Cosmos

The parentage of Richard Benjamin's My Stepmother Is an Alien can be traced back through Cocoon to a certain extraterrestrial botanist who waddled his way into the hearts of millions seven years ago. Like his other megahits, Steven Spielberg's E.T. encouraged its share of imitations and rip-offs. With some noteworthy exceptions, such as Ron Howard's Cocoon, most of them have done nothing more than make us appreciate the simple genius and impeccable craftsmanship of the original.

St. Basil graduate Pat Clayton has made big winners out of the 14 rookies who showed up on her volleyball court for the start of the season at Penn State's Ogontz Campus. Coach Clayton's squad is 22-7 overall and leads the Eastern Pennsylvania Collegiate Conference (EPCC) Northern Division with a 9-1 record. The Little Lions also finished second in the Commonwealth Campus Athletic Conference (CCAC) East Division with a 11-1 mark. "We had 14 brand-new players at the start of the season; not one player returned from last year," said Clayton, who was named the EPCC Coach of the Year for her team's outstanding season.

Fran Mallee, a sophomore at La Salle University, was the individual medalist Thursday in the East Coast Athletic Conference Southern Qualifier at the Sheraton-Lancaster golf course in Lancaster. Mallee fired a 74 on the par-72 course to lead a field of 95 players. Mallee, a junior from Holy Ghost Prep, will play in the ECAC Championship Tournament at Hershey Country Club Saturday through Monday. "Fran has worked very hard on his game at Torresdale and has responded well to the lessons of Bud Lewis, the pro at Manufacturers Country Club," said La Salle golf coach Father Robert Breen.

Brower Hatcher is one of several artists being considered for a public art commission for Walnut Towers, a mixed residential-commercial building being constructed at Ninth and Walnut Streets by Parkway Corp. and Historic Landmarks for Living. Hatcher's proposal calls for a garden centered on a gigantic classical head that would appear, structurally and metaphorically, to be a comet. A latticelike, 28-foot-long "star trail" would stream from the rear of the head, creating, in the artist's words, "an allegory of past, present and future.

In 1976 I visited Oswiecim, Poland (Auschwitz). I felt the need to spend some time there in the town where my grandfather had served as shohet (religious kosher slaughterer), where my father had been born and where he took me as a young child to show me off to his side of the family. The kaddish (prayer) I said at the site of the ovens seemed so puny in relation to the outcry hanging in the air. The pall over Auschwitz is dense - not from the climate, but from the untold numbers of souls that are still earthbound and in need of the special help that calls for a religion's arsenal of after-life strategies.