Father And Daughter

In By The Light of My Father's Smile (Random House, $22.95), Alice Walker explores the impact of sexuality on father-daughter relationships. The book opens with the ghost of a father watching from beyond the grave as his daughter makes love, first to her husband and then to another woman: "She was radiant and sensual . . . she was, as a woman, someone I truly did not know. " That lack of knowledge is at the heart of Walker's book. "Fathers tend to abandon their daughters when they become pubescent in many, many places in the world," Walker said in a recent interview.

Downingtown West softball coach Jeff Cellucci had explicit instructions from his wife, Anita, when his team played Twin Valley, coached by his daughter Natalie. They played in the season opener for both teams on March 28. "She told me I couldn't win by the 10-run rule," said Cellucci, knowing that his daughter is in her first year as Raiders coach. "If I did, she told me I couldn't come home. " His daughter is trying to improve a program that won only three games last season.

A father-daughter relationship can be complicated enough, but add a coach- player relationship to the formula and it can be a tumultuous adventure. "The best thing is when I want to pitch - it doesn't matter what time of day it is, he's there," Jenn Jenderko said. "He" is her father, Roy, who is her pitching coach at Archbishop Wood. The bad things are generally limited to their clash of wills. "He calls it coaching. I call it yelling," Jenn Jenderko said. "Sometimes I can be too sensitive, I know.

Back in '65, just four days before Dusty Arfons was born, her father, Art, sped across the Bonneville Salt Flats to prove he was the fastest man on land, 576.55 miles per hour burning up the Utah desert. Today, Art is in a safer line of work: He pulls 50,000-pound weights with a turbine-powered tractor called the Green Monster. Dusty hardly minds; she's followed in her father's tire tracks and is right there racing against him. "Oh, she's beaten me three or four times," says Art Arfons, who is scheduled to race as a team with his daughter against the father-son team of Bud and Steve Jaske tonight and tomorrow in the U.S. Hot Rod Association Truck and Tractor Championship at the Spectrum.

Frank Corace figures his daughter Tricia began to beat him on the golf course when she was "probably around 14 or 15. " That was in the mid-1980s. Now that she has passed him for good - Tricia carries a 3 handicap and Frank an 8 - the father figures it's better to play golf with his daughter than against her. Together, they were almost good enough on Aug. 12 to bring the Philadelphia Mixed Championship for the Boyle Cup back to their home course of North Hills Country Club.

A farmer stalks into the house at the end of the day and slumps into a chair. His dutiful daughter kneels and pulls his boots off. They say nothing, and as they go about the simple domestic business of the evening, this silence - broken only by the scrape of knife on plate - becomes a powerful statement. For what we have in Dust is more than a failure to communicate or even a woman submitting to the domineering force in her life. As this stark and haunting movie progresses into further tragedy and madness, it emerges as the refusal of one person, the father, to recognize the very existence of the other.

When about 7,000 participants converge on Harrisburg today for the 12th annual Keystone State Games, Francis Fritz will accompany his daughter, Jennifer. Then he will compete with her. The Fritzes, from Upper Darby, will enter their fourth straight Keystone Games archery competition holding some pretty impressive credentials: Jennifer is a three-time gold medalist in the female intermediate division (age 15-17), and Francis is a two-time silver medalist in the senior male division (18-49)

Upper Makefield teen Clare Roche made the climb up Africa's tallest mountain, not only for the adventure, but also for the time. Seven days scaling Mount Kilimanjaro and through its five ecosystems was a week alone with the father she would eventually be leaving behind for college. So, on Christmas Day, Roche and her father, Richard, set out for the mountain's peak, but not before the father-daughter pilgrimage turned into something else. The trip became a chance to shine a spotlight on Tanzania, a majestic country troubled by crises such as war and famine, and to do something to help.

A 29-year-old Bucks County woman died in an apartment fire early yesterday as her husband and one of their daughters escaped by jumping from a window. Their other daughter was rescued by police. Firefighters tried but were unable to find the mother, Wendy Bray, until after the fire was extinguished. Her body was found under debris in the living room of the Brays' apartment, in the 2200 block of Pileggi Drive, Warrington, Warrington Fire Chief Peter Schecter said. Her husband, Douglas, 24, who Schecter said had jumped from the second- floor apartment just before rescuers arrived, was in stable condition yesterday in the burn center at Crozer-Chester Medical Center, Upland.

When Dr. Nina Mingioni, a second-year resident at Albert Einstein Medical Center, works late at night and has a question about a patient - say, should she drain fluid from the lung first, or from the stomach? - she often calls home and consults with Dr. Ellen Zagrebelsky, her mother, or Dr. Vladimir Zagrebelsky, her father. Often, both parents get on the phone - one upstairs, the other down. The conversation can get animated, especially when they differ in opinion. What does the youngest doctor in the family do?

Buried in a harmless-looking sand pit in Lancaster were a bunch of plastic devices designed with gruesome intent: to kill or maim anyone who steps on top of them. They were land mines - in this case, filled with inert materials instead of explosives, but otherwise no different from millions of devices buried in war-torn regions around the world. Yet Tim Bechtel could see them. He moved a cylinder-shaped device back and forth over the sand, emitting a steady stream of radio waves - radar - and bit by bit an image of the mines emerged on a nearby computer screen.

Question: Seventeen years ago I divorced the mother of my four children. After a heated divorce lasting several months, we agreed on things and split up legally. Throughout the proceedings, my wife used my children as weapons against me, and I spent the next several years listening to insult after insult from my children, driven from their mother. Under no circumstances will I paint the picture that I was the perfect angel, but I never expected or deserved what I got from them. My work had me out of state for the last seven years.

Third in a series of Daily News profiles of runners entered in the 32nd annual 10-mile Blue Cross Broad Street Run May 1. Who: Alyssa and Walt DeTreux Residence: Philadelphia Ages: Alyssa, 19; Walt, 49. Family: Mother/wife Maryann; brothers/sons Walt, Matt, Pat. Education: Alyssa is a freshman at the University of Delaware. She is a graduate of Nazareth Academy. Walt: Cardinal Dougherty High, Penn State, Temple Law School. He is a labor arbitrator. Career plans: Alyssa is a history major who plans to be a museum curator.

"Somewhere" has prompted gripes that nothing much happens in it, and, by contemporary standards, that's true. Feathers do not grow from Natalie Portman's shoulders, and she does not perform Swan Lake with a shard of glass in her abdomen. Ben Stiller does not stick a syringe in Robert De Niro's junk. Jason Statham does not kill or maim a zillion people (I say this at the risk of divulging plot details from "The Mechanic"). It's true that nothing like this happens in the observational, uneventful "Somewhere," but we should know by now that nothing much happens in Sofia Coppola movies.

GIMME FIVE Due to the popularity of last week's Father's Day Fandango poll of the Top Five father-son acting duos, here are the Top Five father-daughter acting combos, issued with the understanding that fans apparently did not realize that Henry Fonda is dead: 1. Billy Ray and Miley Cyrus. 2. Will and Willow Smith. 3. Jon Voight and Angelina Jolie. 4. Eric and Emma Roberts. 5. Henry and Jane Fonda.

Their cocktails properly mixed, Lee and Jennel raised their red plastic cups Friday and toasted the Flyers, a prelude to their own little two-person tailgate party in the rapidly filling parking lot outside the Wachovia Center. This may not have been the kind of father-daughter moment Norman Rockwell would have depicted, but it was theirs. The bond between Lee Wooster and Jennel officially began 23 years ago when Jennel was born, the third of his three daughters. But to hear them talk, the bond strengthened 13 years ago, when Lee took Jennel to her first Flyers game.

Liz Cheney doesn't hold a U.S. Senate seat. She doesn't have the power to call committee hearings to intimidate those who dare disagree with her. And she isn't practicing her demagoguery in an era of widespread fear of an existential threat. Nevertheless, she has slipped easily into the role of Joseph McCarthy. Maybe it's in her genes. The daughter of the former vice president, she has her father's meanness, his dark view of the world, and his autocratic sense of authority.

COLLEEN LaRose was a troubled woman even before, authorities say, she went on the Internet as JihadJane and offered herself up as an avenging angel to Islamic militants. A possible suicide attempt prompted by the death of her beloved father, drinking bouts and reported legal troubles in her former home in Texas all preceded the arrest of LaRose, 46, of Pennsburg, Montgomery County, last fall for allegedly trawling the Internet in search of terrorists she could aid and pledging to die for their cause.

Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest ones. Michael Resnic of Philadelphia and his daughter, Madi, 12, were spectators at the Philadelphia Marathon two years ago when they noticed something that seemed wrong. As thousands of runners prepared to start the race on the chilly November morning, the athletes shed their warm-up clothing. It's standard practice at marathons - runners don't need the extra layers because they heat up naturally during the 26.2-mile race. The runners don't want to carry the spare clothing with them, so they discard it at the starting point or along the first few miles of the route.

As the crowd grew for the Philadelphia Marathon on Nov. 22, so, too, did the piles of detritus. Tossed-off T-shirts, hoodies, sweatpants, windbreakers, hats, gloves, an occasional scarf all littered the edges of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. More hung from the crowd barriers, like so much drying laundry. Long-distance runners surely burn a lot of calories. They also, it turns out, shed a lot of clothes - which, until last year, ended up, for the most part, in the back of city sanitation trucks.