Mystery Woman

Who is this woman? That question was foremost in the mind of America's Best Female Distance Runner during the exciting final lap last night of the Penn Relays women's Olympic Development 5,000. ABFDR had been passed by Mystery Woman on the second turn of the bell lap. She then retook the lead and allowed MW to draw close. "I let her get next to me with 300 meters to go," ABFDR said. "I wanted to see who she was, and how serious she was . . . She kept steaming down the straightaway.

For Deborah Scullin, 33, a tall, willowy strawberry blonde whom the media have dubbed the "mystery woman" in City Councilman Leland M. Beloff's life, the events of the last two days have been more than a little overwhelming. "I want to get my side of the story out, and I'll be meeting soon with my attorney to discuss how to do that," Scullin said politely when contacted last night at her job behind the cosmetics counter of an upscale City Avenue store. "But right now, I don't want to talk about it. I don't have anything to say. It's bad enough already.

Beginning June 1, "All My Children" will add film actress Lisa Eichhorn to the cast in the long-term role of yet another mysterious woman, Olivia Spaulding. In the "AMC" story line, all we'll know about Olivia at first is that she's wealthy and that she's a widow. But she will have ties to another character who's been on the show for quite some time. You'll have to tune in tomorrow to find out who it is! Movie lovers will remember Lisa from her starring role in the film "Yanks," but she has also appeared in the critically acclaimed "The Europeans," as well as "Wildrose" and "Cutter and Bone.

She wore only pajama pants, a T-shirt and clogs on the night that the second-largest snowfall in Philadelphia history was beginning. State Police know how she died: She was killed running across six lanes of highway traffic near Philadelphia International Airport. But over the weekend, the mystery for State Police piled up as quickly as the snow had: Who was this woman, and why was she running across Interstate 95? Police said last night that the unidentified woman was not running to or from a broken-down vehicle, and that they found it difficult to determine what she could have been running to or from.

A late-night car accident, an up-and-coming young politician, rumors of a mystery woman along for the ride, a dead man, talk of a cover-up. It is the stuff that staggers political careers and stirs swirling rumors in the state capital. Harrisburg police are following a lead that two people were in a black Jeep involved in the July 27 hit-and-run accident that killed pedestrian Louis Cains. One, cops say, could be state Rep. Thomas W. Druce. The other - a mystery woman.

When the curtain rises later this month on "Porno Stars at Home," Anne Newman won't be there. It's not that the mother of slain Main Line lawyer Stefanie Rabinowitz doesn't have a few questions for the show's star - the topless dancer known as Summer. The woman Craig Rabinowitz never told her daughter about, the one he was willing to kill for. But she's already seen her act. She knows how good Summer is. "All those men over all those years, I believe that she is a natural actress.

Will the mystery woman who watched three suspected car thieves at work in Middletown Township yesterday please call the police? They want to thank you. "She was great. . . . She was the key to everything," said a grateful Sgt. Pat McGinty, after three men were arrested and charged with car theft. It seems that the heroine and two children, in her car in the Oxford Valley Mall parking lot, saw three men break the left front window of a 1981 Oldsmobile station wagon. "They apparently sat there and watched these three guys steal this car," McGinty said.

Hal Hartley's 1998 gem, Henry Fool, is about the tricky relationship between a garbageman poet and a blowhard stranger whose huge manuscript, scrawled in speckled composition notebooks, was "a philosophy . . . a literature of protest . . . a novel of ideas . . .a pornographic magazine of truly comic-book proportions. " In Fay Grim, Hartley's sequel, those same notebooks serve as the McGuffin - the thing that moves the plot, that everybody wants, that all the motion (and emotion)

If you enjoy operas by Wagner, you're in for a good, long night. Otherwise, steel yourself for a long night, period. EVENING HIGHLIGHTS FAST TIMES (8 p.m., Ch. 10) - Fast-food tycoon Buck Whitman suffers a fast, unexpected death. Martin Mull plays Buck in this episode, which was directed and co-written by Amy Heckerling, director of the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. CBS. LIVE FROM THE MET (8 p.m., Ch. 12) - Wagner's 1850 Lohengrin, starring tenor Peter Hofmann in the title role and soprano Eva Marton as his lovely maiden, is conducted by James Levine.

Neil Jordan's Ondine , full of melancholy and blarney, is set in one of those wee Irish fishing villages that belongs to another time - but then modernity intrudes. It's part of a fanciful subgenre: the mermaid movie (see Splash , see William Powell and Ann Blyth in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid ), although the beautiful creature that Syracuse (Colin Farrell) pulls up in his trawler's net has limbs and toes instead of fins and scales, and seems to have little trouble breathing the fine misty air. She doesn't like being near people, though, so the hangdog fisherman hides her in a cottage tucked away in a cove.

A smart, sophisticated musical revue called Closer Than Ever opened Off-Broadway 20 years ago - and it's just as smart and sophisticated today, in the polished production at Bristol Riverside Theatre that marks its anniversary. Maybe it's because the subject matter, about the cycles that run through our lives, the pleasures and pains, are constants - and constantly germane. Falling or losing or staying in love. Parenting. Feeling like you're parenting your parents. Trying to do the right thing and figuring out what that might be. Doing the wrong thing and paying for it. Here we have Miss Byrd, efficient and proper at her office desk, and wild or wanting to be wild as soon as the office empties.

A smart, sophisticated musical revue called Closer Than Ever opened Off-Broadway 20 years ago - and it's just as smart and sophisticated today, in the polished production at Bristol Riverside Theatre that marks its anniversary. Maybe it's because the subject matter, about the cycles that run through our lives, the pleasures and pains, are constants - and constantly germane. Falling or losing or staying in love. Parenting. Feeling like you're parenting your parents. Trying to do the right thing and figuring out what that might be. Doing the wrong thing and paying for it. Here we have Miss Byrd, efficient and proper at her office desk, and wild or wanting to be wild as soon as the office empties.

She wore only pajama pants, a T-shirt and clogs on the night that the second-largest snowfall in Philadelphia history was beginning. State Police know how she died: She was killed running across six lanes of highway traffic near Philadelphia International Airport. But over the weekend, the mystery for State Police piled up as quickly as the snow had: Who was this woman, and why was she running across Interstate 95? Police said last night that the unidentified woman was not running to or from a broken-down vehicle, and that they found it difficult to determine what she could have been running to or from.

RYAN JENKINS, on the lam and wanted for allegedly killing his ex-wife, was found Sunday at the Thunderbird Motel near the tiny town of Hope, British Columbia. He was hanging by his neck from the bar of a coat rack. The body of the reality-TV contestant triggered a new search - finding the woman who accompanied him to the room. TMZ.com reported that the woman in question was Jenkins' former fiancee, Paulina Chmielecka, a striking blonde whose three-year relationship with Jenkins ended earlier this year.

Hal Hartley's 1998 gem, Henry Fool, is about the tricky relationship between a garbageman poet and a blowhard stranger whose huge manuscript, scrawled in speckled composition notebooks, was "a philosophy . . . a literature of protest . . . a novel of ideas . . .a pornographic magazine of truly comic-book proportions. " In Fay Grim, Hartley's sequel, those same notebooks serve as the McGuffin - the thing that moves the plot, that everybody wants, that all the motion (and emotion)

I INTERVIEWED Ed Klein the other day. It never occurred to me NOT to speak with the author the controversial new book, "The Truth About Hillary. " Others are treating him like a life form somewhere below Kitty Kelley because of the incendiary nature of what he has written about the former first couple. As for me, I wanted to ask the man to defend his scurrilous innuendoes about the Clintons. Now that I have, I think I know the truth about Ed Klein. He doesn't have the goods.

Police searched five hours in the Schuylkill early yesterday for a woman they mistakenly believed had been ejected from a car that plunged 100 feet off the Schuylkill Expressway in Philadelphia to the riverbank below, police said. The accident and search snarled the morning commute. Police eventually discovered the missing woman was safe at home. The search began after the man driving a 1994 Toyota Camry said the woman was with him at 3:20 a.m. when his vehicle was struck from behind by a dump truck near University Avenue.

There is a commandment of dating that ought to apply to movie casting: Never pair off with someone old enough to be your parent or young enough to be your kid. Now, if this were observed faithfully, we wouldn't have Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window or Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina. Nor would we have Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride. And that would be our loss. Then again, we would have been spared the cringe-worthy coupling of Gere and Winona Ryder in Autumn in New York.