Show Business

Would you like your adorable children, so precious and precocious, to be actors or models and make a lot of money and be the envy of all their little friends? Listen, then, to Edie Robb: "It is hard, hard, hard. It is time-consuming and expensive and, sometimes, heartbreaking. That's why most people drop out. "And it's exciting and glamorous and, sometimes, very profitable. That's why some people stick it out, in spite of everything. " Listen to Edie Robb. She knows.

Among the many eccentricities of my dear mother, Darlene, is her fondness for celebrities. My mom was a walking People magazine long before Mia Farrow ever graced the first cover. To this day, she has a wealth of Hollywood knowledge to rival that of Ryan Seacrest. Any time we end a phone conversation, I half expect her to say, "Darlene out. " She has a penchant for referring to famous people as if they are her close, personal friends. She'll say things like: "Did you see my Oprah yesterday?"

I've had an affinity for cabdrivers ever since my early years as a Philadelphia schoolteacher, when I spent eight summers driving a yellow cab on our city streets. That's why I was delighted when I was accepted as an extra on the TV show Hack last fall after an open casting call. I've been in four episodes of the show, about a disgraced police officer turned cabbie, and played a different role in each. In one, I was told that I would portray a customer in an upscale, conservative men's clothing store.

Richard Pryor's raucously funny semi-autobiography, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, ranks with those legendary epics of show-biz high life and self- destructive low life, Lenny and All That Jazz. Provocative Pryor co-wrote, produced, directed and stars in this account of a celebrated stand-up comic and Hollywood personality in critical condition after a drug-related flash fire chars his upper body and face. Swathed in gauze in the burn ward intensive care unit, mummylike Jo Jo wonders, "What am I doing here?"

In its first 200 years, the United States built the world's strongest economy on its rich farmland and powerhouse industries - steel, oil, railroads, automobiles. Now, it is a nation whose vital economic assets include Mickey Mouse, Captain Kirk and Cheers. Last week's high-stakes bidding war for Paramount Communications Inc., the producer of The Godfather, Entertainment Tonight, and Wayne's World, dramatizes the economic importance of the U.S. entertainment industry. Entertainment - movies, music, cable television and home video - brings an estimated $50 billion to the U.S. economy.

Louis Eugene Wolcott, the Bronx-born son of Caribbean immigrant parents, was headlining at the Blue Angel nightclub in downtown Chicago in a show called the "Calypso Follies. " It was 1955, and on the south side of town a little known black separatist group called the Nation of Islam was holding its national convention. A friend had been encouraging young Wolcott to come and hear the group's leader, an unemployed Detroit auto worker who had renamed himself Elijah Muhammad. After his show, Wolcott rushed off to hear Muhammad speak.

In short, environmentalists love it, business people call it oppressive, and the politicians just think the whole thing's a pain. But one way or another, state and regional officials warn, the mandates of the Clean Air Act amendments are here to stay - and if you do business in the Philadelphia area, you'd better start planning for them now. That was the message spread Tuesday at a special seminar sponsored by the state Department of Resources...

Four students from Bucks and Montgomery Counties placed in the top 10 at a national competition sponsored by the Future Business Leaders of America from June 29 to July 2 in Chicago. Christopher Muller from Morrisville High School won second-place honors for information-processing concepts. In the category of machine transcription, Lisa Frankel of Wissahickon High School in Ambler placed third, and Evan Steinberg of Cheltenham High School took fourth. Peter Haas from Neshaminy High School in Langhorne placed 10th in computer applications.

Software-makers SAP AG and Oracle Corp. are competitors most of the time. So are accounting and consulting firms PriceWaterhouseCoopers L.L.P., Arthur Andersen L.L.P. and KPMG L.L.P. Nevertheless, these companies and about 50 others have formed a consortium to promote a new way of presenting business information on the Internet. It is a method that promises to make financial documents easier to share, search, analyze and compare. It is called XBRL, or Extensible Business Reporting Language.

A man walking along North Broad Street yesterday squinted toward the New Freedom Theater, where hundreds upon hundreds of people - babies in strollers to women leaning on canes - formed a line that looped and twisted its way around two blocks. "What's going on in there?" he asked. "They giving away money?" Actually, no. But the producers of Beloved were looking for extras for the movie based on the best-selling novel by Toni Morrison, who wrote of Sethe, a former slave haunted by her past and the infant daughter she sacrificed.