Gimmick

One of the first lessons we are taught by our parents, teachers and other persons of authority is that we must obey the law. Later in life we are taught that the basic philosophy of our nation is that it is based upon laws, not on the whims or the political designs of elected leaders. If the President of the United States doesn't accept this philosophy, how can we expect youth to obey the law? As Al Smith, governor of New York about 60 years ago, said: "Let's look at the record.

You need more than just ability to make a name for yourself in the NFL these days. You also need a gimmick. You need a weird haircut or a strange pet or a belly the size of the Hindenburg. You need a paternity suit or a drug suspension or a book on The New York Times best-seller list. Other than being a devout Christian and a devoted family man, Charles Mann doesn't have a gimmick. To make matters worse, he lines up just three doors down from an outspoken fellow by the name of Dexter Manley, who held the all- time NFL record for gimmicks until Brian Bosworth came along and broke it. So, it is not terribly surprising that, despite notching 34 1/2 quarterback sacks over the last three seasons, it has taken the world a while to finally get around to noticing the Washington Redskins' other defensive end. Mann stomped into our conciousness last January in the Redskins' dramatic 21-17 playoff victory over the Chicago Bears.

In this Eminem-saturated climate, the white emcee is hardly the scorned figure he once was. As hip-hop becomes an increasingly portable culture, racial baggage has never been less of an issue; where you are is becoming more important than how you got there. That only makes more quizzical the shamelessly geeky, Ivy League-educated stylings of MC Paul Barman. Discovered by visionary producer Prince Paul in 1999, the Brown graduate has let his background shape his music, rather than let an affinity for hip-hop dictate his identity.

Some productions sound better in the conception than they succeed in the execution, although why this should be is not always clear. Consider, for instance, Travels With My Aunt, in which four actors take 23 roles in Graham Greene's 1969 comic novel about an eccentric old woman and her staid, prim nephew. Giles Havergal's adaptation, a hit in London, opened last night at the Minetta Lane with Jim Dale and Brian Murray heading the busy little cast. You may remember Travels With My Aunt from the 1972 George Cukor film starring Maggie Smith and Alec McCowen.

Dael Orlandersmith is a force of nature, a gold-braided typhoon tossing scraps of memory and emotion around like matchsticks. She's a ghetto griot, a spellbinding shaman conjuring up people so fully formed that their struggles with a harsh, fatally seductive world seem nothing less than the stuff of epic. And she's a poetic sybarite, a black, female Walt Whitman drunk with the power of words to pummel like fists or caress like swaths of silk. She is all this and a good deal more in The Gimmick, her one-woman show on view through Sunday on the capacious stage of the McCarter Theatre, which becomes McCarter's "second stage" when outfitted with a small playing area fronting rows of seats.

Let us be mercifully brief about this. Steven Berkoff's Kvetch, which the Vox Theatre Company is presenting through Nov. 7 at the Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 3, is a gimmick-driven comedy of a particularly nasty and repellent hue. The fact that it has actually found admirers in both this country and England is a sad commentary on a theater virtually bereft of genuine satire. Kvetch has to do with Frank, a woebegone, middle-aged fabric salesman; Donna, his sex-starved wife; Hal, one of Frank's co-workers; George, an overbearing customer, and Donna's nameless mother, whose belching and flatulence inspire much of the play's putative humor.

Coming soon to the mailboxes of 300,000 Democrats in New Jersey is a package of advertisements that portray U.S. Rep. James J. Florio as "a packaged" Democratic candidate for governor. The campaign gimmick, which will be accompanied by radio and television ads in the New York and Philadelphia markets, was unveiled yesterday by Assemblyman Alan J. Karcher of Middlesex County, Florio's chief opponent in the June 6 primary. Karcher's ads, attacking Florio as a candidate beholden to New Jersey's 21 Democratic county chairmen, and special-interest groups such as the insurance industry and the gun lobby, feature a bright yellow cereal box with an unflattering characterization of the eight-term congressman from Camden County.

HOW DO YOU spell relief? It isn't "Federal Gas Tax Holiday," no matter what presidential candidates John McCain or Hillary Clinton say. In the first place, this gimmick - removing the 18.4 cents a gallon federal excise tax for the summer - simply isn't going to happen. There's less than a month until Memorial Day, not enough time for Congress to act. Even if it did, imagine the administrative nightmare of turning off $10 billion in gas tax collections for three months and then turning them back on. Except, of course, some politicians would call reinstating it a tax increase.

Dael Orlandersmith was raised in East Harlem. Although she says her impressive one-woman show The Gimmick, which is set in that neighborhood, is fictional, she concedes that some of it is derived from her own experiences. A part that is, one suspects, is the lead character's discovery as a young teenager of the power and beauty of language and the realization that she wants to be a writer. The Gimmick - which is being presented at the Wilma Theater as the concluding show in the Wilma 2 series - does, indeed, demonstrate that coming from the same environment, Orlandersmith herself certainly developed into an extraordinary writer.

High-fliers took the savings-and-loan industry off a cliff in the 1980s, while politicians and regulators were asleep at the wheel. Cleaning up the mess has cost taxpayers more than $100 billion - and it's not over. This week, taxpayers got more stickershock as the Supreme Court raised the cost by at least $10 billion. This decision springs from the fact that Congress and regulators weren't just napping. They were also trying to paper over basic problems in the S&L industry to keep the public from noticing.

The scratch-and-sniff "Aroma-Scope" gimmick of Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D didn't work. Maybe I got a defective card, but the scents you're supposed to sample when the number flashes on the screen and you scratch the corresponding number on your card all smelled like burned artificial blueberry syrup. So take away one "D" from this "4D" movie, one gimmick from a gimmick-laden kiddie comedy from the Robert Rodriguez Spy Kids factory. Gadgets, cheese puffs, and diapers fly off the screen in the cheesiest kid-friendly 3-D tradition.

By Michael Silverstein Washington's big new idea for keeping Social Security solvent, while saving the government about $300 billion over 10 years, is something called the "chained CPI. " It could soon replace the standard measure of inflation - the consumer price index, or CPI - long used to keep seniors' real-world benefits from being whittled away by price increases. The new yardstick would virtually guarantee that future Social Security cost-of-living adjustments will be smaller than if the standard CPI were used.

MAYBE MICHAEL VICK was just trying to project confidence yesterday. What came across was closer to cluelessness. It was hard to leave Vick's brief session with reporters at NovaCare feeling like the Eagles' quarterback understands and appreciates the adjustments defenses have made over his last half-dozen games, or that he plans to do anything differently. "I don't think we have to make changes," said Vick, who threw no interceptions in his first seven appearances this year, then threw six in his last five.

BOBBY JACKSON had a short NFL career - only two seasons - but the d-back from Alabama holds a special place in Eagles lore. Generously listed as 6-1, 190 pounds, Jackson's first and only season with the Eagles was 1960. He was a defensive back on that NFL championship squad, the last Eagles team to bring home the title. He played in all 12 regular-season games that year, not doing a whole bunch to distinguish himself. But in the title game against Green Bay on Dec. 26, Jackson had a hand in the final play of the season.

Once you read the title, you've pretty much seen the movie. The Invention of Lying is just what it sounds like: a fable about an alternate world in which everyone tells the absolute truth. As the narrator observes, "No deceit, no flattery, no fiction. " It's hardly a utopia because no one is capable of masking unhappiness or insecurities. As a waiter approaches a table, he doesn't open with, "My name is Chad. I'll be your server tonight. " Instead he blurts out, "I'm very embarrassed I work here.

I wasn't sure what the salt shaker was for at first. It came in the mail with a pepper shaker, and it had an I N.Y. logo on it. It was sent by an outfit called The Center for Consumer Freedom. With an ecru-colored gift card. "Congratulations!", it said, "You're now on the cutting edge of New York City culinary culture. " Then the card got down to business: It said that if New York Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden put in place his 10-year plan to remove 50 percent of the salt "from all restaurant meals," two things would happen.

In his speech to a joint session of Congress last night, President Obama outlined a sobering course for bringing the country back to fiscal responsibility. The president hopes to cut trillion-dollar federal deficits in half within four years by raising taxes on the wealthiest wage earners, reducing spending on the war in Iraq, and cutting wasteful programs, among other steps. "While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken . . . tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," said Obama.

TELEVISION, the medium that first divided us into a nation of red and blue states, last night pulled out every crayon in its box to show that map remade. Holograms, virtual rotundas, game show-style sets that cried out for briefcase-toting models - even a fussy set of "drawers" that opened to yield exit-poll nuggets - all served to mark time in the hours before the polls closed on the West Coast. But for sheer drama, no news division's bells or whistles could compete with the news itself, delivered in the final moments of prime time with none of the ambiguity that marked two previous presidential elections.

HOW DO YOU spell relief? It isn't "Federal Gas Tax Holiday," no matter what presidential candidates John McCain or Hillary Clinton say. In the first place, this gimmick - removing the 18.4 cents a gallon federal excise tax for the summer - simply isn't going to happen. There's less than a month until Memorial Day, not enough time for Congress to act. Even if it did, imagine the administrative nightmare of turning off $10 billion in gas tax collections for three months and then turning them back on. Except, of course, some politicians would call reinstating it a tax increase.

She's a different kind of mail-order bride, this girl in Lars and the Real Girl . For one thing, she actually arrives in a box, via UPS. And there's no language barrier, because she can't speak. But she is "anatomically correct," a feature highlighted on her XXX Web site. And Lars (Ryan Gosling), the small-town sad sack who's crashing in his brother and sister-in-law's garage, proceeds to fall for this life-size sex toy. If relationships are all about projecting your ideals and fantasies onto someone else - and aren't they, half the time?