What was going on when I was born?

WHAT is it that makes one dancer in a stageful suddenly grab our attention? It isn't necessarily the star, or even the performer who does the steps the best. Is it personal magnetism? Or the way the dancer approaches the role? Sometimes it's hard to tell. But you know it when you see it. And, with the spring season well under way, the phenomenon can be studied this weekend in six dancers who are performing around town on their own and with some of the weekend's leading dance companies. Much of the attraction has to do with the dancer's concentration and sense of self. Such a performer is Richard Fein in the Kathryn Posin Dance Company, with which he will perform tomorrow at 8 P.M. and Sunday at 2 P.M. at the Joyce Theater, on Eighth Avenue at 19th Street. Here is someone whose potent presence and intense immersion in the dance draw the eye inevitably to him. Mr. Fein previously appeared with the Eliot Feld and Pennsylvania Ballets and with Ohad Naharin, a modern dance choreographer.

The American Natural Resources Corporation today accepted the Coastal Corporation's cash offer of $65 a share and said it would complete a friendly merger that includes curbs on Coastal's freedom to break up American Natural or move its headquarters. The total value of the transaction is about $2.5 billion. It will make Coastal the owner of one of the largest gas distribution networks in the country, with more than 21,000 miles of pipelines ranging from Texas and Louisiana to the Middle West and the Rocky Mountain states. Other Interests American also owns interests in more than 1,500 oil and gas wells and has Appalachian coal mines that produced 3.9 million tons in 1984. It owns a one-quarter share of the Great Plains Coal Gasification Project, which is nearing completion.

Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d said today that he did not favor imposing blanket economic sanctions on countries that produced or shipped narcotics, although he said he viewed the ''objective'' as ''a good one.'' In an interview shortly before being formally installed as Attorney General, Mr. Meese elaborated on a variety of topics. These were among them: - He is not inclined to seek changes in antitrust laws and says enforcement decisions should be made so as to help American companies compete worldwide. - He does not foresee changes in the department's enforcement policies on civil rights, although he wants to improve communication with minority groups and civil rights leaders who have been critical of the Administration's performance.

FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 1985 Companies Coastal agreed to buy American Natural Resources and pledged not to break up the company or move its headquarters. The merger is valued at about $2.5 billion and will make Coastal one of the nation's largest gas distribution networks. (Page D1.) The Washington Post Co. plans to buy 17 percent of Cowles Media of Minneapolis. Analysts said the Post might eventually take control of the newspaper company and its main asset, The Minneapolis Star and Tribune. Terms were not disclosed, but several analysts said the Post probably agreed to pay $53 million or more. (D5.) The Minneapolis newspaper has endured a series of crises in the last three years. (D5.)

THERE has always been more to St. Patrick's Day in New York City than the parade, although the parade, now grown to more than 200,000 marchers and 195 bands, was something many people, and certainly elected officials, did not dare miss. If you are not an elected official, however, or if you simply prefer Irish theater, or Irish folk music, or Irish food, the city's restaurants, bars, playhouses and parks have enough planned this weekend to keep you thinking of St. Patrick until Monday - without even setting foot near Fifth Avenue (where the march begins at noon tomorrow). You might, for example, direct your feet to Lower Manhattan, where the history of the Irish in New York City has been played out since before the first St. Patrick's Day parade in 1762 and where, around City Hall, the influence of the Irish community in politics has been indisputable since the late 1800's.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, has come to power pledging to rouse the Soviet economy from its stupor. That stupor, however, has resisted repeated assaults over the last 40 years, and Western diplomats here say they are skeptical that, for all his youth and apparent energy, Mr. Gorbachev will be capable or really prepared to take the radical steps required. The task is a daunting one, as any Western visitor to the Soviet Union quickly sees. Long lines form for consumer goods that would be scorned in Western shops. By American standards, the telephone service is rudimentary, banking is all but unknown, roads are few and poor, offices are ill equipped and officials inaccessible.

Ten days ago, New York City began distributing F.B.I.-style posters in a new program to bring in its 100 most- wanted criminals. Yesterday came the first results: Of the 10 named on the first poster, the police had found three - two of them in jail. These things happen, Mayor Koch said at City Hall. ''There's no question that when you use a computer and you're dealing with large numbers,'' he explained, ''that on occasion the computer is going to make an error. So what?''

Sales of manufactured goods fell sharply in January while inventories continued to rise, the Government said today. Total sales declined by seven- tenths of 1 percent, to $415.5 billion, in the steepest drop in nearly two years, the Commerce Department reported. Sales had increased by 1 percent in both December and November.

IT is difficult to believe that even in a season that is remarkable for a profusion of very good shows in the midtown galleries we shall see a more serenely provocative exhibition than the one that Ellsworth Kelly has put together at the BlumHelman Gallery, 20 West 57th Street. Rarely has major art worn such a look of ease, but we may be sure that this look is deceptive. The true artist knocks himself out in the studio, not in public, and if these paintings come across as limpid, fulfilled and complete it is because half a lifetime of hard and intelligent work stands in back of them. Individually, they have the economy of means, the superfine color, the feeling for the monumental and the instinct for what can be left out of art without loss on which Kelly has been working for many years. Collectively, they answer to one another, in twos and threes, in ways that we associate with the great sequential paintings of the past. The show has been devised to make this clear, and it is rich in echoes and conjunctions, vistas and enfilades of a kind that we hope to see, but rarely find, in museums of modern art.

An article in Business Day on March 7 about Asarco Inc. misstated the amount of stock held by Robert Holmes a Court in Broken Hill Proprietary Ltd. Mr. Holmes a Court and concerns controlled by him own less than 5 percent of Broken Hill, an Australian company.

''With those one or two, we have to slap them along the head with a piece of stove wood.

A former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation pleaded guilty today to charges of taking $850,000 in bribes and payoffs from a drug ring he was investigating as an undercover agent, the United States Attorney's office reported. The former agent, Dan A. Mitrione Jr., 38 years old, also admitted taking more than 90 pounds of cocaine from a shipment he had been ordered to seize and reselling it to drug dealers. Mr. Mitrione, an F.B.I. agent for 10 years, had been assigned to an undercover operation that sought to break up the channels for distribution of cocaine coming into this country through Miami. F.B.I. Director's Reaction William H. Webster, Director of the F.B.I., called the case ''sad'' and said it showed the determination of the bureau to police its own ranks.