February 17, 1991

With great fanfare, three $150 million amusement parks opened in France in the past three years, but all have fallen flat and two have been forced into bankruptcy. Nonetheless, the Walt Disney Company is pushing hard with plans to open Europe's first Disneyland next year, a $4.4 billion extravaganza sprawling over 5,000 acres of former sugar beet fields 20 miles east of Paris.

DESPITE the recession and the dormant real estate market, the owners of the Wentworth by-the-Sea resort are planning to develop 55 house lots around the resort's 18-hole shorefront golf course. The 275-acre resort is in the coastal towns of Rye and New Castle, just south of Portsmouth. A small bridge across a tidal inlet connects its 170-acre golf course in Rye to its motel, condominium villas and marina in New Castle.

Since World War II, we have done something remarkable with opera. We have whisked it from view. This has not been easy, for opera's sheer bulk and ungainly shape make it a poor object for concealment. But we've mastered the trick through an old detective-fiction dodge: leaving the body out in plain sight. We've disguised it, naturally, to render it unrecognizable to next of kin. If apprehended by folks in search of it, we can always shrug, point and protest that it has been there all along. We have been particularly ingenious with opera of the Extended 19th Century, the 150-odd years beginning with Mozart that produced what is still referred to with some accuracy as the standard repertory. The Extended 19th has had us in a pickle for decades. It offers riches we cannot do without, but these constitute an oppressive patrimony. It is not only that E-19 stands as an embarrassment to our own creative struggles. It persists in the revalidation of esthetic, philosophic and political principles incompatible with our own, with views of society and behavior we itch to obliterate and dare not look in the eye for fear of what may be reflected there.

WHEN Benjamin L. Zwirn won election in 1989 as the first Democratic supervisor of the Town of North Hempstead in 73 years, the Nassau County Democratic chairman, John W. Matthews, was ecstatic. He hailed the victory as the beginning of the end of Republican domination in Nassau. Now the two Democrats are disputing whether Mr. Matthews should end his effort to reappoint himself to a $94,000-a-year patronage position at the County Board of Elections.

It has been a year since someone set fire to Wilfred and Agnes Phillip's new house in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn -- a week before the Grenadian-born couple were to move in and become the first black family on the block. The fire only delayed their move. The Phillips settled in last June and were pleased when a neighbor, a young school bus driver, invited them to dinner. Only a few other neighbors have gone out of their way to welcome them, but even so the couple say they feel accepted now and plan to invite everyone on the block to an open house in April.