Cautionary Tale

Imagine Ally McBeal featuring two buff Boston attorneys, GWMs looking for soulmates with brains, bods and bank accounts equal to theirs, and you have All the Rage, a comic cautionary tale about how the heart and the eyes have different appetites. Christopher (John-Michael Lander) is an estate lawyer with the chiseled face of a Details magazine coverboy and the sculpted abs usually found on heroic statues and Chippendales dancers. His best friend at the firm, Larry (Jay Corcoran)

CLEVELAND - The Indians sat in first place when, on the cool and pleasant evening of June 20, they opened a series with the Colorado Rockies at Progressive Field. Despite the good record and weather, and even though interleague play typically produces a crowd bump, Northern Ohio's tortured sports fans were unmoved. The Indians, then last in baseball attendance, drew just 15,224 spectators to the 8-7 loss. Perhaps Clevelanders suspected the success was a first-half illusion.

Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is at once a strongly feminist play and a cautionary tale for feminists. The play shows how strong, determined women in the past were able to fulfill themselves even though they were greatly constrained by male oppression and how boorish and empty the same type of woman can be today with the freedom, more or less, to be herself. Churchill presents the women from the past in a lengthy, highly imaginative opening scene that has Marlene, a contemporary character who is newly named to head her office, celebrating the promotion at a dinner with noted women from the past.

The story is familiar. Beautiful, talented singer, actor, dancer, and on down the list, succumbs in a tragic likely accident that may have involved drug abuse. Whitney Houston was added to that roll call Saturday. She was 48. Like so many others, she is gone too soon, and yet she will always be with us. Almost from the time the little girl from Newark opened her mouth in song, it was clear she would one day be a star. And why not, given her lineage? Gospel great Cissy Houston was her mother, pop music icon Dionne Warwick her aunt, and the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin, her godmother.

Though not strictly a travel book, How Not to Live Abroad (Citadel Press, $19.95) is a cautionary tale for anyone who has ever traveled abroad in search of himself/herself - at no matter what stage of life. What starts out as an escapist vacation to Spain for a pair of twentyish slackers - desperate to avoid work in the real world and the type of humdrum lives they see folks living around them in London - becomes a comedically disastrous story befitting the book's title. How many of us - and I am not discounting our post-adolescent traipses across the Continent or Southeast Asia or Latin America, in between baccalaureate and grad school or beyond - have found ourselves so enamored of the culture, climate or environment of some thoroughly foreign venue that we didn't seriously consider carving out a new life right there?

When rescuers began pulling victims from the rubble of the sugar factory here in 1988, the corpses seemed like ghastly, crimson ghosts, covered with an awful goo, a coagulating mixture of blood and powdered sugar. The 6.9-magnitude earthquake that crushed the sugar plant also destroyed every other factory in this mountainous patch of northern Armenia. It flattened schools, churches, homes and hospitals, killing more than 25,000 people and leaving half a million homeless. The 1988 disaster was nowhere near the scale of the Dec. 26 tsunami, but the horror and grief were the same.

"Take a glance at Noah. . . . He didn't pair up the apes with the antelope, right? It's one of the many laws of nature. 'Run with your own kind.' " This is the generous eugenic advice proffered by slender Carter (Paul Felder) to slender Tom (Ed Renninger) about the impropriety of Tom's plus-size girlfriend in Fat Pig, Theatre Horizon's current production. Playwright Neil LaBute's "kind," of course, are those possessed of a deep well of self-loathing from which to draw endless vitriol or tortured inertia, or both.

Frail and childlike, 89-year-old Lola DiStefano fingered a yellow legal paper and glanced back and forth at her lawyers as she struggled to remember what she owned. There was the Victor Cafe, the family's famed South Philadelphia restaurant, where aspiring opera singers perform arias between waiting on tables. And there was a parking lot she had bought from the city. "I paid cash for it, I did," DiStefano said with a smile. She had bought two houses for her son Gregory, but she wasn't sure what had happened to them.

A feverish tale of convent schoolgirls who confuse spiritual with sexual ecstasy (or is it the reverse?), Lucretia Martel's The Holy Girl is as eerie and intoxicating as the theremin music it prominently features. Set in an Argentina hotel during a convention of ear, nose and throat doctors, Martel's haunting film focuses on Amalia (Maria Alche), a 16-year-old who has a twin awakening, erotic and religious, when a man rubs up against her in the street. Martel, who previously made the likewise elliptical La Ci?naga, shoots her characters in extreme close-ups, focusing on the sensory portals of ears, noses and throats.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show (3 p.m., NBC10) - Actress Sandra Bullock ( The Blind Side ). The Oprah Winfrey Show (4 p.m., 6ABC) - Jenny Sanford discusses her ex-husband's international, headline-making affair. Community (8 p.m., NBC10) - The gang finds out that Jeff has a new love interest, which he wanted to keep under wraps. But now that everyone knows, he can at least keep her identity to himself. Rookie Blue (9 p.m., 6ABC) - Many of the officers' personal secrets come spilling out as Andy and Traci are among the first responders to a home invasion.

Frail and childlike, 89-year-old Lola DiStefano fingered a yellow legal paper and glanced back and forth at her lawyers as she struggled to remember what she owned. There was the Victor Cafe, the family's famed South Philadelphia restaurant, where aspiring opera singers perform arias between waiting on tables. And there was a parking lot she had bought from the city. "I paid cash for it, I did," DiStefano said with a smile. She had bought two houses for her son Gregory, but she wasn't sure what had happened to them.

The story is familiar. Beautiful, talented singer, actor, dancer, and on down the list, succumbs in a tragic likely accident that may have involved drug abuse. Whitney Houston was added to that roll call Saturday. She was 48. Like so many others, she is gone too soon, and yet she will always be with us. Almost from the time the little girl from Newark opened her mouth in song, it was clear she would one day be a star. And why not, given her lineage? Gospel great Cissy Houston was her mother, pop music icon Dionne Warwick her aunt, and the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin, her godmother.

ONLY A HEAD case wouldn't be troubled by the revelations in a recent preview of TLC's "Toddlers & Tiaras" of wacky pageant moms giving their daughters "go-go juice" and Pixy Stix candy, a/k/a "pageant crack," to hype up their little darlings for competition. And how about that British mom who gave her 7-year-old a gift certificate for liposuction as a Christmas gift? And have you seen the adults who stood around and cheered for preteens gyrating to Wu-Tang Clan's "Clap Them Thighs"?

DeSean Jackson played and acted like a star Sunday. He made a huge play when his team needed one and then said all the right things when facing sensitive questions in the locker room. It happened too late to save the Eagles' season. Was it also too late to save Jackson's relationship with the team? The two-time Pro Bowl receiver couldn't say. "It's a business. I wish I could give you an answer saying if I'm going to be here next year or not, but honestly I really don't know, so we'll just see how it plays out," Jackson said after a four-catch, 86-yard day that reminded fans, and maybe management, about the receiver's big-play ability.

DeSean Jackson played and acted like a star Sunday. He made a huge play when his team needed one and then said all the right things when facing sensitive questions in the locker room. It happened too late to save the Eagles' season. Was it also too late to save Jackson's relationship with the team? The two-time Pro Bowl receiver couldn't say. "It's a business. I wish I could give you an answer saying if I'm going to be here next year or not, but honestly I really don't know, so we'll just see how it plays out," Jackson said after a four-catch, 86-yard day that reminded fans, and maybe management, about the receiver's big-play ability.

DEAR ABBY: My 78-year-old mother opens her mouth for only three reasons - to tell me what to do, complain about other people and to remind me that when my older sister died, it left a void in her life no one can fill, including me and my other sister. Several months ago, I visited Mom and she wasn't feeling well. She has a heart condition and osteoporosis, which makes her unsteady on her feet. A few weeks later, I called to check on her but couldn't reach her by phone. Because I live 150 miles away, I asked my uncle to check on her. He went to her house several times and rang her bell, but got no answer.

Robert M. Kelley is an Inquirer editor The photo really took me back - to being chased by a coach, to a tale of a fur coat and jail, and a runner on strike. The man in the upper left of the photo was known to me only as "Mr. Walker," and my only direct interaction with him was being chased by him. He always seemed to have an air of self-importance, and now I know why: About 10 years before I knew him, he had been the coach of the high school basketball team in the photo.

City Council sessions just haven't been the same since the always-quotable Rick Mariano was sent away to the federal slammer. But he's out of prison now and recently made an intriguing offer to Tommy Massaro, the good-government guru who is running an extensive eight-month orientation for the potential class of Council freshmen. Mariano said he would like to talk to the candidates. The professor's topic: "How not to go to jail. " Mariano's lecture could offer instruction on the temptations and hubris that can lead to a Council member's downfall as well as a scared-straight program for prospective pols.

CLEVELAND - The Indians sat in first place when, on the cool and pleasant evening of June 20, they opened a series with the Colorado Rockies at Progressive Field. Despite the good record and weather, and even though interleague play typically produces a crowd bump, Northern Ohio's tortured sports fans were unmoved. The Indians, then last in baseball attendance, drew just 15,224 spectators to the 8-7 loss. Perhaps Clevelanders suspected the success was a first-half illusion.

Something about Oakland reminds us of Philly Here's a cautionary tale the Phillies might want to pay attention to: The lowly Athletics are tied with the Atlanta Braves for the best ERA in the majors, a spanking 3.01 runs per game allowed despite playing in the hitter-heavy American League. (The Phils, with a 3.21 ERA, are No. 3.) But in a stunning display of pitching-to-hitting disparity, Oakland ranks 25th in batting average, 26th in runs scored, and 29th in home runs - a condition that has the A's at the bottom of AL West.