May 12, 1991

The interior of the old American Automobile Association headquarters at 28 East 78th Street has undergone a $1 million renovation and emerged as a combination consignment art gallery and museum. Chozo Yoshii, with galleries in Tokyo, Paris and at 20 West 57th Street, has teamed up with Michael Lord, a Milwaukee gallery owner, and Jacques Demons, a French curator, to lease the building and turn it from a temple of the automobile to a palace of art. They have named their effort Elysium Arts.

WOODY ALLEN A Biography. By Eric Lax. Illustrated. 386 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

Few companies push civil rights in the workplace harder than the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. In the past decade, the giant utility has put hundreds of female, black, Hispanic and Asian workers into jobs that were once the exclusive domain of white men. The company is one of just three that the Labor Department has praised, along with the International Business Machines Corporation and the Digital Equipment Corporation, for a commitment to affirmative action. P.G.& E. officials say they have aggressively recruited and promoted female and minority workers largely out of business necessity: they serve an ethnically diverse population of 7.5 million people in Northern California and need workers who can communicate with customers. Some Are Upset; Some Complain White male employees at P.G.& E., which has a work force of 26,000, are reacting to the changes in varied ways, a complex mosaic of the expected and unexpected. The reactions of workers, for the most part restrained in recent interviews, provide an insight into the way the American workplace will accommodate the forces of law, demographics and business conditions that are changing the complexion of the work force in the 1990's.

JIM GROTE never stops. In Chester, where he is the town's fire marshal, he spent most of a recent day investigating the cause of a house fire. Then he was a featured speaker at a fire service banquet and finally got to bed at 2 A.M. The next day began with a meeting about firefighting at 9 A.M., followed by another at 10:30. After a midafternoon meeting, this one about the Chester fair, he visited friends at a nursing home. At 5 P.M., he was driven to another dinner across the state.

In a growing recognition that an 11-year policy aimed at overthrowing the Soviet-backed Government of Afghanistan is outdated, the Bush Administration has not requested funds for the Afghan rebels in its proposed 1992 budget, senior Administration officials say. In interviews this week, the officials stressed that the Administration reserved the right to request funds for the program as the budget process continues over the next two months. And Congress can still recommend a continuation of the program on its own.