I guess I'm easy to please. For their birthdays, some people want to go to Paris, London, Madrid. Others desire an around-the-world cruise.

All I wanted was to visit a stairway in L.A. where Laurel and Hardy tried to move a piano.

You oldtimers and film buffs may know the stairs I mean. In 1932's "The Music Box," Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who have pooled their resources of $3.80 to start a moving company, attempt to deliver a piano.

They pull over their horse-drawn wagon and ask a postman for directions to 1127 Walnut Ave. The postman points across the street at an impossibly tall set of stairs that starts at the curb and rises to the top of the hill. "That's the house there, right on top of the stoop," he says.

Stan and Ollie, after a momentary panic, set their jaws and begin carrying the piano up the stairs, one step at a time. Hijinks, needless to say, ensue. The stairs are real.

Even more improbably, they still stand in Silver Lake. Laurel and Hardy fans with love in their hearts and time on their hands diligently tracked down the location and, in 1994, a historical plaque was inlaid at the bottom. Well-wishers arrived in vintage dress and autos, impersonators

performed, dignitaries spoke, neighbors looked on in puzzlement and everyone went home with a happy glow.

Almost immediately, the plaque was scratched up by vandals. Another fine mess, as Oliver Hardy would say. After reading about the ceremony, I sought out the film on video.

"The Music Box," which I've seen a half-dozen times, is supremely silly. Carrying a piano up this flight of stairs is no simple task, but Laurel and Hardy manage, through circumstance and their own ineptness, to make it even more complicated. The piano slips from their fingers and careens down dozens of steps into the street - not once, not twice, but three times.

The fourth attempt finds the piano lugged all the way to the top. As Stan and Ollie gasp for breath, the postman returns. He asks why they didn't simply bring their wagon up the side road.

How do Stan and Ollie react? They pick up the piano, carry it back down the stairs, load it on their wagon and drive it up the driveway. Adam Sandler should be so brilliant.

I watched "The Music Box" again last month before setting off to see the stairs for myself. It was a visit I'd wanted to make for a dozen years and, for my birthday, at last was inspired to take. The address is on Vendome Street a block south of Sunset Boulevard.

As expected, the street looks far different from the 1930s. The vacant lot next to the stairs is long gone, replaced by terraced homes. And the stairway now has a metal railing.

Very thoughtful. Nice to see that a stairway known worldwide as the scene of a series of comic pratfalls is now mindful of safety. Even with the changes, the Music Box Steps, as a sign at the bottom calls them, are darn tall.

I gazed upward and, like Sir Edmund Hillary mounting Everest, set off to the summit. There are 133 steps, according to Laurel and Hardy Web sites. I didn't bother counting, being more concerned with climbing.

A series of landings, seven or so in all, provide plateaus for hikers to rest a moment. Some of us dreamy-eyed nostalgics dote on places like this stairway - humble spots made grand by their legend, poetry or significance. Ray Bradbury, for instance, set two of his short stories at the steps: "The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair," in which two fans of the duo begin their romance with a pilgrimage to the stairs, and "Another Fine Mess," in which the ghosts of Stan and Ollie perpetually carry that piano up those steps, night after night, year after year.

The romance, of course, is in our imagination, if we have one. The stairs themselves are nothing special. As Freud might say, sometimes a stairway is just a stairway.

Movie mogul Hal Roach, whose studio made "The Music Box," was dragged to the stairs in 1987 by his friend Raymond Bann - after an afternoon shooting game birds on a sporting ranch in Chino, incidentally. Roach had never seen the steps and, in Bann's account on the Laurel and Hardy Web site, didn't much care that he was finally standing in front of them. "What am I supposed to be looking at?

" he asked impatiently. Bann, trying to prolong a moment that wasn't much of a moment, asked, "Don't you want to walk up to the top?" To him, the magic was only on the screen, not in the steps.

Either that, or he was worried that if he didn't scram, he'd be flattened by a runaway piano. David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday, three more descents. E-mail , call (909) 483-9339 or write 2041 E.

Fourth St., Ontario 91764.