Postcards

BANANA DANCER 54 1/2 N. 3rd St. 928-9050 Hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday The original Banana Dancer - the audacious Josephine Baker - would have liked this Old City establishment that bears her nickname. Nestled in the midst of a dull gray wholesale strip, this periwinkle, peach, mauve and aqua-colored art-deco oasis comes as a saucy visual surprise. Carrying the twin theme of Harlem Renaissance/Silver Screen throughout its 360 square feet, Banana Dancer retails postcards, notecards, books, posters and other memorabilia of an era gone before.

Earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Philly to advocate relief of Africa's crushing debt and pervasive poverty and hunger - incredibly worthy and complex goals. Me, I'm a bit obsessed with a much smaller, less important goal but one still worth pursuing. I am standing in the periodicals aisle at Borders, shaking all the periodicals upside down, then collecting and counting all the postcards that fall out. Three tumble out from Fortune. Glamour lets go four.

Harleysville resident Danielle Melanie Brown is heading to Broadway to perform in Les Miserables. Brown, 8, will share the role of the young Cosette with two other girls. She will fill a vacancy created when a girl left the show, which plays at the Imperial Theatre, to perform in another production. "It takes a lot of work," Danielle said this week as she prepared to begin rehearsals in New York. The prospect of being on stage made her "very excited," she said, adding that she did not mind a large audience.

The collapse of the World Trade Center towers has sent New Yorkers scurrying to find pictures of the city they knew. "I have to realize New York's skyline doesn't look like this any longer," said Dayna Camp, 21, as she pondered watercolor paintings of Lower Manhattan's skyline at Phantom of Broadway, a Broadway gift shop between 50th and 51st Streets. "So much has changed. " Ellen Synn, 32, a shopper at Crown Art Gallery Inc., on Broadway between 48th and 49th Streets, said: "It's like having something historical.

Ever notice that huge, purple building on Aramingo Avenue in the Northeast? The owners have self-deprecatingly named it The Dump, but it's actually one of a growing number of liquidation retailers in the Philadelphia area. Most of the merchandise in the place has a story to it: Some items are closeouts, some are overstocks and over-runs, some are "buybacks" (merchandise returned to a manufacturer by a retailer who took the goods on consignment). The merchandise is varied - housewares, foodstuffs, toys, linens, health and beauty items, furniture, seasonal goods and more.

I'm enclosing a picture of a vase shaped like a monkey. I know it is majolica, but that is all I know about it. Can you give me more information? Your figural monkey pitcher is English majolica, the richly colored, lustrously glazed pottery produced between 1869 and 1885. According to New York dealer Bonnie Heller, a specialist in majolica, at least five sizes were made, ranging from 6 inches to 11 inches high. A complete set is striking. All the monkeys appear to be carrying sheaves of banana leaves.

A week after the archdiocese began its letter-writing blitz against Mayor Rendell's gay benefits order, the results were just gathering dust in a box. Yesterday, Team Rendell had no idea how many cards were on hand. In fact, perhaps a dozen letters were unopened. So, the Daily News counted the postcards and letters. Its unofficial tally showed 3,406 people opposing Rendell's executive order granting health benefits to gay and lesbian partners of about 500 executive branch city workers, and 77 in favor.

John Keenan 3d has an album full of antique postcards of the borough, nearly 200 paperweights, three dozen gearshift knobs, a chest full of puppets, a mantel shrouded with cast-iron coin banks, and enough neckties so that he could wear a different one every day of the year. Keenan, a second-grade teacher at Barkley Elementary School, is a self-professed professional collector. "He collects everything," his wife, Linda, said with a sigh. But don't blame him. John Keenan is only continuing a family tradition.

Kelley Miller has found the key that unlocks a first grader's desire to write: big trucks. Miller, a first-grade teacher at Lower Pottsgrove Elementary School, has sparked her pupils to practice the fading art of letter-writing by finding them a prolific pen pal in Dale Banks, a truck driver. Banks, 56, and Miller, 27, were connected through Trucker Buddy International, a national nonprofit organization that makes correspondents of truckers and schoolchildren. Miller first heard of the organization when she was a long-term substitute at an Upper Merion elementary school six years ago. Since then, she has been eager to use it in her own class.

Within the confined space implied by the title of Postcards From the Edge, Mike Nichols and Carrie Fisher have written a vitriolically funny poison-pen letter to Hollywood's pretensions and a refreshingly unsentimental billet-doux to the tangled and unending frictions between mothers and daughters. Such a combination might seem to invite a jarring collision of styles and the suspicion that two postcards were being mailed in different directions. But the point of contact is a new form of star wars, enriched by the way that art trips over life.