WASHERWOMAN LEAVES MARK TRANSCENDING FIBS OF FAMOUS.

Byline: JANE ROBISON

THE biggest dream any child can ever have is to become someone he or she is not.

It's called the American Dream, and anyone with enough ambition and imagination can make it happen.

Reinventing ourselves, polishing up our images, embellishing our lives to make something of ourselves - those ideas were made in America. That's what I love about this country.

Hats off to people who turn convention on its head. People like Larry Lawrence and Judge James Ware, who made something of their lives by redefining ``affirmative action'' and putting their own personal stamp on history.

Lawrence, owner of the Some Like It Hot hotel in San Diego, affirmed he saw action during the war and rose to prominence by creating a richly textured fabrication that landed him briefly in Arlington National Cemetery. Until the lie was uncovered and he was unearthed.

No rest for the wicked.

Ware, a federal judge, affirmed for years that he was the brother of a Birmingham, Ala., teen-ager slain at the height of the civil rights struggle in 1963. His affirmative action of misappropriating a family's tragedy cost him a job as the only active African-American judge on the prestigious 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Destiny bites.

Now corporate Americans are cowering under the boardroom table, hoping no one checks the creatively enhanced resumes that landed them the jobs they have today.

The question weighing on everyone's mind is: When is it wrong to take the fib too far?

I guess it depends on who you're working for. If you work for the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, it's never wrong. The district firmly believes in situational ethics: If the situation calls for it, it's ethical.

Making up backgrounds is not new, of course. Shirley MacLaine invented a back story that stretched across the millenniums to the pharaohs of Egypt, and she prospered.

The lessons to be gleaned from these people are this: Good karma sells. Imaginatively inventive people are admired and respected. Faking war injuries doesn't sell.

Most people don't push the envelope of believability that far. They hover on the unexceptional until their 20th high school reunion, and then they grow moxie.

At least, that's what happened to me. I had always been shy about my accomplishments, keeping my Nobel Prize for Literature a secret from my family and friends - because people can be so petty when you make something of yourself.

But when I was asked what I'd been up to since graduation, I found I just had to let my little light shine.

I had written my first novel while working nights in a laundry folding clothes and sorting socks to pay for my Harvard education.

Studying to become a Rhodes Scholar was made more difficult when I interrupted my schooling to help fly U-2 missions during the invasion of Panama. As a test pilot at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, I had laughed in the face of danger at pushing Mach 2.

But I didn't laugh the night I was shot down by a UFO over Roswell, N.M., although most of that memory was erased by subparticle laser beams before I was dropped back down on Earth. Uninjured. Not a scratch on me.

Since then, my life has been fairly routine.

I don't expect any of this will ever get me a job in Los Angeles city government, or a building named after me in the 10-minute diamond, or even a street dedicated in my honor - Jane Lane. Unlike Lawrence and Ware, I'm not after riches and glory. I just don't want to sit by the high school nitwits at the next reunion, the people who never amounted to anything on their resumes.

And then there are people like Oseola McCarty, who work hard all their lives, save their hard-earned pay and want nothing more than to help others. The 89-year-old McCarty donated her life savings as a laundry woman, $150,000, to set up a scholarship fund for African-American students at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, her hometown.

Oseola McCarty's name will be remembered with honor long after Larry Lawrence and James Ware fade into infamy. There's something to be said for being footloose and fantasy-free.