Fine Line

Q: Charles, what's your opinion on professional soccer? I've got friends who absolutely hate it, curse it whenever they see it on TV. I've got others who think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. I've never played, but I find myself getting sucked in when it's on TV now, especially when it's one of the really good European teams. Is there something wrong with me? — A Soccer Lover in Chester A: Dude, there's no law that says you have to like what your friends like.

Like Arms and the Man, which preceded it by three years, G.B. Shaw's 1897 Candida has to do with a woman asked to choose between a pair of suitors. Yet the two plays are substantially different. In Arms, the young woman is a pampered ninny, largely a device to accommodate the conflict between a preening romantic and a gimlet-eyed pragmatist. But in Candida, being revived at the Arden Theatre, the woman is not only the object of the conflict but must define its terms, and this time Shaw presents her no clear choice.

After blowing out its second straight opponent Friday night, raising its season scoring total to 69 points and its yardage to nearly 850, Downingtown coach John Barr was most excited about his linebackers. Linebackers? "We lost our three starting linebackers to graduation," Barr said after the 28-0 nonleague win over visiting Catholic League champion Archbishop Ryan. "We knew we had good ends, nose guards, tackles and backs, but we needed to get some play out of the linebackers.

Red-haired, frail and freckled was how the character of Solomon in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was first imagined. But as soon as Ernie Hudson read Amanda Silver's script, he wanted the part. So what if Hudson has dark hair, is athletic-looking and black? "I got hold of the script by accident," recalls Hudson, best known for his role as Winston Zeddemore in the two Ghostbusters pics. "I told my agent that I had to get in for a reading. It took me two or three weeks to finally get a meeting.

When Villanova coach Rollie Massimino makes a list of great unsolved mysteries in the Big East, Seton Hall is bound to be near the top. The Pirates, who defeated the Wildcats last night at the duPont Pavilion, 81-77, have run off six consecutive victories over their Main Line foes. Most of those games could have gone either way. But this one ended with Seton Hall players dancing off the floor and Massimino shaking his head about an unexpected problem. The Wildcats (5-2, 0-1)

Meredith Unger knows the value of hard work. Hard work led to the Haverford College junior's victory in the recent Centennial Conference cross-country championships. But Unger, who will lead the Haverford women's team into the Division III NCAA Mideast Regional tomorrow at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., knows there is a fine line between hard work and an obsession that leads to an eating disorder. Many athletes cross that line, and Unger, a member of Haverford's Eating Disorders Council, tries to help them with their problems.

There is no NFL protocol for the rest of the body. Get a concussion and, due to the vagaries of the injury and the league's long failure to treat head shots seriously, a player has to pass a series of tests and be cleared by an independent neurologist. Injure your hand, break a rib, tear a ligament, sprain an ankle - do any of those and a player is not only free to play if he can, he is celebrated for his toughness. Playing hurt adds to the mystique, especially for quarterbacks.

Immediately after the new owners moved in, food mysteriously began to disappear. But the way Ed Ferguson remembers it, it wasn't until several days later that they found out why: The seller had left his pet monkey behind. Fortunately, sellers who leave things behind - or at least things of value - are a rarity. What happens far more frequently is that they take things that they shouldn't. All manner of things, too, like toilet seats, built-in microwaves, light fixtures, sometimes even the shrubs.

The man leans across the table and asks the question again, as if I had not heard him the first time. "Where is the line?" It is mid-morning and we are sitting over coffee - the West Coast's drug of choice - talking ostensibly about national politics. But the subject gravitates naturally toward sexual politics. He wants to know: "Where is the line?" Ever since Anita Hill's story exploded all over his office, spewing its uneasy debris, he has been searching for an E-Z marker to separate flirtation from harassment, a threshold between attention that is welcome and unwelcome.

What's a director to do? The movie The Wizard of Oz is perhaps the most seen, most loved, most familiar-to-everyone movie ever made. So if you're Charles Abbott, and you're charged with taking theatergoers off to see the wizard in a musical theater piece, do you imitate the movie or try to be original at every turn? "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't," Abbott conceded during a break in rehearsals for the show, which previews today and Tuesday and opens Wednesday at the Walnut Street Theatre.

Q: Charles, what's your opinion on professional soccer? I've got friends who absolutely hate it, curse it whenever they see it on TV. I've got others who think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. I've never played, but I find myself getting sucked in when it's on TV now, especially when it's one of the really good European teams. Is there something wrong with me? — A Soccer Lover in Chester A: Dude, there's no law that says you have to like what your friends like.

IT HAD TO have been a strange feeling for Cole Hamels to look up at the eighth inning of Sunday's game with the New York Mets and see a big crooked number in the scoring column for the Phillies. Five runs in an inning? For the past two seasons, Hamels would have been overjoyed to get five runs from the Phillies in a game that he had started. For whatever reason, Hamels has been the poster guy for pitchers who suffer from a lack of run support. Last season, Hamels allowed two earned runs or fewer in 21 of his 31 starts (68 percent)

To the legion of Americans running away from a hamburger additive as fast as a startled Angus, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is here to tell you: "It's beef, dude. " Technically, he's right. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's official definition of beef for marketing purposes is "flesh of cattle. " And the product officially known as "lean, finely textured beef," and now infamously known as "pink slime," does originate with a cow. But, dude, we're talking about salvaged scraps, simmered at low heat and spun at high speed to remove the fat, then spritzed with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Claude Giroux, Scott Hartnell, and Jaromir Jagr have been the Flyers' best line this season, but they have struggled recently and have a combined minus-17 in their last six games. Flyers coach Peter Laviolette isn't panicking; he said the unit will remain intact for Saturday's matinee against New Jersey in Newark. "I've tried to be patient the entire year with power plays and lines, and I'll continue to do that," Laviolette said after Friday's practice in Voorhees. After Thursday's 4-1 loss to the New York Islanders, Flyers defenseman Kimmo Timonen suggested that Giroux - who has just one goal in his last 12 games and is goalless in his last eight contests - was putting too much pressure on himself.

IF YOU DON'T know the name Amelia Rivera, you will soon. Her story is going viral as I type this. It's no wonder. Amelia is the embodiment of our ongoing moral debate about whom we let live, whom we let go and the line that separates the two. It's a line that, thanks to medical technology and uneven access to its life-saving powers, continues to blur and shift. Three-year-old Amelia ("Mia" to her Stratford, N.J., parents, Chrissy and Joe, and her big brothers, Joey and Nathan)

MORGANTOWN, W. Va. - For most of the way, Villanova looked about as together as it has this season. That's the good news. Trouble is, it still wasn't enough last night, against a West Virginia team that has two more seniors and four more freshmen than the Wildcats, who have zero and five, respectively. But with 4 minutes remaining in their Big East opener, they were down by only three points, in a place where they'd only won once in their previous five trips. And the WVU Coliseum that Jerry West pretty much erected is still hardly a visitor-friendly environment, even when the student body is away on holiday hiatus.

Eagles quarterback Michael Vick says physically he is "getting better" after returning to the field for the first time after missing three games with broken ribs. "It's been tough the last 3-4 weeks," Vick told the team's website. "Last week didn't make it any better. I'm just trying to stay alive and just trying to be accountable to my teammates and my team. " The question of Vick's unwillingness to slide and avoid contact continues to arise. "I don't want him to take the big hits," coach Andy said Monday.

LIFE IS ALL about lessons. Temple's football team found that out the hard way last week. It shouldn't happen, but it does. Now, well, there's another game to play. And the Owls' "Bloody Tuesday" practice was probably even redder than usual. First-year coach Steve Addazio didn't mince his analysis yesterday. Going from winning, 38-7, at Maryland to losing, 36-13, to Toledo will do that. "We have to learn how to handle success better," said Addazio, whose team (3-2, 1-1 MAC East)

There is no NFL protocol for the rest of the body. Get a concussion and, due to the vagaries of the injury and the league's long failure to treat head shots seriously, a player has to pass a series of tests and be cleared by an independent neurologist. Injure your hand, break a rib, tear a ligament, sprain an ankle - do any of those and a player is not only free to play if he can, he is celebrated for his toughness. Playing hurt adds to the mystique, especially for quarterbacks.

NEW YORK - High above leftfield, the Citi Field scoreboard told an out-of-town story that will impact the Phillies when they close out the regular season with a series against the Braves. The Braves lost again yesterday. The Cardinals won. That means St. Louis is now just a game behind in the wild-card standings. Which in turn means that Charlie Manuel will walk a thin line between respecting the integrity of the game by doing everything he can to win, and still do what he has to do to get his team ready for the playoffs, which begin Saturday at Citizens Bank Park.