On the surface, it seems like a busy Oakland salon — customers getting haircuts and highlights and nail treatments and such. But underground, there’s a secret subterranean spa where some of the city’s best skin work and massages are being done.

James Daviees and Amanda Miller have worked magic with a space that once served as storage for Dina’s Coiffures, 4201 Park Blvd. They’ve designed two perfectly appointed studios in which they do deep, restorative work.

For a longtime customer like me, the spa is an amazing transformation. The calming colors, the soft music, the warm welcome you get when you descend the stairs. And Daviees and Miller are experts in body work.

Daviees’ touch transcends that of the normal massage. It’s as if you can feel the energy leaving his fingertips and charging your cells. His gentle manner let’s you know he’s not just there to work out the kinks in your muscles, but to lighten your mood and lift your spirits.

Miller’s expertise is facials. As a graduate of women’s studies at Duke University, she’s made it her mission to help woman have healthy, glowing skin. Over a cup of healing tea, she shares tips about diet and fitness — then goes to work nurturing your face with a special blend of hydrating, organic products.

Thinking about what Daviees and Miller have done with Dina’s Salon, I’m reminded of all kinds of metaphors. But simply put, here in this underground grotto are two very cool people.

FACE LIFT: It’s a bit of an eyesore now, but Montclair’s Pacific National Bank should be a real beauty by fall. The building is being remodeled into a state-of-the-art banking center, complete with an Internet café where customers can do online banking while they enjoy a free cup of coffee. You’ll also see a name change, as it becomes California Savings Bank when the dust settles.

E-MAIL BAG: With wildfires raging around the state, reader Mike Spencer reminds us to keep our eyes open for suspicious activity in the tinder-dry hills. He says he spotted and reported a brush fire recently while walking his dog along Dimond Canyon trail.

“The fire department arrived pretty quickly,” he wrote, “and got the trail gate unlocked to go put out the fire.”

What concerned Spencer was the fact that he’d just seen a group of kids in the area.

“Those kids either started the fire or saw the fire starting as they came up from the trail,” he wrote.

He gave the description of the kids to the fire captain, but doesn’t know if the youths were questioned.

Regardless, it was Spencer’s quick thinking that prevented the fire from burning out of control.

Let’s all be “heads up” this fire season.

IN THE LIMELIGHT: It’s a bird, it’s a plane . . . it’s a former Bishop O’Dowd High School student dressed as a comic book super hero. Aja DeCoudreaux is one of the contestants this season on the Sci Fi network’s reality show “Who Wants to be a Superhero.” A talented fashion designer, Aja made her costume entirely out of junk: old bike inner tubes, wire, fabric and other throwaways. Her superhero is th

IMAGINE A RACE where your brain rates as high as your body. The sport of orienteering pairs speed with navigational skills, and the man who brought it to the Bay Area lives right here in Montclair.

Joe Scarborough has always been an outdoorsman. As a marathon runner, he discovered orienteering in Scandinavia, where it’s so popular today that races are often televised.

“It’s the thinking man’s sport,” he says, since it combines compass and map-reading skills with speed and agility.

Years ago, Scarborough set up a course in the redwood forest of Joaquin Miller Park. It’s got all kinds of navigational challenges, including steep grades, streams and areas so rugged, they’re impassable. Along the route, there are checkpoints (called control features) that let you know you’re on the right track, and a map of the course is available on Scarborough’s Web site, http://www.orienteer.com.

If this kind of adventure racing sounds like fun to you, check out the BAOC’s next race in Joaquin Miller Park on July 21st. You can get more information on their Web site, http://www.baoc.org.

PICKY THIEVES: With the rise in auto theft in Oakland, it seems nothing can be left in your vehicle these days. Not true. Reader Wanda Hennig says when her stolen car was recovered recently, the thieves had taken an eclectic mix of her favorite CD’s. (Macy Gray and others).

They left, untouched, her collection of Polish music CD’s.

GOOD BUZZ: I ran into a group of ranchers at the Alameda County Fair the other day. Their livestock was bees — working hard to make honey in a glass-enclosed hive. Apiarys in Oakland? Apparently so — and the buzz on their nectar is good. With a hint of eucalyptus, the honey is refreshing and sweet and the perfect compliment for your morning muffin and tea. You can find out more about Alameda beekeepers on the Web at honeybee.com/beeclubs.

ART SCENE: When it comes to painting, the Oakland hills offer plenty of inspiration. So it’s no wonder that local artist Laura Siegel loves to paint the undulating terrain around Mount Diablo.

Her work is being featured at Montclair Gallery (1986 Mountain) this month, along with colorful images of two other favorite sites — Kauai and Bellagio, Italy. Laura draws much of her inspiration from her dad, who passed away a few years back. An avid photographer, his work was once featured with Laura’s at a father/daughter show at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission Gallery. Today, Laura teaches painting at several locations, including Piedmont Adult School.

GREAT NIGHT OUT: San Francisco has Pearls, Oakland has Yoshi’s and now Orinda has its own classy jazz venue. The Orinda House (just down from the Orinda Theatre) is bringing in some great musicians — guys who’ve played with big names like Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Lou Rawls. The music director, Bob Belanski packed the house last Saturday night when he brought in London cabaret singer Holly Penfield (an Orinda native). Playful, petite and a powerful singer, Penfield lit up the restaurant and bar like a fireworks display. This place offers something we don’t have in the Montclair — a venue with live jazz and R&B bands Thursday through Sunday. It’s worth the short drive.

THE MOMENT I met her, I knew she was a Minnesotan. Her crisp white apron, the way she came out on the porch to greet me for lunch — that’s so Midwestern. Kim Cole lives in Redwood Heights today, but her cooking career goes back to those childhood days in Marshall.

“Growing up, we had pizza all the time,” she remembers. It was Chef Boyardee Pizza in a Box — a staple in every Midwestern mom’s pantry. “I needed to get close to that (taste) but with my East Bay sensibilities.”

Cole worked on a recipe for almost a year, and finally came up with the organic dough she markets today as Mom’s Pizza Dough. In a word, it’s delicious. Easy to use, you just thaw it in the package and spread it out on a pan, adding your own special ingredients. A little olive oil, some fresh veggies and cheese and voila! — you have a culinary masterpiece.

Cole is a one-woman operation. She makes her dough in a commercial kitchen in Montclair called A Chef’s Eye. She markets it, delivers it and does the bookkeeping while her daughter is in preschool. So far, 12 stores carry her product in the Bay Area, including Rockridge Market and Berkeley Bowl.

Will Cole get rich making dough? Profits are thin, but rising every day.

“I’d like to eventually open a take-and-bake pizza place,” she says. Until then, she’s just happy to be doing something she loves, and helping folks put a healthy meal on the dinner table. For more information, see Cole’s Web site athref=”http://www.momspizzadough.com”>http://www.momspizzadough.com.

Zoo Do: Speaking of culinary masterpieces, the Oakland Zoo’s Walk in the Wild was a huge hit the other night. Men dressed in khakis and women wearing leopard prints got a rare treat — a moonlit party where the animals were the stars. And the food was fantastic. P.F. Chang’s served lettuce wraps; Skates had Kobe Sliders; Spengers was barbecuing oysters and the owner of Compadres, Rick Enos, was serving up savory burritos. The East Bay’s best restaurants, wineries and brew pubs lined the pathways offering hearty samples of their fare. This event has come a long way since it started 14 years ago. It’s a real class act, and one of the many things that makes the Oakland Zoo one of the best in the nation.

Around Town: After months of anticipation, El Agavero is finally open for business in the old Round Table Pizza spot on Mountain Boulevard. What a transformation! The Pelayo family has done a great job of decorating and their light, airy restaurant and bar are a welcome addition to the village. You’ll be surprised, too, at the prices, which are modest by Montclair standards. The father, Gregorio, says he tried to keep the costs close to what he charges at his Fruitvale restaurant, Guadalajara. To that end, the whole family helps. The mom, Rosa, runs the taco trucks, and the kids, Al, Fernando, Maria, and daughter-in-law Nancy, work inside the restaurants. It’s nice to see a family-owned operation in Montclair and I wish the Pelayos the best of luck!

Sweet Deal: There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but you can find a free dessert. Just ask hills mom Sabrina Stewart, who entered the Dreyers Neighborhood Salute contest, last spring, and won $200 worth of free ice cream. It’s the perfect prize, since Stewart has a block party on her circle drive every September. Twelve cartons of ice cream will arrive just in time to set up a sundae table at the block party with bananas and nuts and all the toppings. It’s tough to top that!

A promise is a promise — even if it takes 32 years to fulfill. That’s how long it’s been since the city of Oakland designated Shepherd Canyon Road a scenic route, with a promise to put up appropriate signage. Not surprisingly, the signs never went up, until now.

Neighbors and Boy Scouts have just finished putting up the signs that the city should have installed over three decades ago. It wasn’t easy. Just finding the sign design from those 1975 documents took hours of digging into the state archives.

Once the drawings were located, Matt Ceraldi made the sign installation his Eagle Scout project, placing the first of the placards at the top of Escher Drive. He even used some of the leftover debris (from the years when the city used the park for an un-permitted dump) to anchor the sign’s base.

Signs also went up this week at the top and bottom of Shepherd Canyon Road, the east and west boundaries of the scenic route. Now every motorist, pedestrian and biker will know what we already know — that this canyon is precious and protected. Thanks to the ongoing efforts of our neighbors, and scouts like Ceraldi — a promise made in the 1970s has finally been fulfilled.

LADY LUCK: Some guys have all the luck. Take reader Jack Summerfield. He sent in a postcard for a giveaway on the Regis and Kelly show recently, and within days his card was picked. “They called me at 5 in the morning (8 a.m. in New York) and said they’d call me back live at 6 (a.m.),” hesaid.

That’s when the fun began. The hosts spun the wheel and the marker landed on the biggest prize — a trip to Jamaica and a $5,000 Price Grabbers gift certificate. All Jack had to do was correctly answer a question about the previous day’s show.

“I was hemming and hawing and trying to come up with the answer,” he says, “and with two seconds left of the 20 seconds they gave me — I got it.” Now Jack and his wife are headed to Jamaica to celebrate, not just their good fortune, but Jack’s 75th birthday AND the couple’s 51st wedding anniversary. Congratulations, Jack and Sandy. You guys really know how to live.

CAT SIGHTING: A mountain lion and her cubs have been spotted outside The Village Market on Broadway Terrace, according to reader Howard Smith, who says a dog walker spotted the big cats on the hillside recently. “When he saw the mountain lions, he scooped up his little dog and disappeared,” says Smith, who thinks the cats may have been drawn to the area by a flock of wild turkeys.

AREA ODDITIES: You’ve heard of a jungle beat? Reader Jane Fuerch says there’s a beat of a different kind echoing through the Canyon between Montclair and Moraga. At least once a week, a guy has been playing his drums (a full set including tom tom and cymbals) in a pull-off along Pinehurst Road. The acoustics may be great, but I bet he’s driving the wildlife squirrely.

A GROUP OF GRADUATES gathered for lunch in Montclair Park the other day. Like most classmates, they laughed and shared memories of their school years. But much time has passed since these kids were together. They were students at Montclair Grammar School (now Montclair Elementary School) during the 1930s and early 1940s.

My connection to this group came in a very strange way. I met one of these “youngsters,” quite by chance, in the northernmost part of Finnish Lapland last winter. There I was, in a cold, dark place near the Russian border — on a tour with a man who’d grown up in Montclair.

Dick Winterhalder has colorful memories of his childhood in the Oakland hills. He remembers how the train would rumble past Montclair Grammar School at least twice a day. “Everything stopped,” he recalled. “We’d all wave at the conductor and he’d wave back.”

Alma Rulofson remembers her acrobatics on the monkey bars.

“I would wrap my legs around the bars and twirl and go round and round and round,” she said.

Pat Blesse and her sister Barb used to climb over the fence for a moonlight swim at what was then Forest Pool on Thornhill Drive.

“We never got caught,” boasted Pat with a smile. Back then, the pond in Montclair Park was more of a swamp, Barb recalled, and their parents told them it was full of quick sand. But the girls still caught frogs on the bank, and in a rare snowstorm around 1935, their brother was one of the boys who tried ice skating on the frozen pond.

Beverly Byron remembers walking with her friends to the corner drugstore for sodas. She was a bit of a tomboy, changing into her jeans and her dad’s long white shirt after school to play touch football with the boys in the Montclair field.

The school, at the time, was a mixture of portables and an old red brick building. The brick schoolhouse was demolished because of earthquake fears. Don DeLong and classmates Don Sloan and Byron Schroeder remember the portables being heated with pot-bellied stoves, and each desk had an ink well.

“It was a great school with good teachers,” Schroeder said, “although some of them we didn’t like at the time.” One scary teacher had arms as big as tree trunks — or so he remembered.

But then everything seemed bigger when these grads were small. DeLong said the pond (lake) was bigger and so was the old firehouse. He and his buddies, including John Brodie, who later became a star quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers and a Senior PGA Tour professional golfer, used to play ball on the old baseball diamond and had some rousing games of pingpong.

“Brodie was the champion of everything,” DeLong recalled.

As the group gathered for a photo, Pat Blesse broke into song. A rah-rah song about their great little school that she still recalled after all these years. Classmate Donna Oehm (a well-known activist in Marin) made a pitch for her classmates to join her in working toward peace.

“For your grandchildren” she urged. They smiled for the camera, again and again — posing for posterity.

As I stood there soaking up the sweet memories of a simpler time, I realized the things they did as kids in Montclair were not so different from what kids do today. Catching crawdads in the pond, swinging on the monkey bars and trying to hit baseballs over the fence. It’s what makes Montclair special to those of us blessed enough to spend time here. And with a little imagination, you can almost see the bright-eyed children waving at the train as it passes the old brick school.

MARK TWAIN once said, “It’s more like kingdom come than California.”

Looking at Thomas Hill’s glorious 1876 painting of Yosemite Valley , I wholeheartedly agree. This treasured park is nature’s cathedral — one of the most heavenly places on earth — and the new Yosemite exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California makes me ache to go back.

In photographs, watercolors, graphite and oils, artists have captured the many moods of this American icon. Add to this the storytellers, ranger talks, slide presentations and more, and you’ve got a winning exhibit for the museum through Aug. 26. Catch it on the first Friday of the month and you’ll get a bonus: cool live music and dancing with a cash bar. Now that’s something to celebrate!

ART ADDENDUM: Speaking of art, I ran into Jacque Hachquet with the Montclair Village Jazz & Wine Festival the other night at Ron Scrivani’s hip warehouse party for Pro Arts Open Studios. The room was full of local artists, and Hachquet was no doubt scouting for participants for her Sept. 16 event in the village. If you’re an artist who’d like to be part of the festival, check out http://www.montclairjazzandwine.org.

GOOD BUZZ: The Berkeley Rep’s performance of Oliver Twist is getting great revues and one of the actresses is a homegrown girl. Jennifer Ikeda went to Bishop O’Dowd High School and now tours with a company out of New York. She plays the part of Nancy in the old fashioned Dickens classic which runs through June 24.

RAPID RESPONSE: My recent piece on passport problems triggered a rapid reaction from U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee’s district director. Leslie Littleton questioned a reader’s claim that her office was unresponsive when he called for help in expediting the issuance of a long-awaited passport. She says the congresswoman’s office receives daily praise in its handling of passport issues. With the growing number of complaints about the length of time it takes to process passports, I’m sure Lee’s office is getting plenty of calls.

AROUND TOWN: One of Montclair’s most recognized financiers, Dale Marie Golden, has jumped ship (or should I say the stagecoach) at Wells Fargo Bank. Golden and several colleagues have left the venerable institution to join a start-up called Alta Alliance Bank on Grand Avenue. The bank has branches in Oakland, Piedmont and Walnut Creek.

Meanwhile, the most anticipated new restaurant in Oakland must be El Agavera in Montclair. After lengthy delays in the permit process (converting the space from a longtime pizza parlor), building owner Ed Hirshberg says the Mexican eatery and tequila bar will be open any day now. Really.

And La Salle Cigars has reportedly shut its doors for good. Word has it some of the mental health professionals above the cigar store were complaining about the smell coming from the patio. All those years of business for the La Salle Cigars — up in smoke.

AERIAL ATTACK: You may want to duck and cover when you walk past the Hallmark Store in Montclair. There have been reports of a belligerent blackbird dive-bombing the area. One reader says the creature came down from the awning and boldly pecked at her head, then flew off.

Minutes later she saw two or three other ladies being attacked. Why wom