Diary

Sixers' Andre Iguodala is keeping an exclusive diary for the Daily News at the World Championships. The latest entry comes after Team USA's 70-68 win over Brazil, which means the Americans have earned a spot in the elimination round. Iguodala finished with three points - all from the free throw line - and attempted just one field goal in 29 minutes. He also had five rebounds and five steals.     I know my role on this team. The main thing is we got the win. All the other stuff doesn't matter.

The Diary of Anne Frank has become this century's primer in the illumination of the human spirit. The pages written from her hiding place in Holland have made the young - and doomed - girl the symbol of hope, love and affirmation amid devastation. Her diary, published after she disappeared in the death camps late in World War II, has been a book and the basis of films, plays and meditations. In its latest transformation, it is the basis of a series of concerts around the country to raise money for UNICEF, the United Nations relief agency for children.

There is the "let go and let God" movie. And then there is Diary of a Mad Black Woman, a "let go, let God, and let 'er rip!" affair. Produced and written by gospel-theater phenom Tyler Perry, who plays three roles, Diary is a very curious and very entertaining mix, the Labradoodle of inspirational romantic-comedy-melodramas. If John Waters spliced together the plots of Far From Heaven and Big Momma's House and let Pedro Almod?var direct, it might resemble this frisky, unpredictable genre-bender that keeps the faith as it keeps it real.

Valiant is one word for Carrie Snodgress. There are others: direct, indefatigable, thoughtful. She characterizes herself as a good listener. She's not a bad talker, either. The actress, whose quiet rage as Tina in Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) may have created more feminists than Simone de Beauvoir inspired in her entire career, is now playing a noisy psycho-killer terrorizing Charles Bronson in Murphy's Law. What's a nice gal like her doing in a movie like this? "I'm not exactly financially solvent," Snodgress volunteers candidly from a Manhattan hotel tower, Central Park spread like a flowered carpet outside her picture window.

Sen. Bob Packwood used a curious one-two punch on national television yesterday, saying his memory was sound enough that he could categorize some diary entries as erroneous, but so dull that he drew blanks on people and events recounted in other passages. Three days after passages from his diary were made public and helped force his resignation from the Senate on Thursday, the Oregon Republican insisted that many accounts in the diary - dictated in his own voice over 25 years - were misstated or never happened.

In her diary, Anne Marie Fahey described Wilmington attorney Thomas J. Capano as a "controlling, manipulative, insecure, jealous maniac," who was obsessed with her life. In her last entry, two months before she disappeared, Fahey wrote of her relationship with Capano: "Now that I look back on that aspect of my life - I realize just how vunerable I had become . . . For one whole year, I allowed someone to take control of my life. " Excerpts from Fahey's diary, released yesterday by her family, draw a picture of a confused young woman desperately trying to find herself while juggling heavy relationships with two wealthy, powerful men. One of them was Capano, 46, whom she had been seeing on and off for almost three years.

The day after the Oscars no one in Hollywood was talking about Million Dollar Baby kayoing The Aviator. The talk was that Diary of a Mad Black Woman, a genre-bending slapstick dramedy of reconciliation written by and starring Tyler Perry, elbowed past the Will Smith romance Hitch to take in $22 million. While it's unusual for a film that's not on everybody's radar to open at No. 1, it's not as unusual as Diary itself. Faith-based without being preachy, sexy without being graphic, and as hilarious as it is serious, Diary is playing to audiences beyond its core constituency of African American women, pulling in $12 million during its second weekend.

Outside Ralph "Junior" Staino's door were the aqua-green waters of the Caribbean. Behind his beach house were the lush mountains of the Dominican Republic. He had novels to read, a radio that could pick up KYW in Philadelphia, a television, lots of rum, good food. He had a new car, new friends, and an alias, "Joseph Esposito of Hollywood, Fla. " But Staino, 56, a longtime Philadelphia rackets figure and reputed Mafia soldier, was running from the law. An FBI agent named Charles "Bud" Warner was in relentless pursuit.

A field diary partially written with berry juice on old newsprint, paper scraps, and book margins in the last years of the life of British explorer David Livingstone is legible for the first time in 141 years with the help of modern spectral-imaging technology and the old-fashioned sleuthing of a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Adrian S. Wisnicki, an assistant professor of 19th-century British literature, studies the works of Victorian-era explorers and novelists, including Livingstone, Richard Burton, and Joseph Conrad, based on their travels to Africa and across the British Empire.

Most music lovers can count the number of works they know for voice and string quartet on one hand, but are likely to know each one by heart, whether Vaughan Williams' On Wenlock's Edge or Barber's Dover Beach . To this under-explored medium, the compulsively enterprising Lyric Fest brought into being three new works that could be taken to heart immediately at their Saturday premieres at Philadelphia University. All three composers took similar approaches. Piano accompaniments to vocal works tend to be extremely active in externalizing the meaning of the verses at hand.

IN HIS REVIEW of Amber Heard's new movie, "The Rum Diary," Daily News film critic Gary Thompson referred to Heard as "a dish. " It's an objectifying term, for sure, but one from a previous era - the type of term Alan Ladd might say about Veronica Lake, or Robert Mitchum in referencing Marilyn Monroe. And it's fitting for Heard, whose beauty and style is from another era. Yes, she's been on the cover of Maxim , but her image could just as easily be painted on the side of a World War II plane, like Betty Grable, or working for French director Roger Vadim in the 1960s, like Brigitte Bardot.

AT THE END of his life, Hunter S. Thompson worried that he'd be remembered as a caricature of himself, not as the brilliant writer he actually was in the 1970s. For the drug/booze antics referenced in his books, not for the books themselves. So it's with some consternation that we consider "The Rum Diary. " It plays into Thompson's worst fears by tallying his years in Puerto Rico as a bar tab, but it also resulted in the publishing of the author's unfinished "Rum Diary" novel, apparently quite good.

In 1819, Charles Willson Peale headed down to Washington to paint portraits of President James Monroe, Henry Clay, and other dignitaries for exhibition in the famed Peale museum located in Independence Hall. But there was another sitter the painter wanted to snare on his trip. "I heard of a Negro who is living in Georgetown said to be 140 years of age," Peale wrote in his diary. "He is comfortable in his Situation having Bank stock and lives in his own house. " The man was Yarrow Mamout, a free African, a Muslim who indeed held bank stock, purchased with great effort to secure a comfortable old age - after a life of abduction and bondage.

EgoPo Classic Theater, under Lane Savadove's direction, launches its Festival of Jewish Theater with The Diary of Anne Frank at the Prince Music Theater Cabaret. How do you review an excellent production of a terrible play? Especially when that play is iconic? Well, here goes. The story, as everyone knows, is about a 13-year-old Jewish girl who, with her parents and older sister, hides from the Nazis in an attic along with another family and a dentist. Eight people, living in fear and hunger, alert to every noise, getting on one another's nerves.

Mariano Rivera, Bronx Dreams, Pinstripe Legends, and the Future of the New York Yankees By Charley Rosen Harper. 384 pp. $25.99 Reviewed by Joelle Farrell As a title, Bullpen Diaries isn't bad. The author, Charley Rosen, an analyst for FoxSports.com and author of 11 sports books, spends 2010 watching the Yankees bullpen, using his extensive baseball knowledge to dissect every game from a reliever's point of view. The book reads at times like one big scouting report, explaining who threw what and how the game turned out. The subtitle, on the other hand, seems to offer a promise that the book never keeps.

With about 50 million copies of his "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" graphic novels in circulation, author Jeff Kinney has a loyal following of readers who've outgrown Dr. Seuss but aren't ready for Harry Potter. The arrival of the second live-action "Wimpy Kid" movie will give them and indulgent parents something to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon. The movie, which lacks much of the mischievous, subversive appeal of last year's debut film, plays directly to the middle school set. The antihero of the series is Greg Heffley, a put-upon 12-year-old who sees his life as an unending series of humiliations.

Bristol Riverside Theatre's current production, The Eyes of Babylon , serves as a pinch hitter for the show originally scheduled in the slot: Arthur Miller's All My Sons . The two share the theme of wartime morality (present and absent), but Jeff Key's solo first-person account of being a gay Marine under "don't ask, don't tell," and a soldier with a pacifist's heart during Operation Iraqi Freedom, suits our murkier contemporary conflict and shifting global loyalties just fine.

When you find a good bet, particularly at the box office, keep wagering - that's what Flashpoint Theatre Company is doing for the seventh holiday season, in what has become Center City's annual production of The Santaland Diaries . If you're going to pick a perennial Christmas show to stage, David Sedaris' wonderfully sharp look at the holiday season - seen through his own eyes, working as an elf at the original Macy's in New York -...