Family Secrets

The garment from which Kilt takes its name begins in the play as a dance-club gimmick and ends up as a symbol of family solidarity. The work by Canadian playwright Jonathan Wilson (presented by the Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival) ultimately concludes in a wash of sentimentality and not much significance, yet it is filled with nicely drawn characters and engaging scenes. Wilson also makes a strong case that homosexuality is a regular, if not always acknowledged or accepted, component of the "normal" family.

What's the matter, has everyone taken leave of his senses? Crazy things keep happening, and nobody seems to notice. Am I the only one who's sane? Or am I the one going bonkers? For example, I find the public reaction to Deanna Young, the 13-year-old who turned in her parents to the police as drug users, bizarre. She has become a national heroine. Movie companies are bidding for the rights to her story. She is praised by Nancy Reagan as a loving daughter. Doesn't anyone else think of her as a little snitch?

SMALL VICTORIES Fiction. By Sallie Bingham. Zoland Books. $20.95. This sad and somewhat unsatisfying tale is Sallie Bingham's second novel - although some family members might be tempted to suggest that it's really her third. Bingham, founder of the Kentucky Foundation for Women and publisher of a feminist literary magazine called the American Voice, is best known as the firebrand daughter of Kentucky's fabled Bingham dynasty. It was her conflicts with her publisher brother, Barry Bingham Jr., that helped precipitate the sale of the Bingham newspapers, the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, to the Gannett Co. in 1986.

Hollywood's old and new leading men - Robert Redford and Matthew Broderick - are the stars of the latest videos to reach your local store. LEGAL EAGLES (1986) (MCA) $89.95. 116 minutes. Redford charms Debra Winger, is charmed by Daryl Hannah and avoids getting burned in the many four- alarm fires that rage in this overproduced star vehicle about lawyers solving a murder in the New York art world. FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF (1986) (Paramount) $79.95. 103 minutes. Ferris Bueller (Broderick)

JOHN STREET and Michael Nutter have never found much to like about each other. But they do seem to have a common cause. They're both doing all they can to destroy Street's legacy. They go about it in different ways. Nutter is uncharacteristically bold in his repudiation of the Street years. His mayoral campaign was all about positioning himself as the un-Street. In his first year, Nutter was like a third-world dictator toppling his predecessor's statues to blot out all remaining vestiges of the last regime.

Michael Jackson is strapped for cash and is offering Sony Music some of his music properties in hopes of picking up at least $100 mil, Newsweek reports this week. The Beatles catalog is the centerpiece of the deal, which would create a new music publishing firm with the self-anointed King of Pop as co- owner. The mag said Jackson "has been squeezed for cash in recent months" and has been borrowing heavily. It cited the dollar-drainers as his fighting of lawsuits, living in high style and spending $9 mil of his own coin to promote his album, HIStory, which has sold 10 mil copies worldwide.

Maybe it's the way he waited until she was out of the room to call her pretty. Or, the way she described him as a kind man, a Christian man, a family man. And not a womanizer, either. Perhaps it's that they eloped not long ago after a 10-day romance. No questions. No doubts. But talking to Gussie and Clyde Latham makes you wonder what good deeds they did in a previous life to deserve each other. Because after raising their children and burying their mates, Gussie Lancaster and Clyde Latham found each other.

Movies Bad Teacher Buck See Steven Rea's preview on H4. Cars 2 See Steven Rea's preview on H2. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop The late-night TV host is shown on his "Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television" tour, which took place after he lost his job at NBC. Rejoice and Shout Documentary on the long history of gospel music. Viva Riva! A Congolese hood returns to his hometown of Kinsasha, where he becomes involved with another gangster's woman.

Uncle Ralphie, 71, had just heard about the cookbook of family recipes his nephews were writing to celebrate their restaurant's 100th anniversary. "There will be no more secrets," nephew Jimmy Rubino, a co-owner of Ralph's Italian Restaurant in South Philadelphia, told him. "When I sat down and told my Uncle Ralphie I was going to do this cookbook, he had such a concerned look," Jimmy said. "Then he comes into the office and he looks around, like he's doing espionage, and he says, 'Leave some ingredients out of the recipes.

Jean-Loup Hubert's Le Grand Chemin (The Grand Highway) reaches the thrice familiar and unarguable conclusion that life offers no easy roads, and it still makes the journey across heavily traveled terrain seem like a new and refreshing experience. In this affecting autobiographical movie, Hubert has cast his own son Antoine as his alter ego, and has returned to a pivotal year in his childhood in a small village in Britanny in 1958. By examining the interplay of generations and the way someone about to embark on the journey can have a profound and cathartic impact on a couple who have lost their way in midlife, he has restated some old truths with extraordinary delicacy and sensitivity.