Mood Swings

Ten days before her daughter's Ritalin prescription expired, Amy Fratz embarked on a hunt for a refill. She had been alerted that the medication might be tough to find. Before she was done, she had called 55 pharmacies in South Jersey. Only one had enough Ritalin for her child, who suffers from mood swings and lack of concentration and self-control without it. Fratz is just one of thousands of parents across the nation who are scrambling to find the medicine, now prescribed for roughly 425,000 children with attention-deficit disorders.

People who suffer the mood swings of manic-depression may be helped by an anti-epilepsy drug. Researchers at the University of Texas say the divalproex sodium is the first effective treatment for manic-depression's "up" side. Manic-depressives suffer mood swings that vary from extreme depression to euphoric elation. The euphoria causes temperamental outbursts, delusions, hypersexuality and insomnia. Led by Dr. Charles Bowden, head of biological psychiatry at the university's Health Science Center in San Antonio, researchers found divalproex sodium helped 48 percent of the manic-depressives who received it during testing.

SAN FRANCISCO HORMONE PATCH TO TREAT MEN Alza Corp., of Palo Alto, Calif., the company that pioneered the development of the $1.4 billion a year transdermal patch business, said yesterday it had received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin selling its Testoderm patch to treat men who suffer from a serious deficiency of the male hormone testosterone. Although some may be wondering why the world needs more of a hormone that many associate with male aggressiveness, the Alza patch actually is designed to minimize mood swings among men who suffer from a relatively rare medical condition known as hypogonadism.

A glop of rom-com pabulum, Life as We Know It stars Katherine Heigl as Holly, tightly wound Atlanta chef, and Josh Duhamel as Messer, loosey-goosey sports producer. Fixed up by their respective best friends, they abort their blind date three minutes in. Three years later, when they are named foster parents to Sophie, said friends' orphaned infant, Holly and Messer take baby steps toward adulthood. With pratfalls and teardrops, the film swings from sitcom to sit-dram.

You should hear a pin drop during the Adagietto of the Mahler Fifth Symphony, which was almost the case at the Academy of Music last night when the Philadelphia Orchestra played it under Christoph Eschenbach. You should hear a pin drop because this is music of utter stillness; certainly at the beginning with a handful of violas sustaining the melody, and underneath a harp lappingat its harmonies. This is music so impressionistic and austere, for a moment or two you might think you're in the middle of Debussy, not Gustav Mahler.

Patty Sheehan and Tammie Green are familiar with Helen Alfredsson's emotional demeanor on the golf course, and they say that approach is not necessarily a detriment to Alfredsson's chances of winning the U.S. Women's Open. Sheehan and Green, a pair of relaxed LPGA veterans, held the first two places after yesterday's third round, while Alfredsson slipped from a 5-stroke lead to a 2-shot deficit. "I really don't know that that makes a big difference," said Green, who trails Sheehan by 1 shot.

To the Yahoos out in Oregon who've organized the Male Pre-Menstrual Victims Association, we Yo! Hos! here in Philadelphia respectfully say, Phooey on you. According to press reports, dues-paying members of the MPMVA are parading around the Pacific Northwest in T-shirts proclaiming, "If women suffered PMS in silence, there would be no male victims. " Their noble leader, one Charlie Erland, maintains that the mood swings associated with women's menstrual cycles are a real hardship for men. Well, suffer this, Charlie.

Loren Lasky was elated about the birth of her baby. She was so happy, that she cried - a lot. "Everything was overwhelming at the time," said the 33-year-old mother as she patted her now-8-month-old son, Andrew Eilbert. "I would be outrageously happy, and two seconds later, I would be crying," said Lasky, who uses her maiden name. Lasky's extreme mood swings are part of a mental state - transitory postpartum depression - that affects more than three-fourths of all new mothers, researcher Ruth York said.

Brad Mehldau plays jazz piano with the sensibility of a painter. He rarely attacks anything hard, the way some of his brethren do, to demand attention. Instead, he flicks at his melodies, dabbing here and there, brushing the keys to leave the faintest of impressions. His lines scurry and sneak around corners, and when he's finished with one of his long, dream-sequence phrases, it may not be possible to recall every twist in the path, but you know you just visited someplace beautiful.

The bossa nova is a versatile rhythm that lends itself to different settings very well. On her latest record, The Look of Love (Verve), Diana Krall is surrounded by lushly orchestrated strings as she reworks or updates many of the standards as bossa novas. On Friday night at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, Krall brought the languid song form to the table but left the orchestra home, offering many of the same treatments of the same songs in an intimate, quartet setting.

IT MUST be hard to be a menopausal liberal. How else to explain the collective meltdown being experienced by women of a certain age and political stripe in the waning days of this midterm election? The examples of hormonal angst are too numerous to list, so I'll just focus on a few of the more amusing ones. JOY BEHAR VS. SHARRON ANGLE: A lot of people, not just women, hate the GOP Senate candidate from Nevada. She's been ridiculed as an "Annie Get Your 'Second Amendment Remedies,' " a racist who can't tell chalupas from chow mein and a woman who thinks rape victims should be drinking lemonade.

A glop of rom-com pabulum, Life as We Know It stars Katherine Heigl as Holly, tightly wound Atlanta chef, and Josh Duhamel as Messer, loosey-goosey sports producer. Fixed up by their respective best friends, they abort their blind date three minutes in. Three years later, when they are named foster parents to Sophie, said friends' orphaned infant, Holly and Messer take baby steps toward adulthood. With pratfalls and teardrops, the film swings from sitcom to sit-dram.

DEAR ABBY: I am 13 and have been home-schooled for a few years, but I hate it. My parents recently got a divorce after many years of trying to. Although I was used to the idea of their divorce, I cried when it happened. Mom asked me what was wrong and I told her. Her reply was, "Oh, grow up. You're 13, not 5!" It showed me she doesn't care about my feelings. I don't know why, but sometimes I think I'm the reason behind my parents' split. Also, I have no idea how to tell Mom I want to go to high school next year.

The Composer Is Dead. Actually, he's alive, Nathaniel Stookey is, and clearly relishing the dozens of recent performances of his new work, The Composer Is Dead. The creator of the text, Lemony Snicket, is narrating the aforementioned music. He's not dead, and his real name is not Lemony Snicket. He's Daniel Handler, the tremendously popular author of A Series of Unfortunate Events books, who is doing the piece for Saturday's Philadelphia Orchestra family concert. Still, the composer is dead, and the question eats at you like a Lachrymose Leech: Who killed him?

This morning, President Bush has just over 800 days left in the White House. He still has the nuclear codes, the veto pen, and a pretty good megaphone. But voters slammed the symbolic brakes on his presidency yesterday, guaranteeing a more assertive Congress as they turned the midterm elections into a referendum on Republican rule. When the long-analyzed wave of voter discontent crested yesterday, Democrats seized control of the House, meaning Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California will be the first woman speaker.

The Southwest is a place of such changeable climate that locals like to say, "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. " Down in the Valley, physically set in Los Angeles but philosophically in the old Southwest, is a movie of such mercurial moods that it suggests this paraphrase: If you don't like the genre, wait five minutes. Writer-director David Jacobson, who made Dahmer, the chilling study of the serial killer, gives us a teen rebel/Western/domestic melodrama spree.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. . . . Is it possible I stole your name and tale from another writer? Vladimir Nabokov, so far as we know, never asked himself that question about his most notorious character. But others are asking. Sept. 15 marked the 50th anniversary of the first Paris publication of the Russian emigre's most famous novel. (In case you've been living on Mars or are 9 years old, it's about a dirty old man and a nymphet.) American publishers paid due attention.

Some people find Michael Jackson to be an odd man. Odd in appearance. Odd in behavior. If we begin with this premise, then news that he is looking to move to Liechtenstein may not seem all that odd. But then again, it is. Liechtenstein? Located in the Alpine region of Europe, Liechtenstein is one of the smallest countries in the world - 60 square miles, to be exact. In fact, it's not even referred to as a "country," but as a "principality. " It is renowned for its banking - like Switzerland, Liechtenstein is a tax haven where really wealthy people can stow their money in confidential bank accounts.

The 76ers' practice is winding down, and Todd MacCulloch takes the floor and picks out a spot about 10 feet from the basket. Standing flat-footed, he starts shooting, and wears out a little speck on the backboard with bank shot after bank shot, all of them rippling through the net. Unfortunately, that's the extent of MacCulloch's involvement at practice, nearly one year after he found himself in too much pain to participate in the sport that...

So often, when I tell people that I have a 16-year-old daughter, I am met with looks of sympathy. Some even say, "I don't envy you," or "That must be a challenge. " My usual response is to smile and nod in agreement. We all know that living with a teenage girl is no picnic. There are the mood swings - putting her head on your shoulder one minute, and flipping back her hair, rolling her eyes, and stomping off to her room the next. There are even those days when she says, "If you ever think I will care about you, myself or anything else, you are wrong.