Postcards

A suicide attempt would not seem to be a guaranteed mirthmaker, nor wouldan actress who is hung up on drugs and falling for guys like a Hollywood producer who uses women like Kleenex. Be prepared for your jaw to drop frequently as you flip the pages of Postcards from the Edge by actress Carrie Fisher (Pocket Books, $4.50). The near-suicide actress in question is Suzanne Vale, about to turn (uh-oh) 30 and worrying that she's falling for producer Jack. Here is Jack on his hang-up: "I met this one girl last week, this actress, Suzanne Vale, and . . . you know, I'm very upfront about not wanting to get into a committed thing.

Sort of a gone-Hollywood "Terms of Endearment," "Postcards from the Edge" is a real mixed bag. Louis Vuitton quality, but mixed nonetheless. Its literate script, written by Carrie Fisher based on her own novel a clef, boasts a bounty of bon mots, but an equal number of clinkers precludes serious Dorothy Parker comparisons. The film captures truths about the film industry with rare, jaundiced accuracy yet persists in lame reality-vs.-movie-set sight gags that were old when Buster Keaton was doing them better.

If you hear a 6-year-old museum visitor say something like: "No, no, Daddy, that's a van Gogh," chances are the child has fallen under the spell of Aline Wolf's postcards. Children as young as 4 are learning about fine art in more than 1,000 schools in the United States and Canada with the help of Wolf's postcards and her lavishly illustrated, $10.95 manual, Mommy, It's a Renoir. It's also amazing. The manual appeared only two years ago, and Wolf's program for teaching tots about art has attracted so much notice that she now spends practically all of her time traveling from city to city teaching teachers and parents and demonstrating with preschool children.

Today I am pleased to present the results of the Amateur Tax Tips contest, in which I asked readers to submit their tax-preparation tips on postal cards and send them in for a chance to win a valuable used pair of men's briefs signed by humor writer Roy Blount Jr. Needless to say, this prize stirred up plenty of excitement. Many of the entries mentioned it by name ("Do not send me the underwear"). I pored over the postcards for hours, and I have concluded, via a complex and sophisticated statistical analysis, that a lot of them feature photographs of semi-naked women.

The brown paper package sat on teacher Sondra Bergey's desk like a time bomb. No telling what was inside that bundle from School #18 in the Soviet city of Novgorod. The handwritten address, directing it to a sixth-grade class at Greenfield Elementary School in Center City, gave no clues. The children ripped open the package and - boom - exploded into cheers, giggles and squeals as the contents, a pile of letters, photos, trinkets and warm wishes, spilled out. "Look at this," one child yelled, holding up a gold-colored candle shaped like a ram. "I got postcards.

Not everyone thinks it's tacky to send friends a holiday-season form letter, in which families stress their successes and slough over all the glitches. But suppose you were getting these mailings from people you don't know, who charged you for the postage. That's the essence of mass mailings from Capitol Hill. Last year members of Congress charged taxpayers more than $100 million to send them almost one billion form letters, newsletters and postcards - four pieces of mail for every man, woman and child in America.

The headline read, "In times of uncertainty, how much more can we take?" (Inquirer, Nov. 4). We don't know, but we have a choice. We can curl up in a corner, wringing our hands, paralyzed by anticipation and fear. Or we can pick ourselves up and conduct our lives as well as we can in light of our new circumstances. The survival of the human species has always been due to our ability to adjust to our changing environment. Why would we stop now? We don't have to begin each day by listening to an hour-by-hour drip of bad news on CNN; we can begin each day by listening to our favorite music station on the radio and listen to only headline news.

While I'm away, readers give the advice. On people who see therapy as an admission of weakness: I'm a guy. I'm also someone you might have met at a Mensa meeting years ago when I was kind of an elitist, arrogant toe rag. Going to a therapist is something I just would not have done; so much of my self-worth was wrapped in being smarter than people that admitting I needed help thinking through something would have been unthinkable....

PERU WARNINGS. An updated State Department travel advisory cautions that insurgent activity could pose increased dangers to visitors in Peru, including those in Lima, Cuzco and Machu Picchu, the most popular destinations. One of the guerrilla groups, the Shining Path, is marking its 10th anniversary, and the State Department said there was a chance of stepped-up attacks at sites frequented by tourists. The U.S. Embassy also has received information that another guerrilla group, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, may be planning to kidnap foreigners, especially U.S. citizens.

The message from the pulpit yesterday was clear and unwavering: "I firmly believe that this action leads to the erosion of God's gift of marriage and the family . . .," Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua declared in a letter that blasted Mayor Rendell's recent decision to grant benefits to the gay domestic partners of city government employees. Parishioners at St. Timothy's R.C. Church in Mayfair, where the letter was read during Mass, reacted in many different ways to the missive.