Identity Crisis

Dwayne is your all-American guy. He dotes on his parents, adores his sister, and admires his colleagues at the bank, where he is the manager. His feelings are richly reciprocated by all. The one cloud over Dwayne's sunny life is about when to pop the question to his girlfriend. But it is soon subsumed by a storm system from across the Pacific. His birth mother, separated from her children during the Vietnam War, is coming to America. Once she lands, Dwayne and his sister, Mai, Viet refugees adopted by an African American couple when they were very young, will be swept up in an existential tempest with questions of nature, nurture and culture swirling around them, unsettling their happy domesticity.

While the fireworks flickered and boomed overhead Saturday, an illuminated marquee, located almost directly under the night-sky commotion, attempted to put into words the community spirit that was in the air. "We are proud to be part of Glouster Twsp," the sign heralded. The summerlike scene, complete with families huddled together on blankets, stood ready for a Norman Rockwell painting - right down to the misspelling. And though that may have delighted Rockwell, it didn't please township officials.

The Chinese wisdom that if you save a life, you are responsible for it forever is the basis of the frantic French farce Apr?s Vous, which prepares it bordelaise and serves it up with a nice little burgundy. Although the ingredients are excellent, the result is an overcooked comedy more often provoking indigestion than laughter. Incomparable Daniel Auteuil (The Girl on the Bridge, Jean de Florette) stars as Antoine, headwaiter of a Paris brasserie, so accustomed to serving others that when he sees a man about to hang himself from a chestnut tree in the park, he cuts the rope and brings him home for dinner.

Retired Army Gen. Colin L. Powell's surprise announcement that he won't seek the Republican presidential nomination spared the GOP an identity crisis at the very moment its identity as a conservative party seemed secure. Today's Republican Party is more ideological than it has been in decades; it's far more ideological than it was under Ronald Reagan, when the party still had a moderate rump. Republican officials may continue to argue that the party is a big tent, but Powell clearly didn't stand comfortably within its flaps.

A sheep farmer in France attacks a McDonald's with a tractor and becomes a folk hero. France balks at U.S.-backed sanctions against Iraq. Paris politicians complain variously that America is taking over the world or shirking its duties. Mon Dieu! Is America's oldest alliance in trouble? Probably not, analysts say. Rather, France is undergoing wrenching changes - politically, economically and culturally - and tweaking les americains is largely a byproduct of its mounting uncertainty.

Another one of those alternative-reality romances (see Sliding Doors, see The Matrix - hey, it's a love story too!), Passion of Mind stars Demi Moore as a woman with two lives, two lovers, two very comfy living situations: a hilltop house in postcard-parfait Provence, and a sleek, sky-high apartment in New York City. The only problem: Moore doesn't know if she's Marie, a widowed expatriate American raising her two kids in the French countryside, or Marty, a stylish, single go-getter literary agent.

It's amazing what someone can do with a stolen Social Security number. A woman in Wisconsin reported that such a thief ruined her good credit with almost $65,000 in purchases. Identity fraud has increased tenfold in the past five years. Ten states, including New Jersey, have adopted laws making it a crime to steal a person's identity. The Secret Service has jurisdiction over this crime nationally but takes only larger cases. In any event, a police report is needed in some cases to verify the crime for credit-card companies and banks, says Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer information and advocacy program in San Diego.

It was supposed to be one of the proudest days of his life. But when Gerald Luongo, mayor of Washington Township and recently elected state representative, turned on the television New Year's Day to watch the township's high school marching band perform in the Tournament of Roses Parade, he just shook his head in disbelief. There on the television screen for the whole country to see was the graphic: WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOL MARCHING BAND, SEWELL NEW JERSEY Problem is, Sewell is not in Washington Township.

How's this for a "peace dividend"? The dawning of peace in the Middle East is creating an identity crisis for American Jews and also driving a wedge between them and their Israeli "cousins. " That, at least, is the burden of a recent front-page article in the Wall Street Journal - and it rings true. American Jews, the thesis goes, have committed so much of their time and substance to the survival of the Jewish homeland that Israel has become the center of Jewish identity. But if peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors really takes hold, what will be left to preserve that identity?

Sun Co. Inc., which has jettisoned its aspirations of being a broad-based energy company, is also discarding its 13-year-old sunburst corporate logo and falling back on the tried-and-true Sunoco diamond. "It's really an attempt to eliminate a little bit of an identity crisis," said Robert H. Campbell, the chairman and chief executive of the Philadelphia oil company. Campbell said the company was also considering reverting to the name it dropped in 1976 - Sun Oil Co. - when the company recast itself "a diversified management company" rather than the regional oil refiner and marketer that Sun has become today.

See Paul (Mark Ruffalo) harvest his lush vegetable garden to provide ingredients for his luscious organic restaurant in Los Angeles. Paul's fecundity is a wonder. Where he scatters seed, there is abundance. In The Kids Are All Right , Lisa Cholodenko's sharp and seriously funny portrait of an American family, Paul is about to learn that a little deposit he made at the sperm bank 18 years ago has yielded two strapping teenagers. Paul is the bio-dad of Joni (Mia Wasikowska)

As industry sectors go, the creative economy is a work in progress - one with a bit of an identity crisis. "If you ask 11 people their definition of creative industries, you're going to get 11 different definitions," said Kelly Lee, president and chief executive officer of Innovation Philadelphia, an economic-development agency focused on supporting and growing the region's creative economy. While that term might conjure thoughts of artists in paint-streaked smocks subsisting on franks and beans for the love of craft, it is the for-profit side - including architects, engineers, information-technology wizards, and digital-media masters - that is exciting communities for the economic-development potential it represents.

"Back in Black" took on renewed resonance Monday night as AC/DC blasted through it just three songs into its visit to the Wachovia Center, on its first world tour in seven years. Playing a rapid-fire clip of classics as well as several cuts off the new Black Ice, the reinvigorated, Australian-born band provided a deafening level of rock power, belying the fact that most of its members are now in their 50s. Barrel-chested singer Brian Johnson, 61, and blistering lead guitarist Angus Young brought bruising force to their by-now-familiar routine.

You won't catch many country singers, alt- or otherwise, closing their set with a self-penned French number. "Mille Tendresses," the last song on Tift Merritt's newly released third album, Another Country, is just the most tangible sign that the North Carolina singer-songwriter has parted ways with the roots music movement. Not for lack of success, mind you: Her 2005 album, Tambourine, was nominated for three Americana Music Awards, and a country Grammy to boot. But being boxed in seems to have prompted an identity crisis on Merritt's part.

Presidential campaigns do more than elect presidents. Every four years, campaigns redefine what it means to be a Republican or Democrat, and once in a while, they even redefine what it means to be an American. In most years, that redefinition is pretty minor, a mere tinkering with party formulas. Not this year. This year, you get the sense that seismic shifts may be under way. On the Republican side, Ed Rollins, the former Reagan campaign aide now serving as campaign chairman for Mike Huckabee, has been warning about the fragility of the GOP brand since well before the Iowa caucuses.

WHEN Antonin Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court during my second year of law school, I could barely contain my joy. It wasn't so much that - finally - a true conservative had joined the bench, although this was a bonus. More important to me was the fact that an Italian-American had ascended to the Olympus of the legal profession. Five years earlier, I'd felt the same exhilaration when Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman on the high court, just as my grandparents had rejoiced when JFK became the first Catholic to occupy the Oval Office.

In a state known for its small municipalities, the smallest of the small are two Camden County boroughs that don't have enough residents between them to fill a school bus. Tavistock (population 8) and Pine Valley (population 19) are historic relics, golf clubs posing as towns. Each has a mayor and borough commissioners, a clerk, solicitor, tax assessor, tax collector and school district, though neither has any schools. Pine Valley even has a police force of seven. New Jersey, home of the nation's highest property taxes, is contemplating consolidating some of its 566 municipalities, 616 school districts and 486 local authorities to try to save money.

Yes, New Jersey, there really is a Toms River. We thought we knew that all along. But we were wrong. Mention cancer clusters, those adorable 1998 Little League world champions, or Robert Marshall -the guy who had his wife shot to death on the Garden State Parkway - and the name Toms River will pop into the mind of almost any real New Jerseyan. But the name Toms River, until next week, has existed only as a colloquialism. The king of England named the Ocean County town Dover 239 years ago, but the pioneer name Toms River is the one that stuck.

It was 10:30 a.m. yesterday when Eagles coach Andy Reid gathered his full squad at Lehigh University and made the announcement the fans wanted to hear. "Live," Reid barked. "Live, live, live. " That was the coach's way of saying, "Let the contact begin. " Practice at that point was nearing its second hour, but hazy sunshine and a slight breeze kept it from being one of those brutally hot days in which tempers can flare and fists can fly. On this day, there was just a clean reacquaintance with the physical demands of football.

I'm having an identity crisis. When this happens to women in their 50s, it's usually hormones. Or stress. You can blame almost anything on stress. But that's not what's happening this time. This time, it's rhetorical. I am American. I am People. But at least half the time I hear a politician talk about what the American People want, need, believe and understand, they're talking about someone else. Yoga won't fix this. Ditto, black cohosh. I'm beginning to feel like the three faces of Eve. Except it's, like, 296 million.