of the ground," and Abel, "a keeper of sheep."

In the Bible, Cain's offering of "the fruit of the ground" was disdained by the Lord, while Abel's gift of "the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof" found favor with Him.

"And Cain was very wroth . . . [and] rose up against Abel his brother and slew him."

In championing cowboys over landowners, Mr. Shepard seems to be siding with the Lord, favoring the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the old true west over the settled agrarians of the new - but, of course, nothing in his plays is ever that simple.

Bad Penny

We're in a Southern California suburb, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, in the kitchen of a house belonging to Lee and Austin's mother (Irene Stefanik), who's touring Alaska.

Austin, the screenwriter, is typing out a script and misting Mom's plants while she's away. Lee, who's suddenly turned up like a bad penny, drinks beer, gives Austin a hard time, and tries to borrow his car: He's a burglar when he has a getaway vehicle.

The affable, successful family man is contrasted with the seedy outlaw. Austin has prospered in Hollywood, and awaits the arrival of his studio head for a story conference.

Fight To The Death

Lee has lived for years in the Mojave Desert getting by with the prize money his pit bull won in dog fights. Now the dog's dead and he's broke, boosting TV sets for a living.

Austin is afraid of Lee, and at this point, it sure looks like the Lord is in Austin's corner.

Enter the studio head, Saul Kimmer (Hugh R. King, making a big comeback). Lee sets out to sabotage the story conference, and before you can say, "It ain't over til it's over," things have gone to hell in a handbasket. The Lord moves in mysterious ways indeed.

What follows is a classic brother-brother confrontation, a fight to the death with the faces of good and evil obscured by booze and greed.

Two Realities

Sam Shepard is famous for creating archetypal characters that in other hands would seem like cliches, but in his have a kind of monumental reality.

Through language, he makes them and their relationships stunningly authentic and compelling. Almost perversely, he then pushes them to the edge of credibility, into far-fetched situations that strain our contract with him to suspend willingly our disbelief.

It's extremely difficult to find a stage reality that embraces both these realities: the totally believable and the near-apocryphal. This CTC Theater Live production, under Serena Seacat's penetrating direction, has ably solved the problem.

The skill of the actors, and the intensity of the belief they bring to their characters, are what make us believe.

Role Reversals

Mr. Beuscher and Mr. Thomas must be rejoicing that fate has handed them parts they seem born to play; one can almost feel a kind of exaltation in the rightness and range of their performances.

John Franklin Beuscher and Evan Thomas, as the embattled brothers, must be rejoicing that fate has handed them parts they seem born to play.

Mr. Beuscher, the guy with the clean hair and the work ethic, suddenly gives us the most brilliantly controlled drunk scene imaginable, incorporating a hilarious saga about his father's Mexican dentist, a set of false teeth, and a lost doggy bag of chop suey.

Mr. Thomas, scrofulous in a low-cut T-shirt and perpetual bad hair, in a sentimental mode narrates a chase scene about two guys in trucks hauling their horses in trailers behind them - a riotous sendup of the sanctity of the man-horse bond in old Westerns.

Each, in his own way, is thrillingly unpredictable, and utterly believable.

Smashing

As the Hollywood wheeler-dealer, Mr. King is also wonderful, slick and fast-talking, wheels turning.

When Mom finally makes her entrance near the end of the play, Ms. Stefanik does her proud, too.

With Meg Cage's evocative suburban-kitchen set, Gary Hygom's fine lighting design, and Chas W. Roeder's inspired costumes (check out Mr. King's neckties), this "True West" is sure-footed, deeply felt, and a smashing achievement.

Don't miss it.

The South Fork Natural History Society is going in search of the rare blue-spotted salamander in Montauk on Saturday beginning at 7:30 p.m. Anyone curious to see one of these endangered amphibians has been asked to call the society's Natureline in Amagansett.

Ospreys will be the focus of a two-day mission launched by the Group for the South Fork on Friday, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., to repair existing rookeries and build new ones. About 250 ospreys are expected to return to Long Island this year - fewer than the number of ospreys inhabiting this area before the pesticide DDT was used. Osprey eggs were rendered so thin that they broke because of DDT ingested by the birds. The chemical has been banned for over a decade, but the osprey population has not fully recovered. For more information, those interested are asked to call the Group's headquarters in Bridgehampton.

The East Hampton Trails Preservation Society is heading east on Sunday for a "guest speaker" hike along the shore at the Montauk Lighthouse. The hike will follow a tour of the lighthouse and its museum guided by Marge Winski, the lighthouse keeper. Hikers are asked to meet at 10 a.m. at the entrance to the Camp Hero community located about a mile east of Deep Hollow Ranch.