CREATIVITY IS HER MIDDLE NAME.

Byline: Victoria Giraud

When Diantha Ain was a little girl growing up in New Jersey, she dreamed of becoming an actress; little did she know how her creative talents would emerge as the years passed.

Although she began her acting career studying in New York alongside actors such as Walter Matthau and Tony Curtis, when she came to California it wasn't long before Bob Ain talked her into marriage and children.

She had been lucky during her brief Hollywood stint, acting in ``Elizabeth and Essex'' at the Pasadena Playhouse, making ``Girl's School'' at Columbia Pictures and doing a bit part in a Lana Turner vehicle, ``A Life of Her Own,'' at MGM.

But her goals had changed.

``I wanted a happy home. I resigned from (the Screen Actors Guild), and all my creative effort went into raising children until they were both out of college,'' Diantha explained.

The Ains raised their son and daughter in Moorpark and Simi Valley. Bob Ain turned his attentions to Bob Ain Ford for 18 years and remains in the car business. After her children left home, Diantha began looking for a creative work outlet, but at first she was at a loss.

``I had given up my creativity. I went into a depression in the late 1970s for probably three years. I realized I'd been stifling all this creativity. I decided I wanted to become a writer, but I didn't know what to write.''

She enrolled in a course at the Institute of Children's Literature and was inspired by a teacher who wrote poetry.

Diantha's own writing attempts turned out to be poetry. After reading Shel Silverstein's poetry for children, Diantha decided to create poems that were more upbeat than his and began writing short poems and drawing pictures to go with them.

She took her poems and pictures to a friend's kindergarten class, and a new career began.

Diantha employed her theatrical skills in reading and acting out her poems. She also used her ability for composing music (she brought along a keyboard) to help young children cultivate their creativity. She would encourage them to sing and do pantomime with her.

Her first session made such an impression on the children that when the teacher asked about the children's reactions the next day, many of them even remembered the titles of the poems. It seemed Diantha had found a calling.

Then the day before she was scheduled to return to the class she was hit by a car. Unknowingly, as a result of the accident, she suffered a concussion.

The accident didn't stop her, despite enduring some 10 years of vertigo.

``I believe my focus on work saved me,'' she said.

The popularity of her work turned into a self-published book, ``What Do You Know About Succotash?'' and a creativity program over the next 12 years that eventually reached 16,000 elementary school children throughout Southern California. A cash merit award from Family Circle magazine in their ``Leaders of Readers'' contest enabled Diantha to put copies of her book into Simi Valley's 19 elementary schools.

Although Diantha loved working with the children, the fairly recent onset of chronic fatigue syndrome, which she is combating with acupressure, yoga and vitamins, turned her in a new direction.

For years she had created both the message and the artwork for her family's yearly Christmas cards. Each was unique and for the first years involved cutting the designs and coloring them.

One of her techniques is to incorporate words into the artistic design; she used this idea recently for a National League of American Pen Women publication that shows a woman's profile with the hair flowing behind her spelling out ``creative women.''

With her artistic creativity blossoming, Diantha decided she needed to know more about graphics, and she's taking two courses at Moorpark College. Coincidentally, she's come in contact there with a student that remembered Diantha's poetry class from Simi Elementary School.

Designing her own line of greeting cards may be in Diantha's future. It's just another step in a long and varied career.

``I don't know what I'm going to be into next. You have to exercise the creative muscle. Don't stop. You have to keep trying and the better you'll get,'' Diantha concluded with a flourish.