WORKING-CLASS HEROINE

Director Allison Anders was changing planes in Chicago when someone recognized her from a newspaper picture. ''Hey, is that you?'' said the fellow passenger. ''I recognize the tattoo.'' The tattoo on her hand, which is still so new it itches, is not the only thing that makes Anders, 37, easily recognizable: She has six tattoos, extravagant, ruby red waves of hair, a leather bracelet from a mountain man she once loved, and a green-beaded hoop in her right nostril. What is bringing her recognition from movie critics and audiences alike is her new movie, Gas Food Lodging, a sort of working-class ode to single motherhood. She knows the territory. Only two years ago Anders herself was a single mom raising her two daughters on welfare and occasional waitressing stints. But working through UCLA film school, she found both a livelihood and an expression for the pain she suffered at age 5 when her father abandoned the ) family, for the trauma she felt when she was raped at age 12, for the terror she experienced at age 15 when a stepfather held her at gunpoint. Since Gas Food Lodging made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January, Anders has been praised for her faithfulness to trailer-park reality and has already completed her next film, Mi Vida Loca, her story of women gang members (due next year). ''It's all pretty cool,'' she says in a voice so cheerful it belies a hurtful truth-that her film's wry honesty came at a genuine personal cost. ''Sometimes I couldn't believe that this was my job- coming to terms with my life,'' she says. ''Confronting it this way definitely heals you. What it does is get rid of the shame.''